BY KAREN FLETCHER
BRISBANE — In a keynote address to the Women in Prison Conference on November 28, African-American feminist and anti-prison campaigner Angela Davis revealed that are now more armed Immigration and Naturalization Service agents in the US than there are FBI agents.
She told the 200 conference participants that the deaths of the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington were being exploited in the US to justify a racist “war on terrorism” in which people can be arrested and detained on the basis of their ethnicity. President George W. Bush has seized this opportunity to massively expand the prison and military industries on the pretext of policing US borders.
Police, the military and “corrections” (prison) agencies are sharing technologies, research and experience at regular, jointly organised conferences and seminars. “The prison industrial complex has not replaced the military industrial complex”, she said, “they have formed a symbiotic relationship.”
Davis said racism has long been used in the US to construct “national enemies” and to define who goes to prison. In the current political climate, this was more so than ever.
Black women have become the fastest growing segment of the US prison population and the same is the case for Aboriginal women in Australian prisons. Davis pointed out that the number of women in California's prisons today is more than the total number of imprisoned women in the entire US when she was imprisoned in a political frame-up in 1970.
“Prison is today being presented as a panacea for the social problems that result from the dismantling of social services and affirmative action”, Davis added. “The strategic goal must be to abolish prisons in so far as they are the default response to social problems that should be dealt with by other means”.
The conference resolved to form an International Network for Women in Prison and to hold another conference in two years.
From Green Left Weekly, December 12, 2001.
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