**********>>>Activist Isaac Ontiveros is the communications director for Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization that seeks to stop mass incarceration by ending the system’s reliance on prisons altogether and by devising alternative, community-based methods of resolving conflict and delivering justice. He is a prison abolitionist who likens his organization’s work to the fight against another one of America’s peculiar institutions (incidentally, more black people are in American prisons than ever worked on American plantations). I asked Isaac to explain himself, and he was kind enough to do so. VICE: What does it mean to be a “prison abolitionist”? Isaac Ontiveros: What we mean is that we want to end the whole system of mutually reinforcing relationships between surveillance, policing, the courts, and imprisonment that fuel, maintain, and expand social and economic inequity and institutional racism. So, not just prisons. By “abolition,” we mean that we are interested in doing away with the system rather than finding ways to make it work better or for it to be kinder and gentler. We don’t see the prison-industrial complex as broken; we see it working very, very well at surveilling, policing, imprisoning, and killing exactly who it targets. As abolitionists, we work to diminish the scope and power of the prison-industrial complex while simultaneously increasing the ability of those communities targeted by it to be stronger, healthier, and more self-determined. vice/read/abolish-prison?utm_source=vicefbus
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 12:48:35 +0000