Medium Post 11/18

I found this weeks’ material on prison abolition as a platform of Black lives Matter and a way of liberation to be some of the most challenging and complex ideas that I have dealt with this semester. Although the solution to the problem of what to do after the hypothetical abolition of prisons is not very clear to me, I still believe that it may very well be necessary for the end of White Supremacy. As was discussed by Davis, Dubler/Lloyd and Gilmore, the prison system represents the impulse of white supremacists (and upper class elites if you take a more Marxist look) to remove Black people and any people that they consider undesirable from society, and make a profit while they are at it. The purpose of the prison industrial complex and other institutions like the police is to keep people in their prescribed place, that being out of sight and society. When mulling over this material I was reminded of one of my favorite movies, the Shawshank Redemption. The film explores life inside a federal penitentiary for an innocent man, and although it is doubtful that the original intent of the filmmakers was to show the sheer failure of the system as a whole, I would argue that the film achieves a clear depiction of just that. The film goes beyond the average Hollywood stereotypes of prison life and shows a world so clearly segmented and corrupt wherein the Warden and the guards are not there to rehabilitate the inmates at all, but solely to serve the cycle of the system and preserve the order there. Specifically (Spoilers), when there is a witness to the protagonists’ innocence, the warden has him killed because even an innocent man is of more use to him as a slave to him in prison than as a free man in society. While this is obviously a dramatic fictional story, it does line up with prisoner descriptions of life behind bars and scholarly analysis of the Prison-Industrial complex. Possibly because of my experiences with the film, I can honestly say that I do think prison abolition is the way to go for a better life for all.