Submitted by elliott on March 9, 2008 - 2:06pm.
...or in this case, use a broad, grassroots coalition to force Mayor Bloomby to cancel his bid for a new one in the Bronx.
That's right: the Community In Unity coalition, which fought a tooth-and-nail battle against the city, has prevented a new 2,040-bed jail from being built in the South Bronx! CIU includes groups like the Bronx Defenders, the Point, Mothers on the Move, Rights for Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities and Critical Resistance (a national, non-hierarchical prison abolition organization.) Also opposing the jail were the folks at Sustainable South Bronx, who flung a timely lawsuit at the city's construction plans.
The defeat of the Oak Point Detention Center is a huge victory for communities in New York seeking alternatives to mass incarceration and racist policing. The ill-fated jail was to have been erected just across the water from Rikers, and would've expanded a bloated prison system that already includes (in the Bronx alone) two youth detention facilities and a jail barge docked in the East River--with 800 people on board in cages, much like the slaveships of old.
Naturally, the vanquished plan fits into a larger pattern of shoveling unwanted projects on Manhattan's darker boroughs. Alongside the jails that disproportionately intern its citizens, the Bronx also plays unwilling host to 15 waste transfer stations, a Con Ed plant and a sewage treatment facility--just like Harlem endures most of New York's asthma-inducing bus depots. And the Bronx experience is only a small taste of the soaring incarceration trends across the country.
According to recent studies, 1 in 100 U.S. citizens is already in prison, giving it the largest inmate population in the world. The U.S. leads every nation on earth in inmates per capita (at 750 per 100,000 people, beating Russia's 628) and raw numbers (2,319,258 inmates, beating China's 1.5 million.)
These mass detentions are mostly a product of the so-called war on drugs and its selective enforcement in communities of color. Since the 13th amendment outlawed slavery in the U.S. "except as a punishment for crime," the prison industry has basically picked up where the slavemasters left off: today a full third of all black men will be put in chains in their lifetime. But of course, those who write the laws and make the budgets assure us that our voices are being heard.
The New York Times article on the CIU victory claims the jail's location in the Bronx would've made it "easier for family members to visit inmates." A Hunts Point Express article cites a claim by deputy corrections commissioner Stephen Morrello that a new jail "would improve conditions for inmates and officers, compared to Rikers Island." (As if the problem isn't the astronomical rate at which people are being thrown in jail, but bed space!) And the Times portrays commissioner Martin Horn as being so receptive to community feedback that he's considering making his next Bronx jail "smaller." Gee, thanks.
For the time being, New York can celebrate the defeat of the jailers and their PR campaign. But don't worry, those of y'all that want to get involved in the fight against prisons! Though the city was defeated on the Northern front, their plan to expand the Brooklyn House of Detention is still chugging ahead with the blind determination of a gulag archipelago on overdrive.
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Crossposted from Lines of Flight.
