by Isaac Ontiveros and Amy Vanderwarker

When Critical Resistance decided to host a 10th Anniversary conference, it was clear to all involved that it would not be just a conference. A three-day convening will be held in Oakland from September 26-28, but this event will be the culmination of a two-year organizing project. At its heart, the entire effort is an attempt to engage allies from all political spectrums in a collective effort to assess the movement to abolish the prison industrial complex, generate new strategies and invigorate the movement so we can see our visions of a world without prisons realized.

What is the Prison Industrial Complex?
The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a system situated at the intersection of governmental and private interests that uses prisons, policing, and surveillance as solutions to social, political, and economic problems. The PIC depends upon the oppressive systems of racism, classism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. It includes human rights violations, the death penalty, industry and labor issues, policing, courts, media, community powerlessness, the imprisonment of political prisoners and the halting of dissent.

To fully describe the PIC, we have to look at the big picture of how it functions. For example, the prison construction boom can be linked to, among other factors, the huge increase in the number of people sentenced to prison terms with the onset of the “war on drugs,” the repression of radical movements by people of color for self-determination, and the anti-imperialist struggles of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The “war on drugs” and the national and local efforts to destroy radical political movements led to increasing police presence in communities of color and poor communities, higher arrest rates, and longer prison sentences.

This boom is also fueled by dramatic and racist reporting about “crime,” “delinquency,” and “rebellion,” creating a culture of fear in which it continues to be acceptable and desirable to many people to lock people (primarily people of color, youth, and poor people) in cages for longer and longer in the interest of “public safety.” The way the many parts of the PIC interact is exactly what makes it so powerful and destructive. In order to fight this system, we have to see it for all that it is and recognize what drives and shapes it.

Fighting the PIC means fighting the mainstream ideas of public safety and challenging the idea that police, prisons, and the court system make people safer. At the same time, we must create alternative ideas of security based on the safety of the people most affected by the enormous harms that still go on.

The United States currently imprisons over 2.3 million people. At least 5 million people are presently under formal surveillance within the PIC. Women represent the fastest rising prison population. Since 1980, the number of women imprisoned in the U.S. has risen by almost 400 percent.

Organizing against the PIC is as much about building something as it is about fighting what is destroying our communities. Our organizing is also an ongoing effort to create alternatives, not only to imprisonment, but to the culture of punishment and warfare we’ve become so used to.

From a conference to a movement
The story of Critical Resistance’s birth is somewhat legendary by now: a conference held in Berkeley in 1998, bringing together organizers, former prisoners, family members, scholars, attorneys, service providers, students, and others to discuss the recent and unprecedented build up of the U.S. prison industrial complex. The groundswell of people who attended the conference clearly demonstrated that the a national grassroots movement to abolish the PIC was necessary.

As that conference helped jump-start pockets of organizing to end the PIC, the past ten years have seen the massive growth of both the movement and the system we fight. In the time since Critical Resistance was born, the phrase “prison industrial complex” has become commonplace and hundreds of organizations around the country have explicitly taken on aspects of this many-headed hydra. Hundreds more fight pieces of the PIC in less overt terms. In many ways, it is difficult to talk about a cohesive “movement,” given the diversity and breadth of organizations, groups, and people working on these issues.

The simple fact that a concerted effort to abolish the PIC has grown to such a point that it cannot be easily summarized or categorized is a success in and of itself. Through this expansion, our analysis of what constitutes the PIC has deepened. Our understanding of how many different facets of oppression keep the PIC alive and growing has matured. In turn, we have extended our ability to draw connections with one another. Whether it’s building bridges with immigrant rights groups, empowering youth to lead us, or working more directly with prisoners, the movement against the PIC has taken many new forms and created many new alliances over the past ten years.

Healthy doses of new analysis and strategizing have been interjected by allies exploring the mechanics of prison growth, or addressing the intersections of the PIC and queer and transgender issues, or by the release of political prisoners, to name but a few. We have been heartened by the growing efforts to identify alternatives to the punitive options laid out by the PIC, such as transformative justice.

Critical Resistance has been an integral force in pushing forward the idea of PIC abolition and has argued and organized around principles which call into question and move beyond mere reform of the system. Drawing on a politic that necessitates the abolition of not just the prison system but of the “industrial complex”—the policing and surveillance practices—that bolsters that system, Critical Resistance has also worked to redefine what it means to be an expert on the PIC and has struggled to move prisoners, former prisoners, and prisoners’ family members into the forefront.

By understanding the prison industrial complex not singularly as prisons themselves, or even as just imprisonment, Critical Resistance has gone further to emphasize the “complex” part of the PIC, and to incorporate an analysis of policing, surveillance, capitalism, development, the state, gender oppression and counterinsurgency, to name just a few aspects. This framework has played out in Critical Resistance’s work by bringing the organization into close, collaborative contact with organizations not traditionally linked to the PIC including environmental justice organizations, teachers, health workers, farmers, immigrants’ rights organizations, child care collectives, and anti-violence organizations.

However, despite these important successes, we all recognize the many walls we still have to tear down. Even as we have delved deeply into the interconnectedness of the PIC, the PIC itself has developed new fronts. From the rise of quality-of-life policing, criminalization of youth activities, immigrant crack downs, the expanded powers of surveillance within the Federal Government, the specter of terrorism, or the brutal truths revealed in the state’s response to Hurricane Katrina, just as we have grown and matured as a movement – so has the PIC grown and matured as a system.

It is not just the PIC that we have to battle. As a movement, we must address the many internal tensions that are barriers to our success. As more and more people question the efficacy and centrality of the nonprofit organizational model to create a long-term, successful movement for social change, it is time the many pieces of this movement came together for collective thinking about the state of the movement to abolish the PIC.

Looking back and to the future
“Critical Resistance 2008 is an opportunity to mark where we’ve been in the last 10 years and where we’re moving in the next 10 years,” says Mimi Kim of Creative Interventions and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. She sees the Critical Resistance conferences as moments of coalescence brought together by the collaborative work done in the interim between conferences.

The coalition-building aspect of Critical Resistance’s work and the work that goes into building these gatherings cannot be over-emphasized by those who are doing the work and are affected by it. Work is not simply being done to plan a conference, but instead, the conference is the culmination of integrated, conscious organizing, and a jumping off point for future strategy and struggle. In turn we can be encouraged to think about Critical Resistance not simply as an organization, and, in turn, to think about CR10 not as simply another conference. Instead, we might be empowered to think of the work as building pieces together in a movement that is fighting to create a safer, healthier society.

This fall’s conference, to be held September 26-28 in Oakland, California, will once again bring together prisoners and all affected communities, advocates, and activists for workshops, performances, meetings, and a slew of cultural events. When September rolls around we can collectively answer a new question: “Where are we going?” And without a doubt, it is a chance to celebrate our many years of struggle.

“CR10 gives people an opportunity to be part of history. Just like there were twelve people meeting in a print shop in London, and, 50 years later, slavery was abolished,” said Rose Braz, National Campaign Director of Critical Resistance. “This is an opportunity to be part of something that is historic and unique.”

---

Isaac Ontiveros is a member of the AK Press collective, volunteers with Critical Resistance, writes and edits for The Abolitionist, and makes videos from time to time. Isaac lives and works in Oakland, California. Amy Vanderwarker has worked on social and environmental justice issues throughout California for the past ten years. She is a member of the CR10 Planning Committee and lives in Oakland, California. Portions of this article originally appeared in Left Turn and The Abolitionist. The Oakland chapter of CR is a former RESIST grantee, and the New York chapter is a current one..