by Ruby Ching, Violet Brindis-Reich, Cece Li, and Libby Hansen
The term “Prison Industrial Complex” (PIC) was coined by Angela Davis
to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social, and political problems, all for profit.
The prison industrial complex is deeply intertwined with colonialism, both through the direct continuation of colonial-era social control tactics and the development of new systems that criminalize colonized populations. This is most evident through the legacy of slavery and the systemic dispossession of Native Americans in this country.
Currently, the prison industry in America continues to disproportionately impact minority groups on the basis of race and gender. The prison industrial complex is a capitalistic machine that continues to profit off of individuals who are incarcerated, off of the exploitative labor of those individuals, and the continued emphasis on for-profit prisons, as opposed to social justice minded rehabilitation programs.
The population of women in prisons is continually rising. According to the Human Rights Watch the number of women entering U.S. prisons has risen by nearly four hundred percent since 1980, which is double the incarceration rate increase of males. Every single woman in prison is at risk of experiencing gender-based violence, sexual abuse, and rape. To put this into perspective, roughly 200,000 adults are sexually abused behind bars every year in the U.S. Additionally, a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) covering the years of 2009 to 2011 found that while women made up only 13% of the jail population, they accounted for 67% of the victims of staff-on-inmate sexual abuse. Through this educational zine, we hope to educate our community on these issues and how we can all be a part of the abolition of the prison industry.
