Month of Resistance

In this clip from Acronym TV’s full program, to discuss a planned month of Resistance To Mass Incarceration, Carl Dix breaks the war on drugs and the war on crime as proxy wars for the war on black, Latino, and oppressed people. This war, according to Dix, has been going on for decades amongst a backdrop of are the globalization of industry. With production moved from the United States to many other parts of the world where they can find workers that they can exploit much more viciously in much worse conditions and pay them much less than they could here generating more profit for the people who run this country, that leave generations of young people with no legitimate ways to survive and raise families, and Incarceration becomes the program for dealing with that.

If this were happening anywhere else in the world, Americans would be justifiably horrified: 1 out of every 100 adults are living behind bars in the United States, with 1 in 31 in some sort of correctional control, including prison, jail, parole, and probation. The United States, with 5% of the world’s population, has 25% of the worlds prison population. Private prisons are operating around the country at the local and state level, and a majority of them include “occupancy requirements mandating that local or state government keep those facilities between 80 and 100 percent full. In other words, whether crime is rising or falling, the state must keep those beds full.”