Recent demands to defund the police and shift resources away from law enforcement to community-led alternatives have gained steam across the country. We are witnessing a contemporary civil rights movement that will fundamentally alter the role and landscape of policing in the United States. What we are not seeing, however, is similar momentum to defund and abolish prisons. Police are the first point of contact for almost everyone who is impacted by the criminal legal system, but there are many other actors — e.g., district attorneys and judges — who perpetuate systemic racism as well as other forms of oppression such as classism, sexual violence, and transphobia.
The same way that modern policing has consistently failed us, our prison system is a massive failure. If it were working well, we would be the safest nation in the history of civilization considering the scale of mass incarceration. Perversely, crime rates in California are at historic lows, yet incarceration rates remain staggeringly high (a 900% increase since 1978). One factor that contributes to our inflated incarceration rate is extreme sentencing — an inhumanely lengthy prison sentence. As abolitionists, we call for an end to this harmful practice.
The Equal Justice Initiative highlights several examples of extreme punishment, including three strikes legislation, drug offenses, and virtual life sentences (a prison sentence that exceeds one’s normal lifespan). Abolitionists see ending these types of sentencing as a form of harm reduction on the way to abolishing the entire criminal legal system. When it comes to legislation, abolitionists only work to further that which will ultimately limit the size and scope of the criminal legal system. As abolitionists, it is our duty to shine a light on the deep harms inflicted by the criminal legal system. We seek to bring about a crisis of legitimacy for the entire criminal legal system. Police abolition and prison abolition are inextricably intertwined; dismantling the entire criminal legal system helps us build a world free from state-sanctioned violence and create a new system rooted in healing, accountability, and transformative justice.
If we are to envision a world without police, we must necessarily envision at the same time a world without prison guards and prisons. Prison guards [or correctional officers (CO’s)] are cops who police those behind bars, yet they operate with even less oversight than cops on the streets. When a police officer uses excessive or lethal force, a phone is sometimes nearby to record the incident and draw attention to it. When a CO uses excessive force inside a prison, the harm is completely invisible to the outside world and accountability is unattainable. CO’s operate with complete impunity, and because of how powerful their union is, even less is done by the public and legislators to challenge their practices. When we call for abolishing the police, we mean all forms of policing that exist in our state: we cannot get rid of one without simultaneously abolishing the other.
Efforts to defund the police confront the power that police unions wield to resist reform efforts. In California, the correctional officers’ union, CCPOA, is a similarly powerful player in state and local politics, and has consistently contributed to politicians and ballot campaigns for the past thirty years. Their motto, that they “Walk the Toughest Beat in the State,” speaks to the ultra-tough, militarized image they valorize and embody. For job security and self-preservation reasons, CCPOA is invested in keeping prisons open and full. This is an oppressive cycle where people’s livelihood as well as the profitability of a whole industry with powerful lobbyists at the state, local and federal level relies on criminalizing and caging human beings while completely ignoring the harmful destructive and murderous nature of all prisons and jails.
“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”
- Angela Davis
As Law Professor John Pfaff and others have argued, the most powerful players in our criminal justice system, and those who are most responsible for extreme sentences, are prosecutors. The District Attorney’s office decides which charges to file for the prosecution, and these charges often have minimum sentences attached to them, leaving judges with little discretion when deciding the sentences. The fact that D.A.s are elected can increase their propensity for extreme sentences, as the electorate punishes them for leniency in rare examples that may make the news, but does not pay attention to patterns of harsh sentencing. Furthermore, District Attorneys use the threat of extreme sentences to encourage plea deals, which are much less costly and time consuming than going to trial. Roughly 95% of all defendants plead guilty and take a deal instead of going to court.
There is, however, legislation that seeks to abolish some of these harmful patterns. In March 2020, California Assemblymember Kamlager introduced Assembly Concurrent Resolution 186 to call for an end to extreme sentencing. Our partners at Initiate Justice co-sponsored this resolution alongside Re:Store Justice, and have been instrumental in getting it much-needed attention. According to the resolution, “One in three people in California prisons is serving a life or virtual life sentence, which is, at 31.3 percent, among the highest rates in the country”. Nationwide, we see Black people disproportionately subjected to this predatory policing and imprisonment: though less than 15% of the national population, Black people “comprise 48.3 percent of people serving life sentences, 55 percent of people serving virtual life sentences, and 56.4 percent of people serving life sentences without the possibility of parole.” The Assembly put this legislation on hold due to the pandemic, but it will likely be reintroduced in 2021.
The impact of this long-term incarceration on our state budget is mind-boggling as well. The 2020–21 budget for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is a staggering $13.4 Billion, roughly 10% of the state general fund — a higher percentage than any other state in the nation. Furthermore, “The cost to incarcerate one individual for life can cost up to $5,000,000.” If we ended extreme sentences, our society would have the potential to reinvest that money into alternatives to incarceration, such as much-needed social services.
When we call for prison abolition, we not only call for the dismantling of prisons in a vacuum, but dismantling all systems that contribute to seeing prisons as “solutions” — all facets of the massive criminal legal system that condemns so many people to life in prison, including District Attorneys’ offices, state surveillance, Sheriffs’ Departments, Probation, and school police. If we allocate resources to prevent and address the root causes of harm, which are inequality, systemic disinvestment, and trauma, we can address these issues in our communities without using a punitive approach, while simultaneously abolishing police and prisons in our society. One piece of this complex puzzle is the abolition of extreme sentences. No one should be punished with life (or a large portion of one’s life) behind bars, and the end of this inhumane process would be part of the full abolition of this harmful system that we are working towards.
White People 4 Black Lives is a white anti-racist collective and activist project of the Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere (AWARE-LA) and operates within a national network of white anti-racists called Showing Up for Racial Justice. WP4BL is rooted in acting in solidarity with Black Lives Matter: Los Angeles. Visit www.awarela.org and follow us @wp4bl.
Initiate Justice is a non-profit organization dedicated to ending mass incarceration by activating the power of people impacted by incarceration. You can learn more about their work by visiting their website, and following them on social media @InitiateJustice.