Panelists describe La.’s role as ‘Ground Zero’ for prison industrial complex
10th November 2014 · 0 Comments
By Kari Dequine Harden
Contributing Writer
That was the question at the heart of a panel discussion held last Tuesday as part of the Prospect.3 (P.3) New Orleans art exhibition.
Brooke Davis Anderson, executive director of P.3 New Orleans, introduced the evening with the numbers: Louisiana’s rate of incarceration is five times that of Iran, 13 times China’s, and 20 times that of Germany. In the country that leads the world in per capita incarceration of its citizens, Louisiana tops the nation.
In addition to the featured artists Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, the panelists included former prisoners and starred political activist and scholar Angela Davis.
Held at Xavier University, the 400-person capacity auditorium was packed with about 500 people. The panel was moderated by Bill Quigley, a law professor and director of the Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University.
McCormick and Calhoun showed slides of some of their work currently on display at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. The exhibition is titled “Slavery, The Prison Industrial Complex.”
According to Critical Resistance, a grassroots organization founded by Davis in 1997: “The prison industrial complex is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.”
McCormick described their decades of photographing at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola – a project that began in the early 1980s when they were working to document the labor force and learned that Angola was the only place where cotton was still picked by hand.
The most striking thing about the images, said Calhoun, was that it was nearly impossible to tell the difference between images taken 30 years ago and those taken today. And, Calhoun surmised that the pictures would have looked very similar had they had begun documenting when Angola was a slave plantation.
“I spent 30 years in incarceration for a crime I didn’t commit,” former Angola prisoner Henry James told the crowd. James was sentenced to life without parole in 1982 for rape. He is the longest-serving prisoner in Louisiana to be exonerated. James was released in 2011 after DNA evidence was found – by accident – that proved his innocence.
“It’s been a long journey for me,” he said. James said that the journey continues as he tries to fight for those left behind. “It’s a place where no human being would want to live. The things we as people do to one another – it hurts.”
Louisiana also ranks in the highest in the nation in terms of the number of people per capita exonerated after serving time for crimes they did not commit.
James said while inside Angola he worked hard to avoid additional trouble. “The security was my problem,” he said. “They were worse than felons because they had power and they abused it.”
Admittedly “hard-headed” at times, James said he refused to “let them make me what I don’t want to be.” James said he made the choice to not be overtaken by hatred and bitterness.
Describing the prisoners as “livestock,” James stated the motive of those in charge. Not the betterment of society, but, he said, “They get paid. This is a profit. This is a business.”
In a 2012 series in The Times-Picayune, Cindy Chang wrote: “The hidden engine behind the state’s well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt.”
James tore apart the process used to falsely convict him. He fought tears and his voice broke. “I was framed. I was literally framed. There was nothing I could do. Nothing I could do.”
James detailed the lack and manipulation of evidence. “Does that sound like justice?” he asked. “We need to try to do something to make a change in the system.”
Carmen Demourelle spoke about her nine years of incarceration. While she said she was wrongfully accused, “I was someone who was participating in a life of crime,” and she accepted her sentence “because I did a lot of wrong.”
There was no rehabilitation in prison, Demourelle said. It was a choice she had to make. Prison is a big business, she said, and those running the prisons have no interest in getting rid of the prisoners who allow them to increase profits. “Think of all the people who would be without a job,” she said.
Chang writes: If the inmate count dips, sheriffs bleed money. Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars.”
Now working as a “violence interrupter” for CeaseFire New Orleans, Demourelle said that it was while incarcerated that she “began to know who I was and what I wanted to do.”
Demourelle said she loves the work she does, trying to help de-escalate conflict and prevent people from ending up dead or in prison. Her dream is to open a home for recently incarcerated women to help them transition back into a better life.
There are too many needs – and wounds to be healed – that go unaddressed, she said.
Norris Henderson, a nationally recognized advocate who spent 27 years at Angola for a murder he did not commit, commended McCormick and Calhoun for their work, and for bringing stories from within the walls into the light.
Henderson told the story of a prison security guard at Angola who told him that every bus full of new prisoners who came through the gates meant job security. He talked about the penitentiary being staffed by as many as five generations of family members.
“There’s something wrong with this, I think,” he said.
Henderson talked about New Orleans’ long history of racial profiling, and being a 17-year-old in jail, “trying to figure out how I got there and how I could get out.”
Exonerated in 2001, today Henderson is the executive director and founder of Voices of the Ex-Offender (V.O.T.E.), a “a grassroots, membership based organization that builds the political and economic power of people most critically impacted by the criminal justice system, especially formerly incarcerated persons, their families and loved ones,” according to their website.
Henderson talked about an eye-opening moment when he first heard prisons referred to as a “growth industry.”
“It wasn’t until recently that I realized it was systemic,” he said.
Chang writes: “In the past two decades, Louisiana’s prison population has doubled, costing taxpayers billions while New Orleans continues to lead the nation in homicides.
One in 86 adult Louisianans is doing time, nearly double the national average. Among black men from New Orleans, one in 14 is behind bars; one in seven is either in prison, on parole or on probation.”
Henderson referred to a statute in Louisiana law that reads: “Persons committed to and in the physical custody of the department shall be treated in a humane manner, and the department shall direct efforts toward the rehabilitation of such persons in order to effect their return to the community as promptly as practicable.”
“That’s not being done,” Henderson said.
According to Chang’s 2012 article: “Meanwhile, inmates subsist in bare-bones conditions with few programs to give them a better shot at becoming productive citizens. Each inmate is worth $24.39 a day in state money, and sheriffs trade them like horses, unloading a few extras on a colleague who has openings. A prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit.”
Henderson urged the audience to take a “Michael Jackson man in the mirror” look. “Ask, what can I do to change this outcome? Or, what have I done to contribute to this outcome?”
As the final speaker of the evening, Quigley introduced Davis to a standing ovation as “The only person I know who has gotten a presidential chair in academic studies and has been on the FBI’s top 10 most wanted list.”
A professor and author, Davis was born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama and emerged as a prominent civil rights activist in the 1960’s and leader in the U.S. Communist Party.
Of McCormick and Calhoun’s work, Davis said that it “says something about the nature of what is going on in Angola and slavery, and the timelessness of slavery.”
She spoke about racism fueling disproportionate prison populations worldwide, from Aborigines in Australia to Africans and Middle Easterners in Sweden.
Making a connection between slavery and the prison industrial complex is “not an accident,” Davis said.
As a newly born America was “pretending” to offer democracy to the rest of the world, “It also offered the penitentiary – imprisonment – as a mode of punishment,” she said – thus the “negation of liberties and rights.”
With the U.S. prison population so disproportionately black, Davis said it is clear that there is racism driving the decision-making process.
“We know that imprisonment does not work,” she said. “So why is it that no one in power will listen?”
Davis spoke about the shifting of capital from social services – education, housing, and health care – into privatized, for-profit businesses, and New Orleans as a perfect example as the post-Katrina site of “Disaster Capitalism.”
The audience was largely familiar with Davis’ reference to Naomi Klein’s 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Davis defined the term as “taking advantage of peoples’ pain and suffering to create more profit.”
When people “can’t find a way” she said – without jobs, housing, health care, and mental health care – “the surplus population is profitable only as it serves as bodies fueling the prison industrial complex.”
Davis argued that prisons produce violence instead of stemming it. Prisons don’t solve – or even address—any of they underlying societal afflictions, she said.
And Louisiana doggedly maintains some of the harshest sentences in the country. As Chang writes: “In Louisiana, a two-time car burglar can get 24 years without parole. A trio of drug convictions can be enough to land you at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for the rest of your life.”
The day of the panel – Election Day – California voters passed Proposition 47, a landmark victory toward reducing the state’s notoriously high prison population. The measure will reclassify numerous minor and non-violent offenses from felonies to misdemeanors. An estimated 10,000 inmates may now be eligible for early release, and the measure could lead to an estimated 40,000 fewer felony convictions each year. The law stipulates that the estimated $150 million in state savings go toward preventing truancy and dropouts in schools, mental health and addiction treatment, victim’s services, and other efforts to strengthen alternatives to incarceration.
Davis writes: “Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages . . . Prisons thus perform a feat of magic. Or rather the people who continually vote in new prison bonds and tacitly assent to a proliferating network of prisons and jails have been tricked into believing the magic of imprisonment. But prisons do not disappear problems, the disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant, and racially marginalized communities has literally become big business.”
Before taking questions and comments from the audience, Davis ended the discussion with her hope and her fight: the “abolition” of the prison industrial complex.
As defined by Critical Resistance: “Prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment . . . Abolition isn’t just about getting rid of buildings full of cages. It’s also about undoing the society we live in because the PIC both feeds on and maintains oppression and inequalities through punishment, violence, and controls millions of people.”
Davis urged the crowd not to forget the sense of community felt in the room that night, and to get involved – “to join hands, hearts, and vision in the struggle for a better world.”
McCormick and Calhoun’s exhibit will be on display at the Ogden Museum at 925 Camp Street through Jan. 25, 2015. The museum is free on Thursdays for Louisiana residents.◊
This article originally published in the November 10, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
