The vanishing chance for prison and sentencing reform in Tennessee, and indeed the United States, is another foreseeable consequence of a society reaching the terminal stage of the diseases of racism and classism. What I can say with confidence is that we have learned that “the center does not hold.” And for those who have not yet reached that conclusion, you will.
The insurrection of love and community are most essential when the center does not hold. In many ways, the disintegration of democracy and the rise of fascism in America has been made possible by the normalization of, and our numbness to, prison. Those locked in cages must be their own radical activists, build their own inner communities of support and find ways to love each other. There is no great political party that has a caucus of support that is capable of changing anything in the near future. The men and women behind bars will long be dead or released after years of torture and torment before rational human beings understand that the ideology surrounding incarceration in the US is completely out of touch with reality and not politically prudent for elected members to cast one vote for any change.
The system of retribution, trauma, scarcity, and pain that is the American prison system, is not the logical conclusion of locking up “monsters” or “super predators,” rather it is designed to continue a system of enslavement that never ended, only transformed.
The product produced is not agricultural, it is human flesh and human labor. The reinvention of the plantation system
relies as it always has upon the othering and objectification of the peoples and communities trapped within that system, and it is a complete objectification and dehumanization of both guard and prisoner. This is why the rate of prison staff attrition is commonly over fifty percent. You simply can’t pay most people enough to sacrifice their humanity. The first step of course in ending this is amending the US Constitution and finishing the job of the Thirteenth Amendment, which currently as written does not accomplish the goal of the abolition of slavery; rather it simply carves out an exception to allow enslavement of those duly convicted of a crime. And as we have seen, this exception has swallowed entire communities. In Nashville, for instance, the North Nashville zip code 37208 has the highest rate of incarceration in the country. Over 400,000 Tennessee residents have been disenfranchised by felony voter laws; not a surprise when you consider that, proportionally speaking, Tennessee has the tenth highest rate of incarceration in the world. We are running out of time.
The questions were asked and answered while most of us slept. What would happen if we locked up a million people? What would happen if we locked up two million people? What would happen if we disenfranchised over six million citizens because they were convicted of a felony? What would happen if we built a wall on the border? What would happen if we separated immigrant families looking for a better life, and put two-year-olds in cages and sent them to court unaccompanied by a guardian? What would happen if states passed legislation dehumanizing and challenging the personhood of queer and trans folks? What would happen if the U.S. Capitol was subject to an attempted violent overthrow of the U.S. government by thousands of people fueled by a transparent lie? What if the Supreme Court overturned a right to privacy and the dominos of personal rights began to fall? What if Christian Nationalists and Fascist Christians became the political and theological identification of millions? The “what if” is now—ushered in by decades of numbness to a growing militarized police state and carceral enslavement.
The center does not hold. The “what ifs” are now “WTF.” Shelter in place.
