One clear mind

By any measure prison does not work, it does not deter people from re-offending or re-habilitate them - in fact it makes them more likely to commit more crimes. It is also inhumane, being associated with high levels of physical and psychological violence towards inmates and prison officers, with chronic levels of mental health, stress and trauma. 

So what is prison for? Angela Davis coined the term the ‘Prison Industrial Complex’ whereby  overlapping interests of government and industry use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as a means of economic gain and social and political control. Corporations and governments use prisons, not to rehabilitate incarcerated people, but rather to use prisoners for cheap labor and to perpetuate a vast criminal justice system which sustains certain classes in lucrative careers such as judges, lawyers and the police. Davis also argues that the government uses prisons to "disappear" people and essentially enslave them. It is a fact that a disproportionate percentage of the prison population is made up of Black men, Black women, and working class people. 

If you are poor, black or working class you are far more likely to go to prison, even for the same offences as a white middle class person. On top of that offences against people, such as corporate crime, where businesses allow people to die rather than withdraw a product, or bury that drugs have side effects, are often not even counted as crime and go unrecorded. There is a ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ with pervasive links between educational exclusion, social exclusion, and criminalisation. Many people in prison were labelled ‘troublemakers’ and ‘poor learners’ by teachers and subjected to interrupted learning. Almost nine out of ten boys (88%) in custody said that they have been excluded from school. Crucially, people from minority ethnic backgrounds, those who have been in care and those with neurodivrse conditions are overrepresented in both school exclusion figures and the criminal justice system.

Further more our current economic system is inherently criminogenic, in that it actively encourages crime, indeed needs it. It does this in several ways

• Exploitation is at the heart of the system, you are enouraged to rip off other people, politely called being ‘entrepenurial’.
• It encourages individuals to pursue self-interest before everything else. 
• It encourages competition over co-operation 
• It encourages us to treat other humans as commodities 
• It encourages us to want things we don’t need and can’t afford and to persue them
• It creates poverty and inequality, setting us against each other to fight for the few resources we are allowed
• Alienation and isolation are at the heart, making us lash out in frustration at each other.