Ang Bennett | Reflections of Advocacy and the Thin Silver Line
Ang Bennett is an artist, curator, advocate, and former correctional officer. They are a 2020 Young, Black, and Influential award recipient for Creativity. Ang’s art practice focuses on past and present themes of racial inequity, class privilege, and LGBTQ2IA identities. To learn more about them, visit www.angrbennett.com.
Reflections of Advocacy and the Thin Silver Line
One thousand, three hundred, sixty-eight. That is the number of days that I spent swiping a badge to enter a building, in a position that I believed, at the time, to be on the right side of change. When I first stepped into the role of Correctional Officer, I had this novel idea that I could start at the lowest level, work my way up, and enact a system change from within.
Each day that I buttoned my shirt, laced my boots, and strapped on my duty belt, felt like another day that I was serving the system, not breaching it. In a uniform, you must abide by the policies and procedures set forth by the institution, nothing more. If you have a conversation with an incarcerated person that lasts longer than five minutes, you’re placed under a microscope and watched at all times. Showing concern for someone’s mental health gets shot down with, “They’re probably just going through withdrawal. They’ll be fine.” Prolonged conversations and assisting someone outside of the scope of the duties of the job is immediately seen as unethical and a show of favoritism.
Bodies placed beyond barbed wires and secure doors are often judged by their worst mistakes. They are not allowed the grace of having too few resources, lack of mental health facilities, defunded public education - failed community systems that say a body is worth more behind bars than on the street.
In Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex, Angela Davis states, “Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.”[1] She also makes note that, “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.”[2]
What does advocacy look like when parameters are put in place for it to fail? For one thousand, three hundred, and sixty-eight days, I watched as funding was pushed for new jails and prisons, finances that paid my salary, while aid for mental health facilities and community resources gradually got stripped away. Our local police department sits on a budget increase of $21 million, yet we are told that $2 million towards mental health is a waste, as it is seen as a billion-dollar problem not solved by small funds.
Re-entry programming gives the public a feigned sense of relief that these institutions are a place of “rehabilitation” and “corrective behavior.” There are no long-term mental health solutions, no action-based planning around managing addiction, or achievable goal setting. There is no training that allows for a person to adjust to life outside of a six by eight-foot cell.
After one thousand, three hundred and sixty-eight days, I swiped a badge for the final time. Even as a black body, when you are in a blue uniform, your commitment to upholding a standard of respect, fairness, and consistency will always be questioned, and your advocacy untrusted. Abolishing prisons is the ultimate goal. In the meantime, I will continue to nourish the freedom to stand and fight with system impacted individuals and organizations who are committed to doing the work to dismantle systemic oppression. Everyone deserves to know that they are not the sum of their poorest choices.
[1] Davis, Angela “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex,” ColorLines, September 10, 1998. https://www.colorlines.com/articles/masked-racism-reflections-prison-industrial-complex.
[2] Ibid.
Links between environmental justice and prison reform easily emerge when we consider the facts. The United States is the biggest carbon polluter in history. It also incarcerates a higher rate and number of its citizens than any other country in the world. The practices that have led to the kinds of ecological devastation we now face are rooted in social relationships of exploitation, domination, and inequity that also undermine the well-being of large numbers of people, especially poor people, communities of color, indigenous people, and migrants — the same groups that are then targeted by the criminal justice system as the state’s favored mode of crisis-abatement.
In a 2018 post for Greenpeace USA titled, #PrisonStrike, Abolition, and Environmental Justice, Maggie Ellinger-Locke, staff attorney at Greenpeace USA, points to specific examples that illustrate how the prison industrial complex contributes directly to social, environmental, and ecological degradation. She says:
Prisons have long been places where environmental regulations have taken a back seat to profits, and communities of color are disproportionately impacted by both environmental harms and the prison industrial complex. Polluting facilities are more likely to be built in such communities, and the choice of where to build prisons follows this same pattern.
Many prisons are built on locations that are the least likely to be selected for anything else by developers, like old mining sites, Superfund sites, and landfills. According to a 2016 report, at least 598 federal and state prisons are located within three miles of a Superfund site, with 134 of them just one mile away.
A 2014 report by the Abolitionist Law Center and the Human Rights Coalition examined the health of prisoners at SCI Fayette—a prison in rural Pennsylvania constructed on what was once one of the world’s largest coal “cleaning” operations. The report found that 81% of prisoners there suffer from respiratory, sinus, and throat conditions; 68% suffer from GI problems; and 12% reported being diagnosed with a thyroid disorder. Of the 17 prisoners who died at between 2010-2013, 11 died of cancer.
And prison conditions can be made worse by climate change. In 2011, ten prisoners died of heat stroke in Texas state prisons, and as of 2017 the majority of housing units still lack air-conditioning. During Hurricane Harvey, inmates went days without access to basic services, including running water.
Prisons themselves can be a cause of toxic pollution. In 2014 a California state prison was fined $600,000 for spilling 220,000 gallons of raw sewage into a nearby creek that flows into a protected marine estuary. Spills have continued; the prison was fined in both 2015 and 2017 as well.
Indeed, agency regulation is one of the only tools available to push back against such toxic incidents. Between 2012 and 2017 federal and state agencies brought 132 informal actions and 28 formal ones against prisons under the Clean Water Act. Though this is likely just a small sample of the harm that prisons cause our environment and surrounding communities to experience.
You can read more about decarceration and environmental justice here and here and donate to abolitionist organizations like Black and Pink, Fight Toxic Prisons, and the Prison Ecology Project to help.