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The aff is a minor reform which leaves the prison system intact—this perpetuates structural oppression and ongoing racial warfare—they divert attention from larger injustices

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Maya Schenwar (contributor). “What If We Abolished Prisons?” Alternet. November 13th, 2014. http://www.alternet.org/books/what-if-we-abolished-prisons

Shrinking: In a country where more than 7 million people are bound up in the “correctional” system, this is how many people working against incarceration frame their goal. You can’t pop this balloon with just one pin. Not everyone working to close Tamms was interested in abolishing all prisons, but many were. They were simply starting with one. Historian and activist Dan Berger points to the importance of such concrete change-making—closing buildings, reducing prison populations, slashing budgets, dismantling policies that confine people even after release—to the overall goal of freeing ourselves from the prison nation. He defines this movement as decarceration: “reform in pursuit of abolition.” The word “incarcerate” stems from the same root as the word “cancel”: Both mean to cross something, or someone, out (whether with bars, or lines, or actions). Decarceration, then, is also a movement toward un-canceling people—not just by fighting for their release, but by recognizing and supporting their humanity. The strategy that drove the Tamms Year Ten campaign was about making visible the lives of people who’d been “canceled” in the most extreme way. And Tamms was not the only place in which people in solitary confinement were finding ways to come together and speak out. In fall 2012, more than a year after they’d waged two three-week hunger strikes, prisoners in California’s Pelican Bay SHU announced a historic Agreement to End Hostilities, which was then signed and publicized by thousands of people inside and outside of prison, building a coalition across the state. It read, in part: Beginning on October 10, 2012, all hostilities between our racial groups ... in SHU, Ad-Seg, General Population, and County Jails, will officially cease. This means that from this date on, all racial group hostilities need to be at an end ... and if personal issues arise between individuals, people need to do all they can to exhaust all diplomatic means to settle such disputes; do not allow personal, individual issues to escalate into racial group issues.... Collectively, we are an empowered, mighty force, that can positively change this entire corrupt system..., and thereby, the public as a whole. Prisoners emphasized that their actions extended beyond a pursuit of reforms. They were challenging the prison nation’s assumption of—and instigation of—ongoing “racial warfare” behind bars, which is used to justify solitary confinement and other restrictive policies meant to isolate prisoners from each other. In June 2013, when prisoners in the Pelican Bay SHU waged a nonviolent hunger strike to demand better conditions and more opportunities to connect with people on the outside, building networks that fostered both action and visibility were key. Tens of thousands of California prisoners fasted in solidarity. An outside movement led by family members of the strikers rose up across the state and across the country to support the prisoners with letters, phone calls to the Department of Corrections, and rallies. The strike garnered unprecedented media attention, appearing in many major newspapers and on radio and television stations. Isaac Ontiveros of the prison abolitionist organization Critical Resistance tells me about the group’s participation in the strike: “They hollered at us before the strike and said, ‘We’re going to do this thing on the inside, and we need your support from the outside’.... They came up with solutions for how to resolve harm and conflict inside, without violence. They won some demands, but they also showed us—if it’s possible to do this in solitary, think of what’s possible for people in less restrictive conditions.” What’s more, many of the same arguments raised against the scourge of solitary can also be used against imprisonment itself, though with different connotations: Isolation, dehumanization, deprivation of contact, and violence are characteristics of incarceration everywhere. And as Isaac mentioned, the strikers’ actions—the historic commitment made through the Agreement to End Hostilities, and the project of coordinating nonviolent resistance despite enormous communication barriers—also point to exciting possibilities for resolving harm and conflict without (in fact, in spite of) law enforcement and prison. However, much media coverage reduced the strike’s significance to a protest against specific conditions alone, creating the illusion that prisons, and even solitary confinement, can be made “humane”—that they are fixable. Suddenly, mainstream voices were issuing calls to cease the “cruel and unusual punishment,” pointing to certain brutal practices as “out of the ordinary” modes of discipline. Of course, ameliorating conditions is always an important goal: It’s crucial, for example, to provide nutritious food and allow prisoners to call their families. But in framing these improvements as ends in themselves, the terms of “ordinary” punishment are solidified: Caging people is “usual,” so it’s fine! Additionally, small concessions are sometimes used to divert attention from larger ongoing injustices. Several months after the 2013 hunger strike, Dolores Canales of California Families to End Solitary Confinement noted in a MintPress News interview that, despite a few reforms implemented by the Department of Corrections—such as changes in criteria for placing people in SHUs—the basic picture hadn’t changed. “They can still use solitary indefinitely,” Canales said. “They don’t see a problem with it, with leaving somebody for thirty or forty years in their cell. They won’t acknowledge it’s a problem.” And so, doing decarceration-focused work means bearing in mind long-term impacts. For instance, California Families to Abolish Solitary Confinement sets ending the practice of isolation as its ultimate goal. And as the LGBTQ prison abolitionist group Black and Pink’s mission statement puts it, “Any advocacy, services, organizing and direct action we take will be sure to remove bricks from the system, not put in others we will need to abolish later.”

The alternative is to fight for a process of de-carceration—this is key to solidarity with prisoners who struggle for a world without prisons

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Angela Davis (professor emeritus at UC Santa Cruz). “Angela Davis on Prison Abolition, the War on Drugs and Why Social Movements Shouldn't Wait on Obama.” Interview with Amy Goodman. Democracy Now! March 6th, 2014. http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/6/angela_davis_on_prison_abolition_the

ANGELA DAVIS: Thank you, Amy. Thank you. Thank you, Juan. AMY GOODMAN: Do you sense progress? ANGELA DAVIS: Well, yes. I think that this is a pivotal moment. There are openings. And I think it’s very important to point out that people have been struggling over these issues for years and for decades. This is also a problematic moment. And those of us who identify as prison abolitionists, as opposed to prison reformers, make the point that oftentimes reforms create situations where mass incarceration becomes even more entrenched; and so, therefore, we have to think about what in the long run will produce decarceration, fewer people behind bars, and hopefully, eventually, in the future, the possibility of imagining a landscape without prisons, where other means are used to address issues of harm, where social problems, such as illiteracy and poverty, do not lead vast numbers of people along a trajectory that leads to prison. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’m wondering, in term—the first term of President Obama was often referred to by some through the myth of post-racial America, represented by the election of President Obama. But even he has shied away, until recently, dealing with some of the racial inequities of our system, especially the prison system. I’m wondering if you can see a movement or transformation in the president himself in how he deals with some of these issues? ANGELA DAVIS: Well, this is his second term. He really has nothing to lose. And it really is about time that he began to address what is one of the most critical issues in this country. It’s pretty unfortunate that Obama has waited until now to speak out, but it’s good that he is speaking out. And I think we can use this opportunity to perhaps achieve some important victories. AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean, Angela, the difference between being a prison abolitionist, how you describe yourself, and a prison reformer. ANGELA DAVIS: Well, of course, in 1977, when the Attica rebellion took place, that was a really important moment in the history of mass incarceration, the history of the prison in this country. The prisoners who were the spokespeople for the uprising indicated that they were struggling for a world without prisons. During the 1970s, the notion of prison abolition became very important. And as a matter of fact, public intellectuals, judges, journalists took it very seriously and began to think about alternatives. However, in the 1980s, with the dismantling of social services, structural adjustment in the Global South, the rise of global capitalism, we began to see the prison emerging as a major institution to address the problems that were produced by the deindustrialization, lack of jobs, less funding into education, lack of education, the closedown of systems that were designed to assist people who had mental and emotional problems. And now, of course, the prison system is also a psychiatric facility. I always point out that the largest psychiatric facilities in the country are Rikers Island in New York and Cook County in Chicago. So, the question is: How does one address the needs of prisoners by instituting reforms that are not going to create a stronger prison system? Now there are something like two-and-a-half million people behind bars, if one counts all of the various aspects of what we call the prison-industrial complex, including military prisons, jails in Indian country, state and federal prisons, county jails, immigrant detention facilities—which constitute the fastest-growing sector of the prison-industrial complex. Yeah, so how—the question is: How do we respond to the needs of those who are inside, and at the same time begin a process of decarceration that will allow us to end this reliance on imprisonment as a default method of addressing—not addressing, really—major social problems?

Solidarity is vital to an effective movement—we need to acknowledge that prisons cause more harm than good

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Marisol LeBrón. “Oscar López Rivera and the Case for Prison Abolition.” La Respuesta. October 7th, 2014. http://larespuestamedia.com/olr-prison-abolition/

López Rivera’s incarceration for the crime of anti-colonial resistance makes particularly clear the ways in which imprisonment has always functioned to guarantee the freedom of some through the violent exclusion of those constructed as outside the bounds of normative citizenship. The work of prison abolition asks us to expand our thinking beyond categories of deserving and undeserving and instead acknowledge that prisons cause more harm than good and ultimately do not solve the social, economic, and political crises that create the conditions that push people to engage in criminalized activities in the first place. Ultimately, abolitionist thinking challenges us to recognize that if we want a more just world we must work towards dismantling institutions that quite literally cement inequality and create a terrain of uneven freedom. As we continue to exert pressure on the United States government to free Oscar López Rivera we must also undertake the difficult work of reconsidering how we think about prisons and punishment within the Puerto Rican community. We must ask ourselves, particularly as people who have routinely been denied our right to self-determination, if we are comfortable allowing others to have their personal freedom denied or limited. What would it take for us to not just advocate for the freedom of Oscar López Rivera – to recognize and affirm his dignity, humanity, and right to exist within society – but to work towards the freedom of all our brothers and sisters locked in cages away from their family, friends, and communities? Oscar López’s principled refusal to stop resisting from the inside should inspire those of us on the outside to fight in solidarity with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people to free all and not just some of us.