About This Blog
Nicolas Lampert - Just Seeds Portfolio Project
Prison Culture is an attempt to document how the current prison industrial complex operates and to underscore the ways that it structures American society.
I have created this blog as way to make sense for myself of all of the information that comes my way through the work that I do. I am writing this mostly for myself. It’s a place for me to catalogue all of the ideas, thoughts, musings, and resources that I have about mass incarceration and the Prison Industrial Complex. I hope that those who read this will find something informative and useful for themselves in the blog. It would be even better if a few are motivated to take action to abolish prisons in the process.
I rely on a definition of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) developed by Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA) as:
“a massive multi-billion dollar industry that promotes the exponential expansion of prisons, jails, immigrant detention centers, and juvenile detention centers. The PIC is represented by corporations that profit from incarceration, politicians who target people of color so that they appear to be “tough on crime,” and the media that represents a slanted view of how crime looks in our communities. In order to survive, the PIC uses propaganda to convince the public how much we need prisons; uses public support to strengthen harmful law-and-order agendas such as the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terrorism”; uses these agendas to justify imprisoning disenfranchised people of color, poor people, and people with disabilities; leverages the resulting increasing rate of incarceration for prison-related corporate investments (construction, maintenance, goods and services); pockets the profit; and uses profit to create more propaganda.”[1] see also: criminalization, street-based economies, “quality of life” policing”
[1] Making Connections: the Anti-Violence Movement Actively Resisting the Prison Industrial Complex – CARA (Communities Against Rape and Abuse), www.cara-seattle.org
