The prison industrial complex is a system of bondage, torture commodification & death (both literal and civil). You cannot make it good. I am therefore in favor of dismantling it in its totality. It's called abolition. If you need that broken down further: bit.ly/2KuZYiT 
The prison system is impossible to justify upon any close examination, so people do not examine it. They do not think about it. They simply accept its false inevitability. They have been conditioned to fear one another so much that they believe that millions of ppl deserve hell.
The children who have been taken at the border have been snatched from criminalized parents, but in their case, we see past the criminalization. We see context and complexity. There are millions of families separated by the prison system whose criminalization ppl don't see past.
We need to talk about that too. It's not as tho the US was a just place & then these horrible separations happened. We have to reject that kind of messaging. We shouldn't pretend that this is the resurrection of some long-past horror, like it came out of nowhere in the present
Fighting family separations & indefinite family detention calls for an understanding of both the histories that got us here & the larger carceral context in which all of this is occurring. The prison system is a mechanism of social control but also a massive economic complex.
Private prison stock soared when Trump signed his executive order. They can't wait to build a massive network of prisons to indefinitely detain immigrant families in. Enraging, right? Well, to fight this, you have to understand, this is how it works w all criminalization.
Society creates criminals to fill cages because cages generate profits when they have people in them. It's that simple. The .gov and these companies have millions of people locked away, branded as "criminals," out of sight and out of mind -- and separated from their families.
I talked about how the crisis of human bondage in US prisons overlaps with the immigrant family separation crisis here. bit.ly/2lpVQmp
Prisons are monstrosities. Our acceptance of them is a failure of empathy and imagination. But when I see empathy and imagination at work, as I see happening in the name of these separated families, I know somewhere in the mix are ppl who are ready to question all of these cages.
I know this bc I used to be someone who believed this nightmarish network of cages had an essential purpose. I cosigned bondage bc my imagination was that defanged. I see it now and I marvel that I was ever so afraid of anyone/anything that I cosigned the bondage of 2 mil ppl.
