Prison reform rhetoric reinforces the prison’s permanence.

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 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Prison imagery in media makes incarceration seem natural and permanent; Reform has been built into the prison since its origin; Racism and profit, not crime, drive prison expansion (+15 more)

Related

• Prison imagery in media makes incarceration seem natural and permanent (similarity 0.94)
• Prison expansion undermines democracy and normalizes incarceration for people of color (similarity 0.90)
• Prison is treated as an inevitable fact of life even in communities it oppresses (similarity 0.86)
• Reform rhetoric bolsters prison permanence and cannot meet corporate-era challenges (similarity 0.85)
• Prison expansion correlates with falling crime, exposing profit and racism as drivers (similarity 0.85)
• The penitentiary was framed as a progressive reform of its era. (similarity 0.84)
• Prisons preserve racist and misogynist practices society has nominally abandoned (similarity 0.84)
• Rehabilitation has been displaced by incapacitation as prison’s goal (similarity 0.83)
• The prison system is racism’s most reliable institutional refuge. (similarity 0.83)
• The prison boom was a way to concentrate and manage a capitalist human surplus (similarity 0.82)
• Reform has always been proposed as the remedy for the prison’s failure (similarity 0.82)
• Prison is an ordinary life dimension in poor communities of color (similarity 0.82)
• The prison debate wrongly focuses on correction while normalization mechanisms proliferate unchecked. (similarity 0.81)
• Prison abolition has a long history but remains culturally unthinkable (similarity 0.81)
• Prison reform is an integral part of the prison’s functioning, not its antidote (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Racism and profit, not crime, drive prison expansion #corroborates (0.65)
• Rehabilitation has been displaced by incapacitation as prison’s goal #expands (0.60)
• Prison expansion undermines democracy and normalizes incarceration for people of color #complicates (0.60) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 274
• Slavery’s abolition parallels the conceivable abolition of prisons #responds-to (0.55)