The same threats posed by reform that fails to engage structural violence and inequality also identify possible openings for social justice movement base-building and grassroots organizing.

Popular and powerful resistance to the criminalization and deployment of state violence against Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Muslim peoples, against immigrants and refugees, has surged. Black Lives Matter, #SayHerName, Dream Defenders, the Movement for Black Lives, and the Standing Rock water protectors have inspired progressives. Increasingly, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people have been organizing to make their voices heard and advance more progressive agendas. Justice advocates should support and help strengthen this work without permitting White people, non-Indigenous people, and people who have never been incarcerated to take it over.

Some campaigns that attract support across the political spectrum, such as money bail reform, are vitally important. But it is also important to question and sometimes challenge “brokered” rhetoric about danger. Conservatives may well want to advance their arguments in fiscal terms, but that doesn’t mean social justice movements should accept without challenge austerity arguments and privatization strategies. Justice should never be for sale. And it is always important to redefine in liberatory ways what constitutes community well-being and safety outside the framework of policing and the criminal justice system.

Where “bipartisan consensus” reforms and framing are problematic and might intensify harm to heavily incarcerated communities, or simply reconfigure it, there is already significant organizing work underway that suggests better approaches to transformation are possible. Harm reduction efforts are critical to support and advocate for people who are incarcerated and under community supervision. One useful strategy to dismantle the prison industrial complex and develop youth leadership, writes anti-violence writer and educator Mariame Kaba, “is participatory defense campaigns. These are grassroots efforts to pressure authorities, attend to prisoner needs, and raise awareness and funds.”49 Kaba emphasizes the importance of placing this work in an abolitionist context that doesn’t concede the inevitability of prisons. There is no “one-size-fits-all” answer to whether or how we might engage reform efforts, but Kaba proposes this essential guideline: “[A]ll of the ‘reforms’ that focus on strengthening the police or ‘morphing’ policing into something more invisible but still as deadly should be opposed.”50

States and counties remain the primary arenas for bipartisan reform campaigns and initiatives. It will be up to grassroots social justice organizations in those locales to decide if or how to engage them. The work of Women With a Vision (WWAV) in New Orleans provides one example of principled engagement that simultaneously serves immediate needs while advancing long-range justice goals. With a long history of community organizing led by Black women, the organization took on issues of racial bias and lack of transparency in the district attorney’s diversion program. The result was the co-creation of Crossroads, a radically better diversion program for women facing drug and prostitution charges.51

Lastly, we must lift issues of law enforcement violence and mass incarceration out of the stranglehold of a single-issue framework in order to see them in a larger, even global, context. It is essential to develop structural analyses that make clear the complex and interrelated drivers of race-, class-, gender-, and disability-based policing and mass incarceration. The analysis must be centered in the experiences and insights of the communities most affected, not produced by elites. Rather than settling for the trade-off, this work invites justice advocates to begin articulating an endgame that consciously connects work on protection, solidarity, sanctuary, mutual aid, and environmental protection with long-term, cross-movement strategies for liberation.

Examples of how to engage this task abound. In 1962, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose members did some of the riskiest organizing and outreach work of the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South, created a Research Department. Designed to help strengthen field organizing, its resources included an expansive documentary archive and power analysis that illuminated the specific civic and economic structures supporting segregation.52

Present day examples include the Movement for Black Lives platform and the Southern Movement Blueprint: A Plan of Action in a Time of Crisis, a synthesis of analysis from communities throughout the region to help build a powerful, progressive Southern infrastructure for change connected, across movements, by common principles, values, and work.53

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, an anti-prison activist and author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, argues that this step is critical in order to break through narrow thinking, connect local realities to international movements for justice, and organize more effectively. “The problem with a good deal of analysis about what is happening everywhere,” she told me, “is that it is constricted by the obscuring thickness of neoliberalism and globalization. That is, the ideology and rhetoric of neoliberalism has blanketed the earth at the same time that globalization is blanketing the world with war and super-exploitation to keep capitalism going.” Even justice movements can unwittingly come to accept an austerity mindset. She encourages activists to think about austerity politics and the push for privatization beyond the frame of greed and corruption in order to more effectively understand, resist, and offer alternatives to its profoundly desocializing impacts.54

We can start by changing the way we think about, discuss, and depict the devastation of the prison industrial complex. Although it wasn’t as widely covered as 13th, 2016 also saw the release of another documentary: Brett Story’s The Prison in 12 Landscapes. Story’s film transports us into a variety of rural and urban geographies—New York City and rural Kentucky, Detroit and Ferguson, Marin County, California and beyond—in order to glimpse the long, racialized, and economically violent impact of the U.S. prison system. The film offers a quiet but deeply unsettling look at the framework of the civil society we have created, seen through the refracted light of the prison and the expansive systems of carceral control it generates, and all without seeing a single prison until the last, lingering shot.

And, in a way, that’s the point. Reforms that leave so much injustice and violence intact and unchallenged will ultimately continue to lead U.S. society to that prison and all of its shadow manifestations. Long-term, collective strategies of social and economic transformation, by contrast, can take us through changing landscapes, step by determined step, and lead us toward the day that there will be no prison at journey’s end.

Endnotes

1 Dan Berger, “Lessons in Law and Order Politics,” African American Intellectual History Society, August 9, 2016, http://www.aaihs.org/lessons-in-law-and-order-politics/.

2 Newt Gingrich, “On Terrorism it’s Time to Know, to Profile, and to Discriminate,” HumanEvents.com, December 30, 2009, http://humanevents.com/2009/12/30/on-terrorism-its-time-to-know-to-profile-and-to-discriminate/.

3 Michael Scherer, “Grover Norquist: The Soul of the New Machine,” Mother Jones, January/February 2004, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/01/grover-norquist-soul-new-machine.

4 For a useful introduction to neoliberalism and austerity, see Jean Hardisty, “The Gloves are Off for the Right’s Chamber of Commerce Wing,” The Public Eye, Fall, 2014, Political Research Associates, https://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/10/07/from-the-new-right-to-neoliberalism-the-threat-to-democracy-has-grown/.

5 Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2017,” March 14, 2017, Prison Policy Initiative, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2017.html.

6 Peter Wagner, “Are Private Prisons Driving Mass Incarceration?” Prison Policy Initiative, October 7, 2015, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2015/10/07/private_prisons_parasite/.

7 Danielle Kaeble and Thomas P. Bonczar, “Probation and Parole in the United States, 2015,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, December 21, 2016, http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5784.

8 Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011). See also L. Ben-Moshe, C. Chapman, and A. Carey (eds.), Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2014).

9 David Jaros, “Flawed Coalitions and the Politics of Crime,” 99 Iowa L. Rev. 1473 (2014): 1473-1475.

10 Marvin D. Free, Jr., “The Impact of Federal Sentencing Reforms on African Americans,” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Nov., 1997): 268-286.

11 Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 22.

12 Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, “20 Years Since ‘Welfare Reform’,” The Atlantic, August 22, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/20-years-welfare-reform/496730/. See also “Welfare Reform in Texas Has Not Worked, According to University of Texas at Austin Researchers,” UT News, The University of Texas at Austin, January 29, 2008, https://news.utexas.edu/2008/01/29/social_work_welfare. See also Joshua Holland, “How Bill Clinton’s Welfare ‘Reform’ Created a System Rife with Racial Biases,” Moyers & Company, May 12, 2014, http://billmoyers.com/2014/05/12/how-bill-clintons-welfare-reform-created-a-system-rife-with-racial-biases/.

13 Governor’s Advisory Task Force on Faith-Based Community Service Groups, Faith in Action: A New Vision for Church-State Cooperation in Texas, December 1996, https://www.scribd.com/document/249455442/Texas-Faith-in-Action-1996-pdf.

14 Tanya Erzen, God in Captivity: The Rise of Faith-Based Prison Ministries in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).

15 Texas Freedom Network Education Fund, “The Texas Faith-Based Initiative at Five Years: Warning Signs as President Bush Expands Texas-style Program at National Level,” 2002, http:tfn.org/cms/assets/uploads/2016/01/TFN_CC_REPORT-FINAL1.pdf (cached).

16 Forrest Wilder, “Revealed: The Corporations and Billionaires that Fund the Texas Public Policy Foundation,” August 24, 2012, Texas Observer, https://www.texasobserver.org/revealed-the-corporations-and-billionaires-that-fund-the-texas-public-policy-foundation/.

17 “The Conservative Case for Reform,” Right on Crime, http://rightoncrime.com/the-conservative-case-for-reform/. See also “Right on Crime Signatories,” Right on Crime, http://rightoncrime.com/right-on-crime-signatories/.

18 Susan B. Tucker and Eric Cadora, “Justice Reinvestment,” Ideas for an Open Society, Open Society Institute, Vol. 3, No. 3, November, 2003.

19 JFA Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, The Sentencing Project, et. al, Ending Mass Incarceration: Charting a New Justice Reinvestment, April 17, 2013, 6. Available online: https://www.aclu.org/ending-mass-incarceration-charting-new-justice-reinvestment.

20 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Misplaced Priorities: Over Incarcerate, Under Educate, (Baltimore: NAACP, 2011). The press conference is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46X8ClRmDvg.

21 Newt Gingrich and Pat Nolan, “Prison Reform: A Smart Way for States to Save Money and Lives,” Washington Post, January 7, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/06/AR2011010604386.html.

22 “NAACP Report Says Shift in Funding Toward Prisons ‘Failing Us,’” April 7, 2011, PBS Newshour website at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/social_issues-jan-june11-incarceration_04-07/.

23 “Spring 2011 Policy Update,” Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, 2011,https://www.gcir.org/publications/gcirpubs/2011_policy_update. See also Mark Gunther, “Round Up the Usual Suspects: The MacArthur Foundation’s Big Climate Bet,” Medium, September 2, 2015, https://medium.com/@marcgunther/the-usual-suspects-the-macarthur-foundation-s-big-climate-bet-c3a2327fc23d.

24Frederick Clarkson, “Anti-Abortion Strategy in the Age of Obama,” Political Research Associates, December 1, 2009, https://www.politicalresearch.org/2009/12/01/anti-abortion-strategy-in-the-age-of-obama-2/.

25 Telephone interview with foundation official, October 19, 2016.

26 The Center for Media and Democracy, “Koch Criminal Justice Reform Trojan Horse: Special Report on Reentry and Following the Money,” PRWatch, June 16, 2016, http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/06/13115/koch-criminal-justice-reform-report-reentry-follow-money.

27 Public Performance Safety Project, “33 States Reform Criminal Justice Policies Through Justice Reinvestment,” The Pew Charitable Trusts, November 16, 2016, http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-sheets/2016/11/33-states-reform-criminal-justice-policies-through-justice-reinvestment.

28 American Civil Liberties Union, “ACLU Awarded $50 Million by Open Society Foundations to End Mass Incarceration,” November 7, 2014, https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-awarded-50-million-open-society-foundations-end-mass-incarceration.

29 The Coalition for Public Safety, “Leading Conservative, Progressive Groups Join Forces to Launch Nation’s Largest Coalition Aimed at Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform,” PR Newswire, February 19, 2015, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/leading-conservative-progressive-groups-join-forces-to-launch-nations-largest-coalition-aimed-at-comprehensive-criminal-justice-reform-300038422.html.

30 In September 2016, I requested an interview with executive director Steven Hawkins, who agreed, and I submitted questions in advance. Shortly before the (twice confirmed) interview was to take place, a public relations executive with a firm that helped create the branding for CPS informed me by email that Hawkins’ schedule had changed and the interview was cancelled. Despite my request to reschedule, I did not hear from CPS again.

31 Mississippi NAACP, “Prison Reform Bill’s Effectiveness Questioned,” April 3, 2014, http://naacpms.org/prison-reform-bills-effectiveness-questioned/.

32 “Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 (S. 2123),” Families Against Mandatory Minimums, http://famm.org/sentencing-reform-and-corrections-act-of-2015/.

33 Bernadette Rabuy and Peter Wagner, “Correctional Control: Incarceration and Supervision by State,” June 1, 2016 https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/50statepie.html

34 No Entry: A National Survey of Criminal Justice Diversion Programs and Initiatives, Center for Health and Justice Alternatives at TASC, December 2013, http://www2.centerforhealthandjustice.org/content/pub/no-entry-national-survey-criminal-justice-diversion-programs-and-initiatives

35“Problem-Solving Courts,” Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities, http://www2.tasc.org/program/problem-solving-courts

36 Donna Murch, “Paying for Punishment: The New Debtors’ Prison,” Boston Review, August 1, 2016. See also Cate Graziani, Liat Ben-Moshe & Haile Eshe Cole, Beyond Alternatives to Incarceration and Confinement, Grassroots Leadership, April 2017 http://grassrootsleadership.org/blog/2017/04/grassroots-leaderships-latest-publication-lays-groundwork-new-program-area

37 JFA Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, et. al., Ending Mass Incarceration, 3–5.

38 Kay Whitlock, “Community Corrections: Profiteering, Corruption, and Widening the Net,” Truthout, November 20, 2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/27555-community-corrections-profiteering-corruption-and-widening-the-net. See also American Friends Service Committee, Grassroots Leadership, and Southern Center for Human Rights, Treatment Industrial Complex: How For-Profit Prison Corporations are Undermining Efforts to Treat and Rehabilitate Prisoners for Corporate Gain, November 17, 2014, https://www.afsc.org/document/treatment-industrial-complex-how-profit-prison-corporations-are-undermining-efforts-treat-a.

39 Nick Wing, “How a State Bail Reform Measure Lost the Support of Bail Reformers,” Huffington Post, October 31, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-mexico-bail-reform_us_580a7885e4b0cdea3d8784e5.

40 The Movement for Black Lives, Color of Change, Law for Black Lives, Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, Project NIA, and Southerners on New Ground (SONG), Transformative Bail Reform: A Popular Education Curriculum, March 1, 2017, https://policy.m4bl.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Transformative-Bail-Reform-5.pdf.

41 Samantha Harvell, Jeremy Welsh-Loveman, and Hanna Love, et. al., Reforming Sentencing and Corrections Policy: The Experience of Justice Reinvestment Initiative States, Urban Institute, December 19, 2016, http://www.urban.org/research/publication/reforming-sentencing-and-corrections-policy. See also JFA Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, et. al., Ending Mass Incarceration, 1–4.

42 Editorial Board, “Proposition 47: A Failure to Learn History’s Lesson,” The Sacramento Bee, December 22, 2016, http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/editorials/article122675524.html.

43 “Invest-Divest,” The Movement for Black Lives, https://policy.m4bl.org/invest-divest/.

44 Marjorie Cohn, “Jeff Sessions’ Department of Injustice,” Truthout, May 4, 2017, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40455-jeff-sessions-department-of-injustice.

45Adam Gabbatt, “Anti-Protest Bills Would ‘Attack Right to Speak Out’ Under Donald Trump,” The Guardian, May 8, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/08/donald-trump-anti-protest-bills.

46 Frederick Douglass, “Address of Hon. Fred. Douglass” (address, National Convention of Colored Men, Louisville, KY, September 24, 1883). Online at: http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/554.

47 Aaron Rupar, “Newt Gingrich Suddenly Acknowledges Structural Racism. Here’s Why It’s Hard to Take Him Seriously,” ThinkProgress, July 8, 2016, https://thinkprogress.org/newt-gingrich-suddenly-acknowledges-structural-racism-heres-why-it-s-hard-to-take-him-seriously-4a630483d1d#.r7idxojl4.

48 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “In the Shadow of the Shadow State,” in The Revolution Will Not be Funded, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Boston: South End Press, 2009). Reprinted with permission by The Scholar and Feminist Online: http://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/ruth-wilson-gilmore-in-the-shadow-of-the-shadow-state/.

49 Mariame Kaba, “Free Us All: Participatory Defense Campaigns as Abolitionist Organizing,” The New Inquiry, May 8, 2017, https://thenewinquiry.com/free-us-all/.

50 Mariame Kaba, “Police ‘Reforms’ You Should Always Oppose,” Truthout, December 7, 2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/27852-police-reforms-you-should-always-oppose.

51 Zenobia Jeffries, “What It Takes to Get Women Out of Prison – and Stay Out,” Yes! Magazine, Winter 2017, http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/50-solutions/what-it-takes-to-get-women-out-of-prison-and-stay-out-20160112.

52 Derek Seidman, “The Hidden History of the SNCC Research Department,” Eyes on the Ties, May 2, 2017, https://news.littlesis.org/2017/05/02/the-hidden-history-of-the-sncc-re….

53 “Platform,” Movement for Black Lives, https://policy.m4bl.org/platform/. “Southern Movement Blueprint: A Plan of Action in a Time of Crisis,” South Movement Assembly, http://southtosouth.org/.

54 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, telephone interview with author, October 7, 2016.

55 “In Support of Mens Rea Protections in Ohio,” http://rightoncrime.com/2014/12/reddy-in-support-of-mens-rea-protection…

56 Rena Steinzor, “Dangerous Bedfellows” op cit. The Stalemate on Criminal Justice Reform,” American Prospect, May 11, 2016 http://prospect.org/article/dangerous-bedfellows

57 Greg Dotson and Alison Cassady, “Three Ways Congressional Mens Rea Proposals Could Allow White Collar Criminals to Escape Prosecution,” March 11, 2016, Center for American Progress, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/criminal-justice/reports/2016/0….

58 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, telephone conversation with author, October 7, 2016.

59 “Overcriminalization,” Right on Crime, http://rightoncrime.com/category/priority-issues/overcriminalization/. See also Michael Haugen, “Randy Petersen on ‘The Lars Larson Show’: Policing Is A “Uniquely Local” Idea,” January 18, 2017, Right o Crime http://rightoncrime.com/2017/01/randy-petersen-on-the-lars-larson-show-….

60 Nancy A. Heitzeg, email conversation with author, May 9, 2017