Punishment follows politics, corporate profit, and media, not crime itself

Evidence

Creating agendas of decarceration and broadly casting the net of alternatives helps us to do the ideological work of pulling apart the conceptual link between crime and punishment. This more nuanced understanding of the social role of the punishment system requires us to give up our usual way of thinking about punishment as an inevitable consequence of crime. We would recognize that “punishment” does not follow from “crime” in the neat and logical sequence offered by discourses that insist on the justice of imprisonment, but rather punishment—primarily through imprisonment (and sometimes death)—is linked to the agendas of politicians, the profit drive of corporations, and media representations of crime. Imprisonment is associated with the racialization of those most likely to be punished. It is associated with their class and, as we have seen, gender structures the punishment system as well. If we insist that abolitionist alternatives trouble these relationships, that they strive to disarticulate crime and punishment, race and punishment, class and punishment, and gender and punishment, then our focus must not rest only on the prison system as an isolated institution but must also be directed at all the social relations that support the permanence of the prison. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 295

Categorization

• XREF: Directly continues Davis’s earlier argument about the prison industrial complex and the disarticulation of race/class/gender from punishment. — connects to: Imprisonment became the primary punishment because it suited capitalist bourgeois ideology, not superior merit. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 107; Pre-prison punishment aimed at spectators as public spectacle, not at reforming the punished. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 102; Corporate profit motives entrench a prison system that would otherwise be obsolete. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 235 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Punishment is so corporatized that mainstream companies now stake themselves in its perpetuation #corroborates (0.85)
• Criminalized communities, not individual acts, determine who ends up imprisoned #corroborates (0.80)
• People are imprisoned largely because their communities are criminalized, not for crimes #corroborates (0.75) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 296
• Prisons proliferated while crime rates were falling due to corporate profit #expands (0.70)
• The prison industrial complex term contests crime as the root cause of imprisonment #expands (0.65) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 225
• Media reproduce dominant ideology without direct state command or overt bias. #corroborates (0.60)