Health and Justice: Framing incarceration as a social determinant of health for Black men in the United States

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Genealogies of Resistance to Incarceration: Abolition Politics within Deinstitutionalization and Anti-Prison Activism in the U.S.

Problems of poverty, poor health, and incarceration are unevenly distributed among racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. We argue that this is due, in part, to the ascendance of United States-style neoliberalism, a prevailing political and economic doctrine that shapes social policy, including public health and anti-poverty intervention strategies. Public health research most often associates inequalities in health outcomes, poverty, and incarceration with individual and cultural risk factors. Contextual links to structural inequality and the neoliberal doctrine animating state-sanctioned interventions are given less attention. The interrelationships among these are not clear in the extant literature. Less is known about public health and incarceration. Thus, the authors describe the linkages between neoliberalism, public health, and criminal justice outcomes. We suggest that neoliberalism exacerbates racial disparities in health, poverty, and incarceration in the United States. We conclude by calling for a new direction in public health research that advances a pro-poor public health agenda to improve the general well-being of disadvantaged groups.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2190/HS.43.2.c

Disparities in Health, Poverty, Incarceration, and Social Justice among Racial Groups in the United States: A Critical Review of Evidence of Close Links with Neoliberalism

Each year, approximately 700,000 people are released from prison. Prisoner reentry has emerged as an object of knowledge and intervention in profound new ways over the last decade. The immediate survival needs of people released from prison are vital issues for building the prison abolitionist movement. However, an uncritical acceptance of the seemingly benign notions of prisoner reentry circulating in mainstream criminology and corrections warrants caution. Prisoner reentry initiatives can be read as the latest installment in a long history of reformist reforms, which have expanded the punishment system and strengthened the legitimacy of the contemporary prison. The author argues that prisoner reentry must be grounded in a politics of abolition if it is to undermine the conditions of mass imprisonment's emergence. Keywords: prisoner reentry, prison abolition ********** IN "NOT LIGHT BUT FIRE: GENDER, VIOLENCE AND STRATEGIES FOR PRISON Abolition," Cassandra Shaylor writes: "Though we can trace a pattern in prison history of the pendulum swinging from a professed focus on punishment to a commitment to so-called reform every 30 years or so, reform still always risks becoming punishment's twin" (Shaylor 2007, 7-8). Following Foucault, Shaylor suggests that reform is in a mutually constitutive relationship with punishment. This article takes up the notion of reform as "punishment's twin" and pursues this idea in the context of an analysis of prisoner reentry. Prisoner reentry represents the latest installment in a long history of reforms that have tended to bolster the penal system. The immediate survival needs of people released from prison are vital issues for building a prison abolitionist movement. However, an uncritical acceptance of the seemingly benign notions of prisoner reentry circulating in mainstream corrections and criminology warrants caution. The vocabulary used to discuss prisoner reentry mimics critique in order to render the punishment system more expansive, flexible, legitimate, and seemingly cost-effective. Prisoner reentry must be grounded in a politics of abolition if it is to undermine the conditions that make possible mass imprisonment. From Afterthought to "Reentry Mania" Each year, approximately 700,000 people are released from prison (Carson and Sabol 2012). As the number of people imprisoned in the United States has expanded, the lives of an increasing number of returning prisoners have become a site for governmental intervention in unprecedented ways. In the spring of 1999, then-Attorney General Janet Reno asked a group of corrections officials what the state was doing to manage the increasing number of prisoners exiting state and federal prisons. According to Jeremy Travis, a key founder of the reentry movement, they were speechless (Travis 2005). Despite the rapid escalation in the use of imprisonment, little attention had been paid to the consequences of the prison-building boom. After this meeting Janet Reno asked criminal justice officials to begin investigating strategies for managing the increasing number of prisoners being released from correctional institutions across the country. Jeremy Travis, then director of the National Institute of Justice, and others began what they have termed "a reentry movement" (Travis 2007). Prisoner reentry has become an appealing trend within penological discourse and practice, particularly as a critique of mass incarceration has gained wider appeal. Since 1999, major reentry initiatives have been established on the national level, including the passing of the Second Chance Act, which has enjoyed bipartisan support. In his 2004 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush characterized the United States as "the land of second chance" and stated that "when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life" (Bush 2004). Every state has developed a reentry task force, and reentry services units are popping up in state Departments of Corrections and county- and city-level governments (Travis 2007). …

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"Punishment's Twin": Theorizing Prisoner Reentry for a Politics of Abolition

There are various critiques laid out against the framework of carceral abolition (as it appears currently in prison abolition and deinstitutionalization): that it is abstract, only critiques but does not suggest specific solutions; that it is a utopian vision of the world; and that it is unrealistic in the world we currently occupy. Throughout this article I will demonstrate how such critiques can be conceptualized as strengths of these movements and frameworks for liberation. I argue that carceral abolition (as it appears in prison abolition and deinstitutionalization) is a form of knowledge, an ethical position. My first claim is that this knowledge is rooted in maroonage and I show the consequences of not engaging with abolition from intersectional frameworks. My second claim is that we can understand abolition as a dis-epistemology that rejects ways of knowing tied to certainty, optimism and certain notions of futurity and temporality.

Dis-epistemologies of Abolition

"I'M BEGINNING TO BELIEVE THAT 'U.S.A.' STANDS FOR THE UNDERPRIVILEGED Slaves of America" (Esposito and Wood, 1982: 149), wrote a 20th-century prisoner from Mississippi in a letter detailing the daily violence he witnessed behind prison walls. His statement resounds with a long tradition of prisoners, particularly African-American prisoners, who have used the language and narrative of slavery to describe the conditions of their imprisonment. In the year 2000. as the punishment industry becomes a leading employer and producer for the U.S. "state," and as private prison and "security" corporations bargain to control the profits of this traffic in human unfreedom, the analogies between slavery and prison abound. This year the U.S. prison population cascaded past 2,000,000, [1] with millions more under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system in local jails awaiting trial, in INS prisons awaiting deportation, or in their homes linked with criminal justice authorities through ankle bracelets that track thei r every move. Recent studies of the prison boom stress the persistent disparities in sentencing according to race -- prison populations continue to be disproportionately African American and Latino. With longer sentences being imposed for nonviolent drug offenses, with aggressive campaigns aimed at criminalizing young people, and with the growing number of children left orphaned by the criminal justice system, the carceral reach of the state and private corporations resonates with the history of slavery and marks a level of human bondage unparalleled in the 20th century. Scholars and activists have plunged into an examination of the historical origins of racialized slavery as a coercive labor form and social system in an attempt to explain the huge increase in mass incarceration in the U.S. since the end of World War II. Drawing these links has been important in explaining the relationship between racism and criminalization after emancipation, and in connecting the rise of industrial and mechanized labor to the destructive effects of deindustrialization and globalization. The point of retracing this history is not to argue that prisons have been a direct outgrowth of slavery, but to interrogate the persistent connections between racism and the global economy. Mass imprisonment on the level seen in the U.S. in the 20th century occupies a phase along the spectrum of unfree labor related to, yet distinct from, chattel slavery. As many scholars of the punishment industry have shown, regardless of the labor prisoners do to service the larger economy (either private or public), pr isons increasingly function in the U.S. economy as answers to the devastation unleashed by the dual forces of Reaganomics and the globalization of capital (Parenti, 1999; Gilmore, 1997; Manning, 1983). The immediate post-emancipation period is a key place to start in outlining the investment of the U.S. state in this trade in humanity. Related to the above is the growth of new abolitionist movements whose goals are the elimination of mass imprisonment as a method of treatment for addiction and mental illness, as an economic ameliorative, and as a method of social control -- what one scholar has termed "the carceral management of poverty" (Wacquant, 1999: 349). The connections between slavery and imprisonment have been used by abolitionists as an historical explanation and as part of a radical political strategy that questions the feasibility of "reform" as an appropriate response to prison expansion. As a leader in the creation of this new abolitionist movement, Angela Davis (1996: 26) has written, "I choose the word 'abolitionist' deliberately. The 13th Amendment, when it abolished slavery, did so except for convicts. Through the prison system, the vestiges of slavery have persisted. It thus makes sense to use a word that has this historical resonance." Though some 20th-century abolitionist movements connect themselves expressly with the tradition of 19th-century abolitionists and antislavery advocates, abolitionism as defined here is the conglomerate of many local movements that express abolitionist aims indirectly through challenging the fundamental methods of the prison-industrial complex -- mandatory minimum sentences, harsh penalties for nonviolent drug offenses, and the continuous construction of prisons that goes on regardless of crime rates. …

Kim Gilmore

Papers

Slavery and Prison -- Understanding the Connections