Reform rhetoric bolsters prison permanence and cannot meet corporate-era challenges

Evidence

Extensive corporate investment in prisons has significantly raised the stakes for antiprison work. It means that serious antiprison activists must be willing to look much further in their analyses and organizing strategies than the actual institution of the prison. Prison reform rhetoric, which has always undergirded dominant critiques of the prison system, will not work in this new situation. If reform approaches have tended to bolster the permanence of the prison in the past, they certainly will not suffice to challenge the economic and political relationships that sustain the prison today. This means that in the era of the prison industrial complex, activists must pose hard questions about the relationship between global capitalism and the spread of U.S.-style prisons throughout the world. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 266

Categorization

• QUESTION: This causal claim—that reform strengthens prison permanence—underwrites her abolitionist turn and is worth interrogating.
• XREF: connects to: Prison is treated as an inevitable fact of life even in communities it oppresses — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 29; Reform-centered frameworks marginalize decarceration strategies — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 48; The penitentiary was framed as a progressive reform of its era. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 64 (+14 more)

Related

• Rehabilitation has been displaced by incapacitation as prison’s goal (similarity 0.87)
• Reform-centered frameworks marginalize decarceration strategies (similarity 0.86)
• The penitentiary was framed as a progressive reform of its era. (similarity 0.86)
• Punishment is so corporatized that mainstream companies now stake themselves in its perpetuation (similarity 0.86)
• Prison reform rhetoric reinforces the prison’s permanence. (similarity 0.85)
• Prison persists as a detestable solution no alternative replaces (similarity 0.81)
• Corporate profit motives entrench a prison system that would otherwise be obsolete. (similarity 0.80)
• Prison imagery in media makes incarceration seem natural and permanent (similarity 0.80)
• Prison reform is an integral part of the prison’s functioning, not its antidote (similarity 0.80)
• Reform has always been proposed as the remedy for the prison’s failure (similarity 0.80)
• Punishment follows politics, corporate profit, and media, not crime itself (similarity 0.79)
• Prisons stockpile obsolete ideas like racism and misogyny that society has rejected (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Prison reform rhetoric reinforces the prison’s permanence. #corroborates (1.00)
• Prison imagery in media makes incarceration seem natural and permanent #expands (0.75)