Fascinating editorial on how to combat US prison industrial complex

[MarxSchmarx]

It is not often that the ruling class mouth piece "New York Times" discusses seriously a possible and very risky strategy to fight back against the prison-industrial complex particularly in the US and other anglo-saxon countries:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

The basic idea is:


The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation.

This is an incredibly risky strategy for the individuals involved, as the author acknowledges. But it is a very novel idea of how to struggle against the expanding police state without having to take power.

I would be curious on opinions comrades here would have about such a tactic.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Knowing this country, we'd just start turning gymnasiums and old warehouses into prisons. :rolleyes:

The real problem is a very fundamental one. It's that this barbaric system was not foisted upon many Americans. In this country people sometimes freely turn in their own family to the authorities...that is unheard of in many other countries. Running on tough-on-crime "public safety" campaigns has been a winning electoral formula for petty local bullies in DA offices and governer posts the country over. The author says that rupturing the system will create two possible outcomes: either 1) sentencing changes significantly or even stops altogether for certain offences, esp. drug offences, or 2) there will be a "state of emergency", and presumably the situation vis-a-vis civil liberties and incarceration will get even worse.

Take a wild guess what the public will want. That's without even going into the fact that the people in the justice system are mostly (not always, but mostly) concerned with their own self interest, not in changing society.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

It would take something very large to convince great amounts of Americans to purposely get themselves arrested when the usual goal is to complete your action and try and slip away. I like the idea of that but how can it be combatting the system? I don't see them destroying many prisons because of this tactic, rather a increase in the amount of lies the conservatives spread about "lawlessness and anarchy!"

[Os Cangaceiros]

It wouldn't require people to go out and purposefully try to get arrested; it would just require those who happen to be arrested to take their cases to trial.

[Dabrowski]

It's not an editorial (the official line of the Times Editorial Board), it's an opinion piece by Michelle Alexander. Everyone should read her book The New Jim Crow.

As a protest tactic -- well, I'm not categorically opposed to it, actually. But it would rely on the individual action of oppressed people, right at the moment when they are at their most powerless, isolated and vulnerable. You're locked up, you've got one phone call, you're being threatened with doing hard time (or worse, death!) -- are you going to take a stand on principle and join a "civil disobedience" movement, especially one that doesn't (yet) exist? Probably only if you've already been deeply politically motivated and part of some kind of movement before the police arrested you. If what Alexander imagines ever happened in spite of those odds, it sure would cause headaches for the prosecutors and judges, at least initially. Good!

But in the final analysis, what needs to be done is to smash the state, not just cause headaches for it. And the main work of that abolition is not going to be done by the ones already behind the bars of the racist capitalist "justice" system, but by the multiracial working class on the outside that actually has the power to bring the judicial hangmen to their knees. And, to my reckoning at least, people are only going to start doing what Alexander is advocating, in significantly large numbers at least, when they understand their procedural intransigence to be a part of, and supported by, a class struggle to put Jim Crow and the lynch rope in the past forever, through a socialist revolution.