Abstract
Since the 1970s, exponential growth in the use of incarceration in the United States, combined with racial targeting in the use of state surveillance and punishment, has marked the prison as a primary site of contemporary black liberation struggles. Black women and girls, as well as other low-income people of color, have been particularly devastated by prison expansion and the accompanying withdrawal of resources from community infrastructure and economic supports for low-income families, in part in order to fund costly law-enforcement and prison budgets.1
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Rebecca Bohrman and Naomi Murakawa, “Remaking Big Government: Immigration and Crime Control in the United States,” in Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex, ed. J. Sudbury (New York: Routledge, 2005), 109–26. The other major shift of public-spending priorities has been from the welfare state to the global war on terror.
Julian V. Roberts and others, Penal Populism and Public Opinion: Lessons from Five Countries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Julia Sudbury, “A World Without Prisons: Resisting Militarism, Globalized Punishment and Empire,” Social Justice 31, nos. 1–2 (2004): 9–30.
Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson, The Politics of Injustice: Law and Order in America (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1999), 47–74.
Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (New York: Verso, 1999), 45–66.
For example, anyone convicted of selling two ounces or possessing four ounces of narcotics would receive a sentence of fifteen years. Marc Mauer, “The Causes and Consequences of Prison Growth in the United States” in Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences, ed. D. Garland, 6. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001).
Ibid, 6. The federal budget for the war on drugs grew from $1.5 billion in 1981 at the beginning of Reagan’s term to $6.6 billion in 1989 and hit $17 billion ten years later.
Sonia Lawrence and Toni Williams, “Swallowed Up: Drug Couriers at the Borders of Canadian Sentencing,” University of Toronto Law Journal 56, no. 4 (2006): 285–332.
Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 84–104.
Edwin Bender, A Contributing Influence: The Private-Prison Industry and Political Giving in the South (Helena, MT: Institute on Money in State Politics, 2002), 4.
Julia Sudbury, “Transatlantic Visions: Resisting the Globalization of Mass Incarceration,” Social Justice 27, no. 3 (2000): 133–50.
Richard Edney, “To Keep Me Safe From Harm? Transgender Prisoners and the Experience of Imprisonment,” Deakin Law Review 9, no. 2 (2004): 331–33.
Angela Y. Davis and Dylan Rodriguez, “The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation,” Social Justice 27, no. 3 (2000): 212–18.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
For a range of abolitionist voices from the 1970s see Fay Honey Knopp and others, Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists (New York: Prison Research Education Action Project, 1976), 13–16.
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents From the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 1996).
Kim Gilmore, “Slavery and Prisons—Understanding the Connections,” Social Justice 27, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 195–205; Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Policing and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (New York: Verso, 1999), 166.
Joy James, ed., The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005).
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© 2009 Manning Marable and Leith Mullings
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Sudbury, J. (2009). Rethinking Global Justice. In: Mullings, L. (eds) New Social Movements in the African Diaspora. The Critical Black Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104570_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104570_12
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