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Chapter 10. “People Like Us”: A New Ethic of Prison Advocacy in Racialized America
- University of Illinois Press
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Chapter 10 “People Like Us” A New Ethic of Prison Advocacy in Racialized America Eleanor Novek Mass imprisonment has failed to reduce crime and poverty and has undermined America’s most fundamental values of liberty and equality. Reproducing the worst patterns of racial discrimination, the population of the nation’s overflowing prisons is more than half black or Hispanic. Black men are 6.5 times more likely to be in prison than whites, and 2.5 times more likely than Hispanics (Sabol, West, & Cooper, 2009). Young African American men in particular are targeted for arrest, investigation, and incarceration (Alexander, 2010; Mauer, 1999; Tonry, 2011; Western, 2007), while the cycle of marginalization imposed on their communities affects succeeding generations of the urban poor (Gandy, 2009; Wacquant, 2001). Decades of selective targeting have created a permanent underclass of presently and formerly incarcerated people of color who have been legally excluded from social, political, and economic participation in society (Alexander, 2010; Davis & Rodriguez, 2000; PCARE, 2007; Reiman, 2004). The evidence gathered by prison scholars and activists has had little influence on policy makers or public discourse, however, for despite its profound impact on American society, the mass imprisonment of Americans in general and African Americans in particular continues to be regarded with general indifference by broad segments of the public. With political discourse framing the system’s brutality as deserved punishment, and with the media exploiting it as sensational entertainment, public support for mass incarceration endures. As an educator who has worked with incarcerated men and women since 2001, I have come to believe that the racialization of the prison-industrial complex is propped up by the self-serving manipulation of public fear on the part of repressive social structures. I agree with Hartnett’s (2000) assertion that the contemporary prison functions “neither to prevent crime nor to deter violence, but rather, to reinforce hierarchies of class privilege and political power” (p. 204 Eleanor Novek 200). To change this system, nothing less than a revolution of the spirit is required . The antidote to the prison crisis is not only radical justice, but love. This chapter begins by exploring public discourse on prisons and detailing the intersections of crime, fear, and social inequality that reinforce the racism of the prison-industrial complex. Next, it sketches the parameters of an inclusive vision of community safety based not on punishment, but on ethics of nonviolence, care, and compassionate love. Drawing from experiences of personal engagement, the chapter introduces a number of activist models of this approach and offers a close look at one in particular, the Alternatives to Violence Project. The chapter concludes by urging activists to reframe the prison-abolition movement as a new civil- and human-rights effort, a broadbased multiracial and cross-class coalition of people partnered in peacemaking actions that support healthy communities through their unswerving commitment to inclusion and reconciliation. Loathing and Love: The Case for Transformation in the Public Mind Public attitudes toward incarcerated people encompass a wide spectrum of attitudes , from dread to derision to compassion. This section will explore three distinct fields of those attitudes: fear of the incarcerated as dangerous beings “not like us,” beyond all redemption; distanced pity for those whose social struggles and personal flaws have contributed to their imprisonment; and solidarity for the incarcerated as “people like us,” members of families and communities whose imprisonment is precipitated by the historic, economic, and political factors that define crime and punishment in contemporary U.S. society. In his work on social stratification, Massey (2009) observes that people judge members of other social groups and categorize them along the dimensions of emotional warmth and competence (p. 13). People are most likely to esteem others whom they perceive to be like themselves. “People like us” are seen as likeable, competent, and worthy of respect; they are accepted as members of our own social category. People “not like us” are categorized into social outgroups that may generate responses of envy, pity, or other feelings of difference. When an out-group is despised and its members are seen as neither congenial nor capable, they may trigger emotions of disgust, contempt, or outright fear (p. 14). Following Massey’s typology, I argue that the prison-industrial complex is a machine of loathing, an institution that perpetuates cycles of fear and otherness that populate our world with ever growing numbers of people perceived to be “not like us.” The most negative mainstream views of imprisoned men, women, and youth acknowledge no human...