"...However, too many in the current anarchist prison support tendencies have united with (...transcriber can't hear the word here sorry) left sectarian tendencies, and instead of fighting the state itself, have gravitated to mere support for certain prisoners, and given up the militant line of razing prisons as a whole.
The united states since the 1970s have created the largest prison system in the world, as has been pointed out. When I was in that prison system, and at the time it was 350,000 prisoners at most, and now we've got it in the millions. Even if we just count prisons themselves--we just count prisons and not jails, and not immigrant detention centers, you know, youth or whatever. If you add all this stuff together, you may be talking about 7 million people. But just as far as the penitentiary system, we can say that there are 2.3 million people in the american prison system.
But where has the mass outrage and protest been? Well, it's been swallowed up by academics, corporate financed social justice groups, and white radical protest groups. Prison abolitionists have lost their way from fighting mass imprisonment, to calling for and accepting reforms with authoritarian leftists-- anarchists, I'm talking about. We should be rallying people all over the world in opposition to american state slavery, and building a revolutionary civil war to overthrow the carceral state. Not just holding it up to public ridicule. Only by smashing the entirety of the state itself, especially the american empire, can Black people and all oppressed people be free..."
--excerpt from Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin speaking on The Black Autonomy Podcast, Episode titled: Prison Abolition and Struggle Against Mass Imprisonment.
https://blackautonomy.libsyn.com/prison-abolition-and-struggle-against-mass-imprisonment
#Abolition #PrisonAbolition #Autonomy #LorenzoKomboaErvin #BlackAutonomyPodcast #Anarchism #MovementCapture #Cooptation
