Dreisinger discusses history of U.S. mass incarceration

By Katherine Casarrubias

Baz Dreisinger said that the “modern day prison system” was invented by the United States and “exported” around the world. **Original image from Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress collection.**

Baz Dreisinger, an English professor at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was invited to Carnegie Mellon on Sept. 19 to deliver a talk on “Doing Transnational Justice: Lessons From Incarceration Nations Network.”

Dreisinger is the founder and executive director of the Incarceration Nations Network and prison abolitionist advocate. Her lecture, sponsored by the Dean’s Office at Dietrich College, aimed to help promote awareness and the significance of Carnegie Mellon’s Prison Education Project.

The United States established the modern day prison system and exported it globally. What were initially holding cells developed into prison systems, first established in the 19th century in the U.S. and eventually becoming the most prominent response to crime.

The first prisons in the U.S. were erected in New York and Pennsylvania and were expensive to build, having running water before the White House did. Due to the country’s dominance on a global scale, many of the ideologies surrounding incarceration and police practices were exported to other countries through colonial domination. “I have pulled up to prisons in Kigali, Rwanda, and I’m like, Wow, I’m in Philly,” she said.

Although she initially faced with pushback for her book “Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World,” Dreisinger saw people rallying behind the ideas presented in the book which eventually transformed into a movement.

The Incarceration Nations Network centers around instigating innovative prison reform methods through a network of 134 partner organizations in over 48 countries. Their goal is to not only reform the prison system in the U.S. but globally as well in order to undo the harm caused by mass incarceration.

Rather than punish incarcerated individuals, the organization seeks to educate them (through higher education courses) and support them by providing legal aid and community support. Dr. Dreisinger’s work encourages a pedagogical discourse surrounding innovative reformative methods for incarcerated individuals instead of the “tough on crime” mindset often heard in politics.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the recidivism rate in the U.S. is a staggering 82 percent, meaning 82 percent of incarcerated individuals are arrested (within the first 10 years) after their release. To Dreisinger, it is clear the prison system in the U.S. is not a system designed to make us feel safe, but rather is a criminogenic system aimed at pushing people towards crime later on upon release.

So why aren’t prisons working? It may have something to do with their nature of fostering division amongst communities and systemic inequality. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, 38.9 percent of prison inmates are black and 29.1 percent are hispanic.

At the same time, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty finds that Black men lacking a high school diploma have a 69 percent chance of being arrested before they turn 30, versus 35.7 percent for white men who didn’t finish high school. These statistics are behind why many believe in a prison system reform in the United States.

Dreisinger aimed to better understand prison systems by visiting prisons all over the world, when she first noticed many countries modeled their justice and prison systems after globally dominant nations, and while the U.S. may be to blame for the modern day prison, we are not the sole perpetrators of what she calls a “cut and paste system of justice.”

In spite of high temperatures in Kenya, members of the High Court in Kenya proudly don their woolwigs and red capes, lingering remnants of the British colonial dominance the country was once under. On the other side of the world, several Caribbean Islands practice British law not taking into consideration language barriers, cultural differences and population.

Dreisinger combats these issues by helping inmates access a higher education through a prison to college pipeline. For many inmates, education was not an option in the first place, so receiving it while they are serving is what she deems a “first chance.”

Connecting with individuals who are fighting a common enemy on an international level is another way she approaches the issue. She recounts the story of Maurice (a now good friend of hers) and how he managed to obtain his law degree from the University of London while in prison, which he then used to overturn his own death penalty.

Maurice now helps provide law degrees and paralegal training to inmates in Kenya, Uganda and Gambia through his organization Justice Defenders.

Carnegie Mellon’s Prison Education Project was initiated at the university after the murder of George Floyd as a way to combat race and class inequality in the United States.

Prison inmates at the Somerset State Correctional Institution are incredibly grateful for the courses offered to them by Carnegie Mellon’s Prison Education Project and often “put CMU students to shame in terms of preparation, in terms of engagement and in terms of a real willingness to apply themselves to the material,” according to Professor Goldman.

Since the Somerset State Correctional Institution does not allow cell phones into the building, Carnegie Mellon students are able to engage more with the students inside and learn about the experiences of others.