TRANSCRIPT
SFX: Door to prison opens slowly, creaking
Rachel: I want to take you somewhere.
SFX: Sound of walking down echo-y, quiet hallway, keys jangling
Rachel: You might not have been here before, but some things will seem familiar.
SFX: Open cell door
Rachel: It’s a place you’ve probably always been aware of, but you never wanted to end up.
Rachel: Prison.
SFX: Cell door closes
Rachel: But have you ever stopped to think: What’s the purpose of this place?
Rachel: Is it… retribution?
Ashley: Punishment for punishment’s sake. Somebody deserves to be punished for the wrong that they’ve committed.
Rachel: Deterrence?
Ashley: Basically scare people so they no longer want to commit crime or that other people watching don’t want to commit crime.
Rachel: Incapacitation?
Ashley: Removing the person’s ability to commit crime, in this case by taking them out of society.
Rachel: Or rehabilitation?
Ashley: Trying to figure out what is, quote, wrong with the person and then trying to again, quote, fix them by giving them whatever tools it is that they need to not want to commit crime in the future.
Who are prisons actually there to serve? And, in any case, what’s the alternative?
Rachel: I’m Rachel Stewart and this is Don’t Drink the Milk, the curious history of things. Today producer Charli and I are on the trail of prisons. When did we start locking people up? And is it time for a jailbreak?
JINGLE
Ashley: In general, I’ve always been kind of afraid of institutions. And so like, even now when I go to Eastern State Penitentiary, which is where my first book is based, it’s that same sort of feeling, of just like ‘oh my god, this place gives me the creeps’. I’m in awe of it but I’m also like, ahhhhhhh! Heebie jeebies.
Charli: Even though real-life prisons might freak Ashley Rubin out, she’s spent a large chunk of her life studying them. Ever since her first class on the history of crime and punishment in her sophomore year of university.
Ashley: I’m a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I’m in the Department of Sociology.
Before she became a walking encyclopedia for prisons, Ashley assumed they’d just been a feature of society since time immemorial.
In fact, before bed as a child she used to pray that all bad people go to prison… Because that just seemed like the obvious place for them to go.
Ashley: So like everybody else, I thought prisons were something that we just always had.
But. We haven’t.
Ashley: The very first prison was Massachusetts in 1785, followed by Connecticut in 1790 and Pennsylvania in 1794.
Charli: We had been locking people up for centuries before this, yes, but not always in prisons. Because jail and prison are kinda different. Basically… jails are supposed to be short term. And prisons…
Ashley: I define prisons as places where we punish people convicted of usually serious crimes, but definitely crimes, for long periods of time.
And if you use that definition, then basically prisons emerged about after the American and French revolutions, and especially in the United States after the American Revolution.
Charli: There is actually some emerging research that ancient Rome had prisons too. But for whatever reason, they didn’t last, and for most of western history, putting people away for long periods of time wasn’t used as a punishment. But, as we know, life back then was hardly a picnic, so, what did they do?
Ashley: Corporal and capital punishment were kind of the dominant forms of punishment.
Charli: Corporal punishment being painful physical stuff and capital punishment being execution of some kind.
Ashley: So capital punishment in the American colonies and then in the new United States, the dominant form was hanging. In other places, especially in Europe, you could get much more torturous based punishments, including things like boiling, burning, stoning to death, like being crushed under stones, like really gruesome executions.
Charli: Then when it came to the corporal stuff – it wasn’t as fatal, but it certainly got gruesome too.
Ashley: Branding and whipping were common corporal punishments, as was time spent in the pillory or the stocks, which are these wooden devices where your head would be kind of embedded between two boards along with your hands. And in some cases, your feet would be in a separate set of boards. So either you’d be forced to stand or forced to sit. And you’d be essentially in the town square, being exposed to the derision of, you know, whoever wanted to stop by and make fun of you, maybe throw fruit at you or stones. So those were our main forms of punishment. Oh also cutting off hands, ears…
Charli: It sounds pretty extreme. But in many ways, Ashley says, life back then was extreme.
Ashley: Life was a lot more violent and fatal for people at the time. It was also pretty normalized… this is just what you do. The same way that, you know, prison is kind of normal to us today.
Charli: Nonetheless, more and more people weren’t ok with it.
Ashley: Over time, people did increasingly start having problems with these punishments and start to be uncomfortable with it, partly because religious ideas were changing, partly because the Enlightenment happened, partly because our ideas about our rights and our relationship to the state was also changing…
Charli: Religion, the Enlightenment, the novel idea of human rights — all these things were an important part of paving the way for a new system of punishment to emerge.
Ashley: So, on the one hand, you have this growing concern about capital and corporal punishment for a variety of reasons, humanitarian reasons but also kind of practical concerns. Jurors and in some cases judges and in some cases private prosecutors were less comfortable bringing these cases or finding somebody guilty or insisting on the case in the first place because they thought, well, you know, the crime was just a property crime, or it was kind of a minor crime or this is the person’s first offense. I really don’t want them to get executed for this.
Charli: People increasingly started to feel that killing someone for stealing, or breaking and entering, or not paying a debt was kind of… an overreaction. And if it was supposed to deter other people from committing crime, well, that wasn’t working either.
Ashley: As much as it might work on people who would otherwise be law-abiding people, a lot of times the people who are not law-abiding, it’s not going to work on them. They’re committing crimes that are not really about, like, you know, rational cost benefit analysis – of ‘if I do this, I will get this really bad punishment’. So, you have a lot of people saying our punishments don’t work.
Charli: There was also a growing chorus of dissatisfaction with jails. ‘Cause remember, jails did exist – for short-term stints. Everyone was thrown in together in jails, young and old, so people used to call them “schools of vice” — where youngins could learn the tricks of the trade from seasoned crims. They were also usually privately owned and prone to corruption. Plus, jails tended to be extremely dirty and unsanitary — basically, big gross dungeons of disease.
Ashley: And so there’s this big movement to reform the jails.
Charli: The people who didn’t like capital and corporal punishment for various reasons and people who thought jails were doing more harm than good to society…
Ashley: They basically came together and kind of said, like, well, here’s, you know, here’s a solution.
Charli: Enter: long term confinement in purpose-built prisons.
Which, weirdly enough, greatly excited a great many people.
Ashley: So one big aspect of early prisons was that people could tour the prisons. So especially the first generation prisons that emerged in the 1780s, 1790s, they became tourist attractions. So like you would buy tickets to go in and you could see these facilities because they were seen as these like modern marvels, these wonderful enlightenment innovations.
But — even back then, not everyone was convinced.
Ashley: There was a lot of concern about what happens when you put people in prisons behind closed doors.
People would no longer be punished for their crimes in public. Behind closed doors, it might be too harsh, it might not be harsh enough; either way, it was seen as undemocratic, (and some people were scared about how the authorities might abuse this system).
Plus, people were asking: what’s actually crueler and more extreme? Whipping people, branding them, killing them, or… locking them away in a prison?
Ashley: …some people worried that the prison was more extreme than capital punishment, which is of course a, you know, debate that continues today.
Rachel: Of course, a couple of centuries later, neither capital, nor corporal punishment have entirely disappeared. More than 50 countries still have the death penalty. But prison as a punishment has well and truly gone global. Every single country has a prison system. And around 11.5 million people are currently incarcerated around the world. But their realities look very different…
TikTok montage
This prison is designed to hold the most dangerous criminals and extreme security threats. It’s nicknamed the Alcatraz of the Rockies. @psychobrainy
Welcome to Bang Kwang Central prison, Thailand’s toughest jail. @GeoFactsAi
Charli: People still seem to be fascinated by prison — especially the different conditions in countries around the world.
TikTok montage
So how was prison in Dubai? My biggest issue with the jail and the prison is that it is not sanitary whatsoever. @broseph_lopez
And it felt like it was 50 degrees in that cell. You know, the lights never get turned off. @mamamiatruecrime
In Japan, prisoners follow an extremely strict schedule that starts at 6:45 a.m. and ends at 9 p.m. @lawbymike
Charli: On one end of the spectrum, there are the supermax security mega prisons you have in places like El Salvador – where more people are imprisoned per capita than anywhere else in the world. 40,000 men in one prison complex, 80 of them crammed into one cell, forced to sleep on metal bunk beds without sheets, pillows or mattresses, and subject to either artificial light 24/7 or complete darkness in solitary confinement. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have the ‘open prisons’ made famous by Scandinavian countries like Norway.
TikTok montage
These are all prison cells in different Nordic countries. They are nice, clean and tight. I could imagine living there myself. @emad.akash
Charli: People inside aren’t hemmed in behind barbed wire fences. They can garden, cook with real knives, have jobs, hobbies, and (take part in) comprehensive rehab programs.
Rachel: There’s a fair bit in between of course, but in general it’s fair to say the state of global incarceration is not good. From England, Belgium and France, to Cyprus, Sri Lanka and the Congo, prisons far and wide struggle with overcrowding and understaffing. Most prisons are places of endemic violence, substance abuse, poor mental health, and chronic disease.
Charli: They’re also sites of stark racial inequality. In Australia, First Nations people make up 33% of the prison population, even though they only make up 3% of the general population.
Move on over to the US — the birthplace of the modern prison — and things are not much better. Black people are incarcerated at a rate nearly 5 times that of white people. It’s also home to the world’s largest prison population — there are nearly two million people locked up in the US. Which costs American taxpayers billions of dollars every year.
Rachel: And if one of the main goals is to ‘reform people’, the return on that investment is pretty low. In the US, the latest stats show that 66% of people released from prison are rearrested within three years, and a massive 82% are rearrested within a decade.
Omari Amili: You’re pushed out of school and prepared for a life of incarceration. Prison is going to be in your future. And they started by removing you from your peers, getting kicked out of class, getting suspended, expelled. And a lot of kids who are suspended or expelled, they have a lot more time on their hands to be up to no good. So it kind of just kills your self-esteem, your motivation, your drive, and lets you know, look, I’m no good. I’m not meant to be a normal part of society.
Charli: Omari Amili was one of many young Black boys to end up in the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline.” He grew up in poverty in Washington State…
Omari: We were living on welfare, you know, just trying to get by the way we could, kind of trapped in survival mode.
Charli: He cycled through 15 different schools, through foster homes, and homeless shelters. He grew up with three of his five sisters and his mum and dad, like most adults in his life, were hooked on crack cocaine.
Omari: Whether it was their friends or aunties, uncles, I was just surrounded by kids who weren’t quite being cared for due to their parents’ addiction to crack cocaine.
It was rough. It was rough for me growing up and I had to engage in activities to support myself that no young kid really should have to do.
SFX police siren
Charli: Activities like shoplifting, for clothes, for food – things that were often lacking at home. Eventually, at the age of 21, once Omari had two kids of his own, he found a way to make money fast —
Omari: I didn’t really know what crime I was committing, but I knew it was illegal. I knew what I was doing wasn’t right.
Bank fraud.
Omari: I looked at it like, my victim’s the bank, they got all kinds of money. So I didn’t really look at it like I was harming people… And I thought that it was my way out of my circumstances.
Charli: Instead of setting him free from the poverty, addiction and neglect of his upbringing though, it sent him to prison. Omari/he spent almost 2 years behind bars.
Omari: It’s the worst environment you can imagine. You’re stuck, you can’t leave, you can’t see your family, can’t hug your mom, you can’t hug your kids, you’re eating the worst food in the world. There’s just constant worries about your safety and well-being. You never know what’s going to happen inside of there. So you’re kind of on edge, feel like you’ve got to protect yourself. Like prison was horrible, just like it’s designed to be.
Charli Omari remembers feeling bored, scared and depressed. There was an “us-versus-them” mentality between guards and the people incarcerated, and there was little talk of wellbeing and rehabilitation.
Omari: I don’t feel like I was treated like a human being at any stage.
They put negative labels on folks like criminal, convict, felon, murderer, rapist, thief, you know, all these things because then they can justify the things that they do to you. If they look at you as a human being, it’s hard to justify putting someone in a cage and telling them you can only come out one hour a day and you you don’t have access to showers every day. We’re going to take your visits away from you, going to take your phone calls away from you, where you just have no communication with the outside world or your family. Like it’s hard to do that to people that you see as human beings.
Rachel: This is one person’s experience inside, in the place where modern day prisons were invented. But… – is there a way to do prisons without stripping people of their humanity? After the break this question takes us to the other side of the Atlantic.
TRAILER – Past, Present, Future
Sound: Walking along a winding path, leaves crunching beneath our feet
Charli: Ok, we’re nearly there.
Rachel: It’s weird that we’re walking into the woods…
Charli: To a prison, yeah. And it’s dark and cold. Are you getting penal vibes yet?
Sound of a bike
Rachel: Haha. There’s some bars on the windows upstairs…Well, this is the fanciest prison I’ve ever seen.
Charli: It is indeed fancy.
Sound entering hotel
Charli: Hi. We’re looking for The Fallon? Oh we’re in right place. Great. Thank you. The booking is for Charli Shield.
Rachel: Yep, you heard that right, we are checking in… to prison. Well sort of. The Fallon Hotel in Alkmaar in the Netherlands used to be the Schutterswei prison, which closed in 2013. Some of the hotel rooms have original cell doors. The pipes running along the corridors and bars on the windows give it that authentic feel. And apparently, one of the country’s most notorious criminals was imprisoned right here.
Sound up stairs
Rachel: What was his name?
Charli: So his name was Willem Frederik Holleeder. He was a Dutch gangster.
Rachel: Ooh.
Charli: So he was sentenced to 11 years imprisonment for his involvement in the kidnapping of… Heineken president, Freddie Heineken, for a 35 million golden ransom.
Rachel: As in the beer company?
Charli: I think so.
Rachel: This is like such a Dutch story.
Charli: Haha that’s true.
Rachel: This is not even the only prison hotel in the Netherlands. Many old prison buildings have been repurposed here – as hotels, cultural centers or temporary accommodation for asylum seekers. Some of the buildings are actually pretty cool!
One reason for shutting down the old prisons was simply an effort to modernize and streamline facilities. Older, smaller buildings are less efficient to run. But there was another reason, too.
News headlines
The Dutch prison crisis: A shortage of prisoners
Criminal Shortage Leads To Near-Empty Prisons In This European Country
Why are there so few prisoners in the Netherlands?
Rachel: The Netherlands is one of the few countries worldwide to see prison populations fall in recent years. Between 2005 and 2016 prison rates dropped by nearly 50%! It has since increased slightly, but remains comparatively very low. So while other countries have prisons filled way over capacity, how did this small nation in northwest Europe buck the trend?
Well, crime rates did fall in the country too. But there’s more to it than that. How you actually define crime will affect how many people end up behind bars. Take drugs for example – the Netherlands has some of the most relaxed laws on drug possession in the world. So someone who would end up in prison in, say, the US, might not end up in prison in the Netherlands.
Then, once you’ve defined the crime, you settle on a suitable punishment. In the Netherlands, that’s often meant community service or a fine rather than prison time. And where prison time has been handed out, the sentences have traditionally been pretty short. Hence fewer people locked up at any one time.
Sound hotel
Back at the old prison hotel, we find out we’re not the only ones here who are really interested in this hotel’s former identity. We spot several Dutch tour groups being taken around the grounds.
Sound hotel tour groups
Edith: I don’t understand that they’re doing it. When I go to a hotel, I go to a nice hotel with a bubble bath and something like that. Not like this. But I understand that normal people, they never come in this world. That’s exciting for them, but not for me, of course.
Edith Levering is one of the tour guides here. She tells us she’d much rather stay in a hotel with bubble bath, rather than a renovated old prison like this one. That’s because she actually used to work at here when it really was a prison… She’s also worked in many other prisons around the country, as a social worker. And she thinks that Dutch people often have a rose-tinted view of what it’s like to be incarcerated in their country.
Edith: They think it’s like a hotel — you get your food, get your clothes, get your everything but that isn’t because you … cannot say anything about your own will. You cannot open your own door. You cannot go outside when you want… You sit and wait. That makes you, I don’t know the word. … Afhankelijk… Complete afhankelijk.
Rachel: We looked that word up, it means ‘dependent’. There’s very little free will when you’re locked up – that’s kind of the point. Prison, even in the Netherlands, is no hotel.
Sound meeting Esther
We’ve come to the Criminology department of Leiden University, about an hour from Amsterdam, to meet with Esther van Ginneken. She spends a lot of time in Dutch prisons.
Charli: How many have you visited?
Esther: I’ve visited all the prisons in the Netherlands.
Rachel: What’s your favourite?
Esther *laughs*
She researches what she calls the prison “climate” – basically the conditions and atmosphere, what life is like for the people incarcerated there.
As we know, there’s a big spectrum of what life on the inside looks like around the world. So what might we actually expect inside a Dutch prison cell?
Esther: Yeah, it has two beds. Then there’s a shower in the cell as well. In many facilities these days, everyone has their own phone in the cell. and there’s always a desk with chairs sometimes like a microwave and sometimes a kettle to boil water. Then they sometimes decorate their cells in very nice ways and they can have a bird in their cell.
Charli: A bird?
Esther: A bird.
Charli: That’s their only pet?
Esther van Ginneken: I’m wondering if they’re allowed to have fish, but I’ve only seen birds.
Esther van Ginneken: I think the Netherlands is probably known to have a pretty humane prison system… which probably has to do with the good relationships that people incarcerated tend to have with staff, for example. So staff… are very enthusiastic and passionate about their jobs. And so I do also come away from prisons often feeling inspired and grateful that we have people working in these prisons that actually feel so strongly about making the day a bit better for people who are incarcerated there.
One potential function of prison is “rehabilitation,” and Dutch prisons take this pretty seriously, offering counseling, education opportunities, vocational training – basically preparing people for life after prison. The idea is that this will benefit both them and society.
Esther van Ginneken: I think actually prison can be an important ground for change also sometimes for positive societal change because – well it’s funny to say maybe, but it’s a captive audience in a way. It’s sometimes when people have very chaotic lives on the outside, actually prison can offer that opportunity for change because people are less distracted.
For people with substance abuse problems, those in abusive relationships, or caught up in a life of crime, Esther believes that prison – at least Dutch prison – can kind of break the cycle.
Esther: Prison, in a sense, can make it easier to reach those people to proactively provide that help. So I think if we see prison maybe as more of a societal responsibility to repair some of the problems that, you know, maybe inadequate systems have sometimes caused, or sometimes it can be due to family circumstances that people have ended up on the margins of society. We should see it as our responsibility to pull back people into society.
Measuring the “success” of rehabilitation is really difficult. Prison populations have gone down here, but reconviction rates haven’t changed drastically – they’re around 45% in the first 2 years after release. But Esther told us that she got to know many people who did personally benefit from the opportunities offered to them in prison.
However, something’s changing in the Netherlands.
News Headline
Dutch society and politics have seen a strong swing to the right. And Esther says this is already having an impact on their prison system.
Esther van Ginneken: Yes, I think the relationship between sort of the more right wing populism and the demand for more punitive sentencing, it kind of goes hand in hand, right? Because it’s traditionally something that is claimed by the right wing, sort of more law and order, more stricter sentencing, so that’s very much a sort of trend, both in the politics and in the public domain.
As the political landscape changes, sentencing is increasing. Recently, Dutch prisons have also been struggling with staff shortages, which means people incarcerated there are cooped for more hours of the day.
Charli: So, Dutch prisons might be more humane than most and have a stronger focus on welfare, but they are not immune to problems. That goes for prison systems in Scandinavia, too — you know the ones in countries like Norway and in Finland, famed for being free-range and all-inclusive.
Ashley: There’s a lot of misunderstanding about how those prisons work and even how they work in their own country. And also like what’s necessary for them to work.
Prison history sociologist Ashley Rubin says that, despite of all the positive press, these more progressive ‘open prisons’ where people are given more freedom aren’t as common as you might think.
Ashley: The open prison model is actually a minority within these countries. It’s the one that gets a lot of attention. So a lot of times there are documentaries that focus on these differences, that’s not the model prison in these countries. That’s basically a low security prison. They still have high security prisons. They actually have supermax prisons just like we do.
And in any case, this isn’t some straightforward, one size fits all prison system.
First of all, a big part of the reason why some countries have successfully built some kinder looking prisons, is because traditionally their societies looked different than bigger, more diverse countries like the US.
Ashley: Their demographics are very different from ours… People are much more likely to support, kind of lenient, kind of liberal seeming punishments, when they think that the person experiencing the punishment is somebody like them. Oftentimes that means demographically like them, culturally like them and so on. And a lot of times people are not comfortable with that when it’s somebody who’s seen as an ‘Other’.
If you can see yourself in prison – you’re more likely to want the conditions to be better.
Ashley: The Scandinavian style prisons work really well in Scandinavian countries where they’re oftentimes targeted towards people who look like the stereotypical version of a Scandinavian person. As the immigrant population increases, especially the immigrant community of color and especially Muslim heritage people, that increasingly is making people more kind of oppositional towards these punishments. And so that’s becoming a problem.
Rachel: As Scandinavian countries also deal with changing demographics and politics, they’re beginning to struggle more with issues like overcrowding and public pressure for harsher sentencing.
Charli: But these nations do tend to have lower crime rates… and that’s where people can get confused.
Ashley: So people think we can just transplant these prisons in(to) the United States and suddenly it’s going to fix, you know, our crime problem. There are so many layers of misunderstanding about why that’s not going to work. And inevitably people are going to be disappointed.
That’s because a better resourced prison is also not a ticket to ‘solving crime’ Ashley says.
Ashley: There are a lot of things we could be doing to reduce crime that basically have nothing to do with punishment. There are other things like just social policies. And a lot of times these are things that they do in a lot of Northern European countries where we look at their punishment system and we say, oh, like their punishment system is so effective, but it’s actually, it’s not their punishment system. It’s their social system.
Charli: Social policies like healthcare, child support, affordable education, a decent minimum wage, mental health support, and stable housing – basically, providing a strong social safety net that makes life easier for people. And harder for them to fall through the cracks if they’re born into disadvantage. Policies that countries in northern Europe, like the The Netherlands, Norway and Finland tend to have in spades. And that the US has long struggled to realize.
Ashley: All of these things are actually pretty effective at reducing crime. It’s just there are things that, at least in the United States, a lot of people don’t necessarily see the value of doing, or they don’t like the idea of just giving things out kind of ‘undeserved’. But at the end of the day, it’s actually in our self-interest to do these things because it would make us so much safer from crime.
Charli: There’s also another, more radical argument for why prisons aren’t helping make societies safer. And that is: they were never supposed to.
Erica: Prisons are functioning exactly as designed, right?
Charli: Erica Meiners is a writer, an organizer, and a professor – of educational policy and gender studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. And, she’s a prison abolitionist.
Erica: …I have been working for about 20 odd years, 25 years, 30 years – when you’re old, the years fade away! As as an abolitionist.
Charli: Erica thinks the problem with prison is more than it being a ‘broken system’, or just an ineffective way to reduce crime.
Erica: It doesn’t act as a deterrent, it’s not a public safety strategy. And at the same time, I would argue, and many would argue, that actually prisons and the criminal legal system and this “tough on crime” framework is actually functioning precisely as designed, to kind of support an economic, racial, social, political agenda.
Charli: Many people, including Erica, argue that prison and policing in the US are not fundamentally about protecting society, but about social control. That, historically, they’ve purposely been used to dehumanize and take away freedoms from certain groups of people. People who might challenge the status quo – like Black people and people who are poor.
Charli: And this starts with what we even consider to be a ‘crime’.
Erica Meiners: Not everything that is criminalized is harmful or violent and not everything that is violent or harmful in our lives is criminalized… We all want stronger and safer classrooms, neighborhoods, houses. And the project of criminalization of state kind of force deciding what counts as harm has often worked against that.
Charli: Erica points to a history of racist laws and discriminatory policing in the US.
Erica: We have histories of the black codes, for example, or laws that specifically targeted and criminalized black folks, you know, for things that, you know, other, that white folks could do, whether it was curfews or loitering, right? We still have charges of things like lewd and lascivious behavior charges levied against LGBTQ people for making out in public, right? Those same laws would be not levied against non-heterosexual, non-queer people.
Charli: There were also laws criminalizing Black people for gathering after dark and for selling crops without permission from a white person. These codes were taken away with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But, then… Erica says, mass incarceration ramped up.
Erica: We engaged in a prison expansion building project in the United States at a precise moment when there was a deep backlash against the limited gains of Black Power movements.
Charli: After the revolutionary Black Power movement of the 1960s and 70s… The US went from building four prisons per year in rural America to 16 per year in the 1980s and 25 per year in the 1990s.
Erica: Those prisons situated in rural communities weren’t situated there accidentally. It wasn’t like somebody had a dartboard and was like, oh this is where we should build a prison. It wasn’t that that was arbitrary or just kind of a whim decision, but that was something that rural communities, downstate communities wanted. That was something that white communities wanted – an expansion of police forces. Because of fears of “social unrest” and you know “social unrest” — a code word for communities of color demanding equal access to services and full humanity.
Clip Nixon “Won’t you join me here, won’t you be seated ladies and gentlemen…
Charli: One key tool used to target Black people and incarcerate them has been the War On Drugs.
Clip Nixon: I would like to summarize for you the meeting I just had with the bipartisan leaders…
Charli: Which first took off in the early 1970s under President Nixon.
Clip Nixon “I started the meeting by making this statement that i think needs to be made to the nation: America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy it is necessary to wage a new all out offensive…”
Charli: One of Nixon’s top advisors later described it as a political tool to fight “Blacks and hippies”. And, it worked. In 1970, the Black incarceration rate was 600 people per 100,000. By the year 2000, that figure had tripled .
Rachel: Nowadays, the stats show an equal rate of drug use among Black and white Americans. But, Black people are nearly six times more likely to be incarcerated for drug-related offenses.
Rachel: The fallout of the War On Drugs has been devastating and far-reaching, and it’ll be felt for generations to come. Omari Amili tells us his own family was directly impacted.
Omari: The war on drugs was actually a war on black people…They weren’t fighting the drugs and addiction and trying to get rid of it. What they were doing was they were locking away a bunch of people. So the introduction of crack cocaine, it deteriorated households and it led to a rise in the prison population.
Rachel: The way Omari sees it, mass incarceration is essentially a way to pick up where slavery left off. Today, America’s 13th Amendment forbids slavery, except as a criminal punishment.
Omari: Once slavery ended here in this country, incarceration was a way to get people back into slavery. Like, slavery was abolished in America, but not fully. There’s people developing a lot of commercial products, license plates, furniture. To me, that’s what it’s all about. That’s what mass incarceration was all about, is exploiting that loophole in the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery and re-enslaving people. This isn’t happening to like suburban white kids. It’s happening to inner city black and brown kids.
Charli: There’s this term a lot of people like Erica use that touches on this idea of prison being a business of sorts: the ‘prison industrial complex’ it’s called. It’s the idea that prison’ does not address societal problems – but it’s become such an enormous money-making entity for so many industries and businesses and political groups, that they now have a vested interest in keeping those prisons full.
Charli: So what if… we had a world without this? What if we got rid of prisons?
Charli: There’s a whole movement for prison abolition, and it’s got a long history. It essentially opposes the idea that prison should be an inevitable, permanent feature of society. Prison abolition means different things to different people, but generally it’s more complicated than simply freeing all incarcerated people and shutting down all prisons tomorrow. For Erica, it’s kind of a philosophy about how to reduce the NEED for prisons. How to reimagine what we’re doing from all angles to create a safer place to live.
Erica: Abolition is simply, you know, what do we need to dismantle, get rid of, but what do we need to build? And I think there’s this idea that abolition is some far-flung horizon or some utopian pipe dream. But instead, I think it’s the practice that we engage in every day as we work to try to build stronger and safer communities. We work to try to dismantle the policies that are harmful. We work to try to change our own internalized logics about what makes us stronger and safer and also what we build on our block, in our families, how we parent differently, how we respond to conflict and harm differently, how we build… more free lives for all where no one is seen as disposable.
Rachel: Omari Amili managed to break free of the cycle. Once he got out of prison, he stayed out.
Omari: Knowing I had children, I didn’t want to go back to prison. I didn’t want to abandon them and neglect them, like what had been done to me repeatedly and like what I had done to them when I had been incarcerated. So I chose education…
Rachel: Now he works with young people coming out of the prison system, trying to help them onto a similar path. While he’s not sure exactly what the right alternative would be – he is sure that the prison system we’ve got is not the answer.
Omari: The role of prison is to punish… to remove you from society, to disrupt. And just having that background, the conviction history, to do even more damage once you released from prison. So not only are we gonna punish you by incarcerating you, when you release, we’re gonna make sure it’s gonna be hard to find a house, it’s gonna be hard to find a job, it’s gonna be hard to reintegrate back into society.
Omari: I hear some people who say, look, I needed to be removed from society in order to get clean and sober and to be removed from negative peer groups. But I always challenge them like what else could have been done? Where else could you have gone where you can get clean and sober and be removed from these peer groups? I just hate to have anyone give prison credit for what they’ve accomplished.
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Rachel: Back in the Netherlands, Esther van Ginneken believes we should avoid imprisonment wherever possible.
Esther van Ginneken: I think it’s always worthwhile searching for alternatives that are less disruptive. Because imprisonment very often is very disruptive. People lose their jobs, lose their housing, children lose their parents because they temporarily go to prison… so if those things can be avoided I would be in favor of it. But sometimes we think a prison sentence is the only appropriate sentence. And in that case, I think it’s at least good to try and minimize all those harmful effects that imprisonment can have and to recognize that the incarceration itself, taking away people’s liberty, autonomy to a great extent – that is the punishment. And we should try to minimize and actually repair many of the other harmful effects of imprisonment but also repair the factors that can contribute to a person’s offending that maybe we as society bear a bit of responsibility for as well.
Charli: Ashley Rubin wouldn’t describe herself as a prison abolitionist, but she does wonder, after so many decades of research showing all the ways in which prisons fail us, why we’re still using them.
Ashley: We just keep trying the same thing over and over again and we keep thinking the outcome is going to be different. In part because we just always ask the prison to do too much. It’s a limited facility and we have to understand that it can only do certain things. And so one of the things I try to do in my research is really kind of move the conversation away from punishment because basically we’ve tried all of this before. We have a lot of the same goals over and over again and they keep failing in pretty much predictable ways.
This episode of Don’t Drink the Milk was produced by Charli Shield. It was edited by Sam Baker and fact checked by Julia Rose. I’m your host Rachel Stewart. And this was our last episode of Season 2! From witch hunts to prisons with a few cheerier topics in between – thank you so much for joining us on these fun historical road trips! If you’ve left us a review or shared us with a friend, please know you are forever in our hearts. Send us your requests for future topics to dontdrinkthemilk@dw.com – no apostrophe. Xoxo, your podcast buddies.
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