Thread by @CAARPRNow

Not engaging with the trolls in our mentions but here's a thread to educate the people:
1) prisons do not keep you safe.
2) the distinction between violent and nonviolent prisoners is not helpful.
3) the prison system does not care about guilt or innocence. It just wants bodies.

Let's explain.
1) Every time you say #FreeThemAll someone flinches and asks if you want to put “dangerous criminals” back into neighborhoods where they can do more harm. They ask this because they’ve been conditioned to think prisons are a solution to violence.

And they’ve been conditioned to think there is a certain kind of person (usually Black or Brown) who is inherently violent and must be removed from society to protect people. Believing racist myths keeps them from looking at the root cause of violence & other social problems.

In reality, police & prisons reproduce & amplify violence by marking people as “criminals” & creating circumstances that ensure they will go back to prison. Lack of access to housing & employment, disenfranchisement, unfair probation requirements, etc cause high recidivism rates.

Part of it is the school to prison pipeline. Schools in Black communities are drastically underfunded and understaffed. Black children are also given harsher & more permanent punishments for the same behavior as white ones and are more likely to be treated as adults.

There’s no single factor behind mass incarceration. Schools, foster homes, the social service industry, and many other institutions contribute to putting Black and Brown children in the system and making it nearly impossible to escape when they reach adulthood.

Many laws are written to target Black and Brown communities. Police routinely harass, arrest, and kill Black people with no justification. Prosecutors, judges, and juries give much harsher sentences to Black people. White supremacy is built into the legal system.

White supremacy is in the entire fabric of the US. Black, Brown, and Indigenous people are systematically neglected and repressed by the state, leading to more poverty, pollution, illness, and social problems in these communities. These are examples of institutional violence.

Which ties into point 2: it’s not helpful to talk about violent or nonviolent prisoners when the primary violence is coming from systemic racism, not the prisoners. Prisons never reduced the level of violence and now they are death traps. #MassReleaseNow is the only option.

With covid-19 spreading rapidly in prisons it makes no sense to ask who deserves to be saved based on the criteria of the institution that endangers them in the first place. No one deserves to be locked in a crowded cage during a pandemic. Period.

3) The reason we raise the demand to #FreeThemAll together with #FreeGeraldReed is that Gerald Reed being in prison exposes the illegitimacy of the prison system. Gerald is not the only innocent person in prison. There are dozens of known torture survivors in Stateville alone.

And the judicial system has consistently decided to keep those people in prison. That is not something an institution concerned with preventing violence or discovering the truth would do. Police are almost never held accountable for torturing, brutalizing, and murdering people

but innocent people have to struggle for decades to get out of prison. The use of torture and coercion to get false confessions is widespread because the goal of police is convicting people, not stopping violence, and the system makes sure to keep people once they’re convicted.

Prisons are a tool of social control and a source of free labor for the white supremacist ruling class. They keep communities fractured and disorganized and are hostile to the lives of everyone in them. Mass incarceration is far more violent than any individual in prison.

People who ask “what about violent criminals” are missing the point. Prisons do not solve violence, nor do they try to, and the resources prisons receive at the expense of public services like education, food, housing, and healthcare exacerbates violence in poor communities.

Now that prisons are threatening the lives of those inside even more than before, we have to fight for #MassReleaseNow as a matter of life and death. That means we shouldn’t fall into narratives created by the racist system we’re working against.
#FreeThemALL

Some resources for further reading:
Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis
prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie202…
schooltoprisonpipelineloral.weebly.com/the-facts.html
caarpr.org/cfist_short_hi…
caarpr.org/survivor_stori…