Kate Rhee
Kate Rhee from the Prison Moratorium Project followed Wysham, refocusing discussion on the forms of violence represented by the penal system in the United States. The Project, which she directs, promotes the abolition of prisons and “the prison industrial complex.” Rhee emphasized that the work of the Project, a good deal of which is devoted to educational and organizational workshops, has to do with changing how participants view and understand prisons as institutions. “When we talk about the prison industrial complex,” she observed, “[we argue] that the prison industrial complex is about everything else but prisons.”
Rhee’s analysis of the prison system emphasized the interconnectedness of practices of incarceration with a range of other historical and contemporary social institutions and practices. “You can’t talk about prisons in this country without talking about slavery and how . . . prisons have continued the conditions . . . of slavery.” The economic element of the prison system is not only reducible to its mobilization of unfree labor; the very logic of the criminal justice system is predicated on an argument about exchange: “You do the crime, you do the time. Think about it for a second. . . . You do the crime, you do the time, and somehow the crime is cancelled out. [As if] crime and time [were] fixed units.” Such thinking effaces the fact that “crimes happen out of a certain context, out of certain social and economic conditions.”
Rhee urged the audience to consider the social function of criminalization – and crime – in the history of U.S. society. Rhee joked a bit at the expense of some earnest college students concerning the influence of Discipline and Punish, the now-classic work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, on the emergence of the prison as a modern social institution. “A lot of people, especially college students, . . . come to us and say, ‘You guys really remind me of Foucault. And like, so how have you really applied Foucault in your work?'” After reminding the audience of the context in which Foucault wrote, and of the need to pay attention to local contexts in thinking about criminalization, Rhee turned to the current situation in the state of New York, a situation that increasingly criminalizes young people in schools. In New York State, this process of criminalization is embodied in the SAVE (Schools Against Violence in Education) Legislation (Chapter 180 of the Laws of 2000) signed by Governor George Pataki in July 2000. (For a summary of the legislation in a gubernatorial press release, see http://www.state.ny.us/governor/press/year00/july24_00.htm.) Rhee explained how parts of the legislation elevate certain acts of fighting in school from being classified as a misdemeanor to a D felony. The process of criminalization tends to move in a unidirectional trajectory, including more and more acts under the category of “the criminal.” “Ten years ago that would not have been a crime,” Rhee observed. “Now it is.”
The Prison Moratorium Project promotes an activist agenda organized around themes such as “schools not jails,” “education not incarceration.” In doing so, the Project emphasizes the connections between intensified criminalization of sectors of the population, on the one hand, and claims about the purported interests of public safety, on the other. Stereotypes and threatening specters help to generate and sustain these connections. Rhee pointed to “the welfare mom” and “the superpredator” as products of policymaking research, as two sides of the same ideological coin, and as imaginary figures that help society rationalize concrete practices of social control and political constraint. Illustrating the point of how these two figures operate in both practical and ideological realms, Rhee gave two examples. In the first, a pregnant African-American welfare recipient was convicted of child abuse and was subsequently given a choice by the judge in the case between accepting Norplant (a form of contraceptive that is implanted under the skin) or enduring a longer prison sentence. Here, Rhee pointed out, a woman’s reproductive rights became dangerously entangled in the machinery of law enforcement. The second example comes from academic research produced by the University of Chicago and Stanford University. According to the study in question, the researchers correlated the drop in crime rates in the 1990s with abortions by poor women of color. The study claimed that the rise in abortions by young, poor women of color during the 1970s had prevented the birth of unwanted children who would have gone on to commit crimes 15 to 25 years later. Rhee went on to speak about social-scientific studies that seek to project the potential for incarceration from various early indicators, such as fourth-grade reading levels. The role of academic research in the service of the prison industrial complex invites further critical analysis and engagement.
Rhee then cited some stark statistics: In the 1970s, there were 200,000 people behind bars in the United States. Currently, there are approximately 2 million people locked up. There are also 6.6 million people under the supervision of the criminal justice system, a number that reflects the ever-extending reach of the system itself and that also invites one to consider how many more people’s lives are therefore touched indirectly by that system. She went on to argue that the prison system is a failure, its failure reflected in the high levels of recidivism (according to the Department of Corrections, between 50 and 75 percent). The recidivism rate, Rhee argued, shows that parole and probation are a set-up for reincarceration. By contrast, the recidivism rate for alternative-to-incarceration programs, which are primarily community-based programs, is between 5 and 25 percent.
Thematized throughout her presentation was the recognition of the racialized dimensions of the prison industrial complex, the construction of African-American and Latino communities as criminalized communities. The racist impulses that drive law enforcement have intensified in a post-September 11 environment, drawing on the enforcement powers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the extended reach of law enforcement under the U.S.A. Patriot Act and, more recently, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. Rhee emphasized the stark parallels between the representations of “the criminal” and “the terrorist,” and the racialized character of both of these specters of “the enemy.” The so-called war on terror, according to Rhee, is simply an escalation of an already existing war against communities of color and immigrant communities.
Rhee closed with a rallying call to “stop the building of prisons.” But, as she pointed out, “If we are really going to talk about a world beyond prisons, society without prisons, we really have to think about the community strategies to build within and the community resources [for effective alternatives] so that we don’t always depend upon the police and the prisons. So that’s my last word.”
