I think it's quite exciting that it's a
term that has acquired a kind of
currency at the very beginning when it
was introduced it was always necessary
to engage in a rather long conversation
explaining the meaning of the prison
industrial complex of course the
resonances with the military industrial
complex so what most people immediately
think about but as I think back I
remember that we were attempting to
capture the globality of the
organization of punishment even as we
were very specifically attempting to
create a way to understand why it was
that such huge numbers of people were in
prison in the US the racial
disparities of the prison population and
at the same time the decline of
education of health care and so forth I
think what was so important about that
term was that it moved us away from
simply thinking about punishment or
jails and prisons in isolation from
everything else
and even though many of us in that
movement had been doing work around
prisons for decades and initially very
specifically around political prisoners
and I always like to point out that
without the aid of people in prison we
would not have been able to begin to
craft a larger analysis of the role of
the prison and I you know I'm thinking
about George Jackson who argued you know
back in the late sixties in the early
seventies that
we needed to think not only about the
prison as the site of political
repression of people who were engaging
in social justice activism in the
so-called free world but we had to try
to begin to understand how that apparatus was key to the way
racism functioned in our society so
there were a lot of questions that were
questions and many of them are still
questions but I think what was most
important was that was precisely that it
allowed us to ask questions and it
made people recognize that what they
thought they knew they really didn't
know and I think that as we try to
move the conversation more toward
abolition today that posture of
raising questions is what is most
important about the way that the
prison industrial complex as a concept
has function
