Real Cost of Prisons Comix

By Craig Gilmore, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Kevin Pyle and 2 more

One out of every hundred adults in the U.S. is in prison. This book provides a crash course in what drives mass incarceration, the human and community costs, and how to stop the numbers from going even higher. Collected in this volume are the three comic books published by the Real Cost of Prisons Project. The stories and statistical information in each comic book are thoroughly researched and documented.

Prison Town: Paying the Price tells the story of how the financing and site locations of prisons affects the people of rural communities in which prison are built. It also tells the story of how mass incarceration affects people of urban communities where the majority of incarcerated people come from.

Prisoners of the War on Drugs includes the history of the war on drugs, mandatory minimums, how racism creates harsher sentences for people of color, stories of how the war on drugs works against women, three strikes laws, obstacles to coming home after incarceration, and how mass incarceration destabilizes neighborhoods.

Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children includes stories about women trapped by mandatory sentencing and the “costs” of incarceration for women and their families. Also included are alternatives to the present system, a glossary, and footnotes.

Over 125,000 copies of the comic books have been printed and more than 100,000 have been sent to people who are incarcerated, to their families, and to organizers and activists throughout the country. The book includes a chapter with descriptions of how the comix have been put to use in the work of organizers and activists in prison and in the “free world” by ESL teachers, high school teachers, college professors, students, and health care providers throughout the country. The demand for the comix is constant and the ways in which they are being used are inspiring.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PM Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781604861761

Craig Gilmore

Craig Gilmore managed bookstores, published books, and edited a quarterly prison newsletter before transitioning into an anti-prison organizer. He is a co-founder of the California Prison Moratorium Project, a member of the Community Advisory board of Critical Resistance and was awarded the Ralph Santiago Abascal Award for Environmental Justice Activism in 2003.

Book preview

9781604860344_0002_0019781604860344_0002_0029781604860344_0002_0039781604860344_0004_001

The Real Cost Of Prisons Comix

By Lois Ahrens

Copyright © 2008 Lois Ahrens

Introduction Copyright © 2008 Ruth Wilson Gilmore & Craig Gilmore

This edition copyright © 2008 PM Press

All Rights Reserved

Cover design by Kevin Pyle

Cover illustration by Susan Willmarth

Layout and design by Courtney Utt

Published by:

PM Press

PO Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623

www.pmpress.org

ISBN: 978-1-60486-034-4

Library Of Congress Control Number: 2008929092

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the USA on recycled paper.

This book is dedicated to all who are outraged by injustice

and are compelled to educate and agitate for change.

table of contents

preface

LOIS AHRENS

introduction

RUTH WILSON GILMORE AND CRAIG GILMORE

prison town: paying the price

KEVIN PYLE AND CRAIG GILMORE

readers respond

PART I

prisoners of the war on drugs

SABRINA JONES, ELLEN MILLER-MACK AND LOIS AHRENS

readers respond

PART II

prisoners of a hard life:

women and their children

SUSAN WILLMARTH, ELLEN MILLER-MACK AND LOIS AHRENS

preface

WHY COMIC BOOKS ?

Comic books and anti-prison agitation and education may seem like an unlikely match, but it seemed perfect to me. My idea was to make comic books combining drawings and plain language to explain complex ideas and concepts. I wanted them to incorporate statistics, new research and footnotes but not scare off readers who were not used to reading academic articles and books. To do this, they needed to be about people’s lives. The glossy cover would be attractive enough for someone doing laundry in a laundromat to pick one up and start reading.

The inspiration for the comic books came from three sources. For more than 30 years, I traveled to Mexico, where I saw women tending market stalls and sitting on park benches engrossed in photo novellas, or picture stories. Photo novellas were everywhere, inexpensive to produce and buy. Only rarely do they have one reader.

In 2000, trade union leaders from South Africa’s COSATU (The Congress of South African Trade Unions) gave me copies of two newly published, eye-opening publications: Stop Privatisation and A South African Workers’ Guide to Globalization. Using graphics, photos and concise explanations, they had created popular education materials which communicated complex ideas in easy-to-understand language. Their target audience was South African trade unionists, astute in political consciousness but perhaps without a lot of formal education.

Lastly, A Field Guide to the U.S. Economy written by economists James Heintz and Nancy Folbre used everyday language, graphs and cartoons to explain how the economy works.

The book was written to help illuminate the complexities of economics for people with little or no background in economics.

My goal was to create materials which organizers, educators, medical and mental health providers, along with people directly experiencing the impact of mass incarceration could use in their work. It was the combination of the Field Guide, COSATU’s publications and the photo novellas that led me to comic books.

The comic books are one part of The Real Cost of Prisons Project (RCPP), which began in 2000. Many of the first people working with the RCPP were economists. They brought to the Project their social, economic and political analysis of how we had come to this terrible place where imprisonment had spiraled into mass incarceration.

WHAT DRIVES MASS INCARCERATION?

Every year from 1947 through the beginning of the 1970s, approximately 200,000 people were incarcerated in the U.S. Today there are more than 2.3 million men and women incarcerated with more than 5 million more on parole and probation—one in every 32 adults.

In our analysis of mass incarceration, we did not seek to remove individual responsibility; however, we wanted to place an individual within a bigger picture. To do this we began by describing how Ronald Reagan and the neo-liberal agenda came to power in 1980 by using covert and overt racist messages fabricating the myth of the welfare queen, capitalizing on fears of affirmative action and the gains made in the civil rights movement of 1950s and 60s, fostering alarm about crime to exploit the divisions between poor and working-class whites and African Americans which remain today. The racist sub-text of neo-liberal political campaigns succeeded in creating acceptance of mass incarceration while simultaneously capitalizing on the industries they created to police, prosecute, cage and control millions of people.

Neo-liberal policies have been in place for almost thirty years. As a result many people are not aware that our political and economic life now is not the result of natural course of events but rather of a systemically created ideology that has pervaded every aspect of our daily lives. Deregulation and globalization—loss of U.S. manufacturing, outsourcing; corporate agriculture and the disappearance of the family farm; reduction of protections for workers; decrease in number of unionized workers; privatization of hospitals, water, education, prisons and the military; drastic cuts in public spending for welfare, public schools, public transportation, housing and job training; and attacks on affirmative action—are now part of the air we breathe. These policies have resulted in impoverishing urban economies, limiting opportunities for meaningful work and slashing funding for quality education, marginalizing the poor, and creating more inequality.

The comic books place individual experience in this context and challenge a central message of neo-liberal ideology: the myth that people can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. In this paradigm, racism, sexism, classism and economic inequality are not part of the picture. Most people now believe that change happens through personal transformation rather than political struggle and change.

A central goal of the comic books is to politicize, not pathologize. Despite years of conditioning, our message appears to be welcome. As of this writing 125,000 comic books have been printed.