“Why Prisons Exist” By Michael Kimble

There's not much that I can say that hasn't been echoed many times before
about the prison industrial komplex, other than to keep explaining how and
why people end up in prison.
     It's hard for some people to wrap their brains around the fact that
generations of high unemployment, poor education, racism and discrimination
to a very large degree causes criminality.  Study after study by social
scientists have shown us that unequal distribution of wealth , education
and political power also determines which sectors of society will accept
criminal activities as a means of survival.  No person gets the chance to
decide what socio-economic status they are birthed into, so society is
culpable to some degree.
     But we must not stop there in explaining why prisons exist and who
ends up in them.  Just as people of color have experienced systematic
discrimination, marginalization and violence simply because of the color of
their skin, so have gay, queer, and transgender people.  Being openly gay
makes you an automatic target for any homophobe out there, because you're
different.  Gay people are discriminated against in housing and employment.
 Many gay youth are homeless due to family problems in dealing with their
being gay.  Some of these youth end up in prison, opt out by way of drugs,
or commit suicide.

"most people realize that crime is simply the result of a grossly
disproportionate distribution of wealth and privilege.  Imprisonment is an
aspect of class struggle from the outset.  It is the creation of a closed
society which attempts to isolate those individuals who disregard the
structures of a hypocritical establishment as well as those who attempt to
challenge it on a mass basis.  Throughout its history, the U.S. has used
its prisons to suppress any organized efforts to challenge its legitimacy
(think about COINTELPRO).
     The purpose of the chief repressive institutions within the
totalitarian capitalist state is clearly to discourage and prohibit certain
activity and the prohibitions are aimed at very distinctly defined sectors
of the class-and-race sensitized society.  The ultimate expression of law
is not order- it's prison.  There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons and
thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social
peace.  Anglo-Saxon bourgeois law is tied firmly into economics.  Bourgeois
law protects property relations and not social relations''.
-George Jackson

Simply put, prisons are constructed to suppress all attempts to challenge
the status quo, be it by way of sexuality or by way or organizing for the
destruction of the state.
     I remember reading a quote from a warden at Marion USP in Illinois on
the purpose for what many consider the first control unit: "The purpose of
Marion USP is to control revolutionary attitudes in prison and in
society''.
Enough said.

-Michael
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