Commentary: Social Death and the Relationship between Abolition and Reform

IN MY BRIEF COMMENTS, I WISH TO FOCUS ON THE THEME OF DEATH THAT APPEARS, explicitly or implicitly, in each presentation given at the "Prison Reform and Abolition panel. As Dylan Rodriguez put it, "death is the social truth of imprisonment.... [It is] the political and organizational logic of the prison." "Death," in this discussion, has signified on multiple registers. On one level, there is what Dylan Rodriguez, Geoff Ward, and Frank Wilderson (at an earlier point) referred to as civic or social death--the disenfranchisement and forced invisibility experienced by current and former prisoners. On another level, there is the political "death" that Liz Appel discussed--the fact that the messages of many of the radical imprisoned intellectuals who are "permitted" to escape this social death are, in turn, politically neutralized by the individualist logic of exceptionalism. Then, of course, there is the physical death inflicted by the racist mechanisms of capital punishment. The more seriously we take the idea that death--not correction or rehabilitation--is the ultimate social truth of imprisonment, the more radical our political organization against the prison-industrial complex will be. (By radical, I do not mean violent, but rather powerful.) (1) This death is administered inside and outside the prison walls. As Henry Giroux illustrated, schools, particularly those in racialized communities, are increasingly becoming sites that function to inure youth of color to their social and political death. Similarly, penal intervention in these marginalized communities, as Ward and Marable discuss, often strips those communities of their right to engage in the processes of political decision-making. I would argue that many of us experience a kind of death when our collective power to act is fragmented, abstracted, and controlled by the mechanisms of capitalist command--a process that transforms our collective living labor into the dead labor that produces profits for the capitalist class. Whether it is social death by incarceration, political death by neutralization and disenfranchisement, productive death by exploitation, or physical death by execution, capital and its state-form predicate the life of the wealthy, the white, and the privileged on the death of the poor, the black and brown, and the impoverished. From this perspective, all reformist politics are simply not radical enough. It is not simply that incarceration is a superficial solution to complex social and economic inequalities. Many recognize that fact and use it to fuel reformist agendas that reason, "if the causes of social and economic inequality are more complex than the current criminal justice system acknowledges, then let us restructure the criminal justice system in such a way that it accommodates those social and economic complexities." However, these movements seek merely to perfect the inherently oppressive logic of the capitalist state-form; I would argue, however, that the point is to destroy it. To embrace a more radical and more properly abolitionist politics, we must acknowledge that our life in the present society is determined by and founded upon the social and physical death of the incarcerated. We must recognize that the wealth of the transnational capitalist class is dependent upon the control of the living labor of the multitude. Thus, we must refuse a system that sustains life through the infliction of death--a system that predicates the freedom of the minority upon the unfreedom of the majority. In a discussion devoted to prison reform and prison abolition, it is crucial that we explicitly address the differences between the two. For instance, we cannot appropriately address the issue of abolitionism without confronting its relationship to the state. Although prison reform and even death penalty abolition are assimilable to liberal politics, prison abolition exists well outside the framework of political liberalism. …