Prison imagery in media makes incarceration seem natural and permanent

Evidence

South Africa’s participation in the prison industrial complex constitutes a major impediment to the creation of a democratic society. In the United States, we have already felt the insidious and socially damaging effects of prison expansion. The dominant social expectation is that young black, Latino, Native American, and Southeast Asian men— and increasingly women as well—will move naturally from the free world into prison, where, it is assumed, they belong. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 274 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Prison abolition has a long history but remains culturally unthinkable; Prison reform rhetoric reinforces the prison’s permanence.; Prison is an ordinary life dimension in poor communities of color (+5 more)

Related

• Prison reform rhetoric reinforces the prison’s permanence. (similarity 0.94)
• Prison expansion undermines democracy and normalizes incarceration for people of color (similarity 0.91)
• Prison is treated as an inevitable fact of life even in communities it oppresses (similarity 0.90)
• Prison is an ordinary life dimension in poor communities of color (similarity 0.84)
• Prison abolition has a long history but remains culturally unthinkable (similarity 0.81)
• Prison expansion correlates with falling crime, exposing profit and racism as drivers (similarity 0.81)
• Prisons preserve racist and misogynist practices society has nominally abandoned (similarity 0.80)
• Reform rhetoric bolsters prison permanence and cannot meet corporate-era challenges (similarity 0.80)
• Prisons create the illusion that free people’s rights and liberties are secured by imprisonment. (similarity 0.80)
• Women’s imprisonment increasingly echoes slavery, colonization, and genocide. (similarity 0.80)
• Imprisonment converts bodies of color into profit sources that drain public welfare funding (similarity 0.80)
• The prison boom was a way to concentrate and manage a capitalist human surplus (similarity 0.79)
• People are imprisoned largely because their communities are criminalized, not for crimes (similarity 0.79)
• Punishment follows politics, corporate profit, and media, not crime itself (similarity 0.79)
• The penitentiary was framed as a progressive reform of its era. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Prison expansion undermines democracy and normalizes incarceration for people of color #corroborates (0.82) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 274
• Prison reform rhetoric reinforces the prison’s permanence. #corroborates (0.70)
• Prison is an ordinary life dimension in poor communities of color #exemplifies (0.50)
• Slavery’s abolition parallels the conceivable abolition of prisons #complicates (0.50)