The siren muffled by the radio,

The faces on the muted TV,

The towering gray under the sunset you photograph,

and the red you step over on the sidewalk.

A rare moment where you stop

and see the cage doesn’t fit the landscape how you thought it did.

Accustomed to the pit in your stomach, you hardly feel it at all. 

Once educated on the state of the prison system today, the racism and injustice is undeniable. We live side by side the millions who are unfairly incarcerated and treated inhumanely. With millions of people viewing documentaries like 13th, millions knowing someone who has been imprisoned, and millions being aware of the cruelty of the justice system, why has change not happened? People continue to die in prisons, Black men continue to be incarcerated at a higher rate than any other group, and poor people continue being thrown in prison without a trial. What has allowed people to accept the existence of this system, or more precisely, what has stopped them from attempting to change it?

Change requires recognition of the problem and action. To understand why change is not happening, we must understand what is blocking these two fundamental pieces. 

1

THE POWER OF RHETORIC

The ability of vocabulary and language to persuade people of something they would not otherwise agree with should not be underestimated. 

By people in power, it never has been.

It can be seen in the way soldiers are taught to refer to the other side with slurs to feel better about killing them. Dehumanizing the other side means you’re not killing people who are just the same as you. It can be seen in slavery, with the portrayal of Black people as savages. Dehumanization means you don’t treat them like people. It can be seen in George Bush’s war on drugs, using phrases like “super-predator” to incite fear and gain support for prisons. Referring to someone as less than human for committing a crime means it’s fine to punish them like they’re not one. It can be seen in the everyday vocabulary surrounding criminal punishment: “robbers,” not people who robbed; “murderers,” not people who murdered; “prisoners,” not people in prison. If you reduce someone down to their worst deed, you have dehumanized them enough that you will not care when they die in prison. 

When “criminals” die in prisons, people can’t relate themselves to it because they see themselves as human and the criminals as not. This is one way that recognition of the problems with the prison system are blocked: the use of rhetoric to convince people that inhumane treatment is okay. This is used in cases of police brutality as well. The second a Black man dies at the hands of police, there are news stations reporting on their criminal record and guessing at one if it doesn’t exist. People watching the news feel a little less outraged, knowing it was a “criminal” who died rather than a regular person. The police claim it was a threat, if he had a gun in the car then he must have used it already, he must be about to use it to rob a store or shoot somebody, maybe shoot me, and it doesn’t matter if the gun was a hairbrush in the first place. It only matters that he could have been a criminal, and criminals are less than human. This is how the justice system’s misconduct can be ignored by people on a large scale. The way people who commit crimes are referred to is the same across the nation, and it has convinced us to let this injustice slide. 

All the rhetoric that surrounds prisons and criminals goes into people’s opinions on the abolition of prisons and/or police. There are many people today who recognize the mistreatment of minorities in America but do not consider the prison system as part of that, even when it’s incredibly clear, because they have been conditioned to think of people who commit crimes as subhuman, and police and prison as necessary for human safety. 

2

“If you get shown a problem, but have no idea how to control it, then you just decide to get used to the problem.” Sorry to Bother You 2018

Even with the rhetoric that blocks recognition of the problem, the injustice of the prison system has obviously been recognized, at least in some way, by many. That is why there have been protests and riots and documentaries and petitions and movements. While these are steps towards change, they have not reformed or abolished the prison system. Change happens when enough people take enough action and we have not reached that point. The main reason for this is that the solutions seem too challenging.

When the options for solutions are lengthy undertakings, it is harder to commit to trying to fix the problem. People know that activism is exhausting, and they are often too busy with their own lives to commit to the commitment to change. Those who do have the time are often the people who aren’t as affected by the problems. People who need to work multiple jobs just to put food on the table don’t have the time to get involved in activism even if they want to, while people who are living comfortably don’t see the need for change in the same way, which results in fewer people participating in activism as a whole. It relates to Dr. King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” where he spoke of the “white moderate.” The people who aren’t direct victims of the problem, who recognize police brutality and inhumane prison treatment as a problem, but aren’t willing to risk what they have to create change, pose the biggest threat towards change. 

Most importantly, if the options for solutions include the destruction or reformation of fundamental parts of our current society, people have a harder time seeing it as the best outcome. It is hard to imagine a life without police or prisons because they are a key part of our country, both visibly and behind the scenes. Police are the supposed protectors of people, the ones you call if you’re in danger. This is ingrained in the majority of Americans’ heads, and no matter how the police are in reality, they can’t help but react with “what if my house is robbed?” when abolishing the police is brought up. Prison is advertised as the only solution to crime, the best option for both society and the criminal. It is such an integral part of the justice system as well as society, making it hard for people to see any sort of realistic alternative. They don’t recognize the unrealistic nature of prisons today. They don’t see behind the scenes, where prisoners do free labor and prisons profit, where prison is as much political as it is economic. What they see is all they have ever known.

“If you get shown a problem, but have no idea how to control it, then you just decide to get used to the problem.” For many people, the second a problem seems too challenging to control, they decide to accept the problem. Faced with the word “abolition,” they see no easy end goal. In this way, rhetoric surrounds the word “abolition” as well as the word “criminal.” The ambiguity, the strength, the destruction, the change…people associate “abolition” with unrealistic.” Even when the solution is necessary, the second we mentally write it off as unrealistic, we stop ourselves from even starting the conversations surrounding it. We stop ourselves before we can start. 

There are many people who, right at this moment, are fighting against this injustice and making progress. There are activists on every level, out in the street, in the courts, and in the prisons. Their work and efforts should not be overlooked. Yet there are enough people sitting idly by as this system harms millions of people, enough that change has not yet been forced. After exploring why this mentality exists, the next step is to ask ourselves: What more do we need to make change happen?