Prison abolition

João Victor · Dec 14, 2023

With the end of slavery, mass incarceration replaced the slavery system and continued to punish black and poor people in a new system that actually has the face of the old one. The state is an instrument of class domination, since the start of civilization, we had the clashes, because the class conflict always belonged for the history itself, from freeman and slaves, patricians and plebeians, to, bourgeois and proletariat, boss and employee. We always had this clashes to try to come out on top of the dominant class, which has always been the bourgeoisie. And the dominant class has never denied or disguised the racism they have made throughout history, out of sheer intolerance and stupid prejudice. One of the procedures used by these Aryan doctors consisted of measuring the size of the skulls of individuals of different “races”. Larger skulls, which supposedly held more brain mass, were indicative of racial superiority.

These racial doctrines came to be used to justify European imperialism and the colonization of the African continent. These same doctrines remained in vogue in the first half of the twentieth century in regimes such as the Nazis, which developed policies to exterminate “inferior races” (Jews, for example), as well as using individuals of the same “race” as guinea pigs to medical and military experiments In South Africa, since the beginning of the formation of that country, whites of Dutch descent, known as Boers, developed racist policies against blacks who inhabited the same region, also based on the thesis of white racial superiority. These policies intensified over the decades of the 20th century and ended up becoming part of everyday life in South Africa, in what was called apartheid in the local language, that is, “separate lives”. Similarly, in the southern region of the United States, there were also policies aimed at separating blacks and whites in the occupation of public spaces, as well as giving rights and privileges to whites and restricting the same type of rights and privileges to the black ones. After many years of struggle, revolutions, wars, class struggle, right for life, blacks won their freedom from a system of slavery that lasted for years and together with mass European and American colonialism that killed millions and millions by land, money, human trafficking and thinking they had superiority - which never existed - has always been part of the intolerance generated. But that freedom was masked with a new model of slavery, but one that looked legal and was said not to be biased towards white people and not to be associated with racism. The fact is that it was just a system of slavery now supported by the dominant class that was in power in the big public offices and they were conservative and of European origin, mostly white. Thus, white people occupied high public and private positions to control the lives of millions of black, Latino and poor people. And prisons took the hole of the old system of slavery, colonialism and intolerance of migration.

Noticed this new system that cause the sorrow of black and poor system, some philosopher and thinkers of early XX century, mainly Louk Hulsman started the current of thought of prison abolition, in the time he and the others supporters of the ideology of prison abolition shows with inexorable reasoning that the creation of the police started in the XIX century after black people achieved freedom from slavery in a lot of countries at the time, even with the beginning of the labor movement, the police played the role of protecting the dominant class. So basically, the creation of the police, in the way we know today, was to mainly to arrest black people and workers.

Created this new system that punish black and poor people, we had a wave where arrest black ones was the “solution”, but the solution for what? Got the point? It just changed the way of enslaving people, now with a formal way to do it and put in the jail black people with the argue that they did a wrong thing from their perspective. From their perspective it’s a cultural thing against the black ones, everything from the black culture it is offensive some way to them, so listen to certain kind of music is wrong, smoke certain grass is wrong, to wear some kind of clothe is considered wrong too. Everything a black person do, is judged by them, just to classify them wrong. We can show and see it from the numbers, in Brazil 68,2% of prisoners are black, and another critical point to observe is that to arrest a white man with drugs he needs to carry much more drug than a black man, usually 80% more.

The system also take as parameter such a dumb thing just to take the black to the prison, like stole a candy is considered as criminal as intentional homicide or robbing a bank, and they receive the same treat in the gen pop, leaving the unity cell, worse than he entered. What is wrong here is that, when you make a mistake you are simply thrown there and there is no type of treatment, neither psychological nor medical, ideal treatment to deal with the mistakes you made, just because the majority are black, you don't have that care.

All said, money going to education health care and housing solves the problem of mass incarceration far more than training and uniforms for police officers. The state is an instrument of class domination, and the dominant class is racist. One of the reasons for a person to want to rob or do something wrong is not being sure of having a place to live and poor health. Education will always be the general basis for solving the problems of our world, and this is no different. We solve racism and all other problems in our society with a lot of education and dialogue! Education saves.