Challenging the prison industrial complex: "as states fail to fund health care, welfare, education, and transportation … the continued growth in corrections spending is extraordinarily stark." - Law & Justice - Critical Resistance South conference

DURING A THREE-DAY SPAN in April, more than 1,500 people converged in the historic Treme section of New Orleans, La.--one of the first neighborhoods built and inhabited by free people of color in the U.S.--to address a crisis in their communities. Advocates, former prisoners, people of faith, prisoners' families, students, immigrants, and others rallied behind Critical Resistance South to fight the monster known as the prison industrial complex (PIC). In the past 20 years, this country's prison and police systems have expanded to an unprecedented size and scope. From 1980 to 2002, the number of individuals incarcerated in the nation's prisons, jails, juvenile facilities, and detention centers quadrupled--from roughly 500,000 to 2,100,000 people. The U.S. has the largest prison system in the world and its impact influences the social, economic, and political life of all regions and sectors of America. Besides those behind bars, 2,200,000 individuals are employed in policing, corrections, and the courts, overshadowing the 1,700,000 citizens working in higher education and the 600,000 in public welfare. With 6,600,000 in prison and jail or on probation or parole, there are 8,800,000 persons either under the control of the correctional system or employed in the criminal justice sector.

The zeal to lock people in cages has not affected crime rates, however. West Virginia's rate of imprisonment rose dramatically during the 1990s--as did the state's rate of violent offenses. Alabama's violent crime rate dropped 77% more than Georgia's, even though Georgia's rate of imprisonment rose at a rate 47% higher than Alabama's. A comparison of the southern states to New York and Massachusetts reveals an even starker contrast: Those two northern states experienced larger crime drops with much more modest increases in incarceration than most of the South. While prisons have multiplied across the U.S., the results have been particularly striking in the South, with its history of slavery, convict leasing, and Jim Crow segregation having created the context for the use of imprisonment as its brutal definition of justice.

The prison industrial complex is multifaceted, maintained through cooperation between government and industry. It designates prisons as a solution to social, political, and economic problems. Like the systems of brutality that preceded it, today's PIC criminalizes a target population based on race and class, providing a means of social control of those deemed undesirable, as well as a source of cheap labor for the state. These inmates are the byproducts of underfunded educational systems, poor healthcare, and inadequate affordable housing. The South leads the nation in incarceration rates for both youth and adults and holds more people on death row than any other region in the country.

At the Critical Resistance South conference, people from across the region came together to discuss, debate, and formulate strategies to rid the nation of the prison industrial complex. Attendees gathered to consider the impacts of policing, incarceration, state repression, and what a nation without 2,000,000 prisoners might look like.

A local elementary school served as the centerpiece of the conference. Its three-story-high brick walls bore 100 or so 4' x 6' banners, featuring paintings by students depicting their family members and friends who are in prison. "To open this news conference, we have a question we need to ask of this country," demanded one speaker. "Why are so many people we love behind bars?"

The answers to this question--as well as proposals for how to collectively resist this nation's reliance on prisons, policing, and forms of surveillance--were explored and debated through over 100 workshops, caucuses, performances, films, exhibitions, and informal discussions. Programs ranged in topic from increased monitoring of communities of color since Sept. 11; police brutality; ability-tracking of kids as a pathway to prison; community-based responses to interpersonal violence; the impact of the criminal justice system on women, children, and families; prison journalism; young people as targets of the PIC; rural organizing against new prisons; political prisoners; the connections between militarism and prisons; and abolitionist strategies.

The prison and jail populations of the South account for four out of 10 imprisoned people in the U.S. In 200l, the South incarcerated one out of every 11 prisoners in the world. The area as a region, and most southern states individually, have significantly higher rates of imprisonment than the nation overall, and each southern state has a rate of imprisonment higher than 63% of all foreign countries. As is the case nationally, people of color suffer disproportionately under the PIC. In every southern state, blacks are locked up at a minimum of four times the rate of whites. In West Virginia, blacks are imprisoned at 17 times the rate of whites. Despite the fact that the criminal justice system often skews its numbers by counting Latinos as white, every southern state imprisons Latinos at a higher rate than whites.