Marc Lamont Hill: Peace everybody you are now listening to The Classroom and The Cell Podcast. This is Marc Lamont Hill.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: And this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Marc Lamont Hill: Mumia, there has been such a push in the last three or four years to talk about mass incarceration, abolition, all of these issues that, a long time ago, seemed impossible. Suddenly, after the killing of George Floyd, after the mass movements in Minnesota, we’ve started to hear people say “abolition,” “defund,” all of these words. But that was 2020. Now, 2023 going into 2024, and I ask myself: Is abolition still at the forefront of our political imagination, and is it something that we can still see achievable?
Mumia Abu-Jamal: Well, if it’s not, then it should be, and it’s certainly, I mean, I’m a biased observer, right? Right?
Marc Lamont Hill: Fair enough.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: Attention. Yeah, hey, I only been here, like, as long as you been alive, right?
Marc Lamont Hill: Right.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: But it should be. And think about this: Angela Davis wrote a book. I’m trying to think of the title, but it was–
Marc Lamont Hill: Are Prisons Obsolete?
Mumia Abu-Jamal: Are Prisons Obsolete? And that had to be 2000?
Marc Lamont Hill: Yeah, yeah.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: Somewhere in that region? And I remember talking to my big sister, right? And, you know, she, she had become a nationalist, you know, and she, you know, we all often had militant and political, you know, conversations. And I, I was talking to her, and I was reading the book, and I was discussing it with her, and she said, ”Come on, man.” She said, “Abolish prisons? Come on. That’s just a little too far for me,” she said. She said, “Look, there’s some dudes that need to be in prison.” And, you know, she couldn’t even begin to open her imagination to a world without prison and a world, you know, we have to understand that in most of human life, that is, human existence on this planet, there were not prisons.
Marc Lamont Hill: Right.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: It’s a new institution, and what we have in the middle of the 20th centuryis an even newer institution, which is mass incarceration. And instead of dealing with issues of crime, it’s dealing with issues…
Facility recorded message: This is a call from Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution, Mahanoy. This call is subject to recording and monitoring.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: It’s dealing with issues, not just of superfluous populations. And I use that term, I think, as closely as possible, to reflect that reality, right? Real stuff, but also of the de-industrialization of whole areas of the American economy. I think recently we mentioned when we were talking about, like, right-wing fascist organizations, NAFTA, and how the right wing has kind of put their hooks into that, to try to attract working-class people to their movement. And the truth is, there is truth to that. When NAFTA happened, because capital cares more about profit than labor, and it made good sense to take jobs first to Mexico and what they called the maquiladoras, where they had no Social Security, no EPA, no nothing, and paid pesos to poor Mexican workers. And then, when that wasn’t enough, they fled to Vietnam, and ultimately they went to China. You know, the biggest GM capital, GM manufacturers in the world, are in China. And it’s all about cheap labor, the cheapest labor they could find. Because the cheaper the labor, the more the profit. The more the profit. And that’s all capital cares about. They only care about labor when labor forces them through strikes and denying their labor, right?
Marc Lamont Hill: Yeah.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: The share that labor should receive.
Marc Lamont Hill: That framework, that outline, is exactly why the struggle to dismantle the prison-industrial complex is so challenging, right? It’s because the forces–there are forces of capital–
Facility recorded message: This is a call from Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution, Mahanoy. This call is subject to recording and monitoring.
Marc Lamont Hill: There are forces of capital that uphold the prison-industrial complex. There are forces of capital that are empowered and strengthened for every minute that there are people who are caged. And, you know, until there’s not a profit invested in the exploitation of labor and a profit invested in the caging of people, the surveillance of people, the control of people, the coercion of people, the criminalization of people, until we until we take the profit out of that, then this system is not going to be easily dismantled. I think that’s why, you know, it’s so important to link a critique of the prison-industrial complex to a critique of capitalism. There is no abolition without capitalism. And I think part of the challenge in 2020 was we talked about defunding police, which can be a tactic and a strategy toward abolition, or can be a step short.
But in all the cases, until we link that to a conversation about dismantling capital, we’re not going to get where we want to be. And I think it was politically palatable at a moment where Black folk were getting shot in the street, to say, “Yo, we need to re-imagine policing.” People could, people could buy into that. They could, they could say, “A’right, well, I don’t know about getting…” like, your sister, I got a whole bunch of folks like, “Yeah, a’right, you know…” Richard Pryor said it, right? “I hated prison, so I went to prisons. [unintelligible] certain people, [unintelligible – ought to be in] to prison,” right? There are people who, people who have that mentality. They’re people who can’t imagine the world outside of policing and prison. We can persuade them, but even as we offer them other possibilities, as long as capital looms so large, as long as these structures of human exploitation loom so large, we’re always going to bump into resistance that’s not easily surmounted. We can’t just wait it out.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: No, you’re absolutely correct, but here’s the other side of the coin. You can’t talk about mass incarceration without talking about the Clinton administration and how they kind of bent over backwards to bring life to mass incarceration at a level and on a scale that had never been seen before in modern American society. And what they did was actually very clever, because they turned around and said, “How can we get white workers, especially rural white workers, to buy into this?” They said, “we’ll build prisons. They’ll have jobs for generations. Great paying jobs, state jobs with a, you know, state union, and there will never be an end.” You know, people, people will, you know, build their houses and buy their cars and live a good life in rural America on caging the excess population drawn from the ghettos of America.
Marc Lamont Hill: Man, I just want to give an example of that, for the people who may not understand. I used to visit you when you were on 175 Progress Drive, right? That’s a that’s a hell of a address for a prison.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: Ain’t it though?
Marc Lamont Hill: Man, and I would fly, I remember when I would fly to Pittsburgh, and then drive to Waynesburg and to SCI Greene. And it was, it was wild man, because on the way there, I would stop at gas stations, and the only people in the gas station, fueling and getting snacks were people going to visit people in the prison. I would go to the waiting area, and I remember getting there during a guard shift. And last thing you want to do when you visit somebody in prison is get there right before guard shift, cuz you got to wait for more more white men, more white men walking through a hallway than you ever imagined, it’s about a hour, right? And I remember one time Mu, man, they were sitting there, they were talking, and it was like, I was like, “Y’all all know each other?” They was like, “Well most of us went to high school together” or “We’re all from the same town.” And I was like, it’s got to be the whole damn town of Waynesburg.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: The whole damn town.
Marc Lamont Hill: Yeah. So, if you don’t, if you don’t work as a CO, you might be the electrician–
Mumia Abu-Jamal: Or work –
Marc Lamont Hill: You might be catering, right? You might be, you’re doing something there, because, if not, like you just said, you’re not working. And so, like, the entire town has an investment–
Mumia Abu-Jamal: That’s the point.
Marc Lamont Hill: –Right? But nobody in the– half the prisoners on death row was from Philly.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: Half the people in the prison were from Philly, if not 75 –
Marc Lamont Hill: Right.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: Yeah, you know, and so, but the mind that thought that up, right, was brilliant but malevolent, you know, because they locked it in with that economic imperative. And you know, like I’m now in another county in another side of the state, but it’s like a mirror image of Greene County, because both of these were mining communities, and the mines are gone. You know, America, really, you know, maybe in Kentucky, they have mines, but most Americans who worked in mines are unemployed or in new jobs if they’re working, because mining is gone. It’s not economically feasible, right, to have American miners, cuz other places do it better and do it cheaper. And this was a mining community, and Greene was a mining community, and those mines are gone. Should I say gone? They’ve been transformed into the new mines that we call prisons.
Marc Lamont Hill: Wow.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: And we the black gold bruh.
Marc Lamont Hill: You ain’t never lied, man, you ain’t never–so, so what do you see as a way to continue the energy and the move forward, like in the Trump era we were resisting, then you get Biden, who says, “Well, I’m pro cop,” right? “I’m pro this. I’m pro this,” right? And you there isn’t as much of a conversation about the defunding. It’s still happening. Abolition has never stopped. People are still organizing, we’re still planning, we’re still theorizing, we’re still strategizing. I’m not saying that, but in terms of the public conversation, how do we get it back into the public dominant conversation?
Mumia Abu-Jamal: Well, you have to talk about two things. And I think first of all, is the cost, cuz the cost is prohibitive. I mean, the DOC snatches about $3 billion a year from the state budget, and even though the population is down about 10,000 from what it was, like five years ago, it’s still, this is you know, huge economic investment. Here’s the problem; it’s an investment that does not work. Because when you think about, you know, capital is about making things that work and then selling those things. Prison doesn’t work, because people don’t come out of prison like, “Oh, I got a better head. I can get a gig.” They go out thinking about doing the same thing they thought about doing when they came in.
Marc Lamont Hill: Right.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: Cuz recidivism has got to be 70% in most states and like Pennsylvania. So, until that is transformed, all you have is the revolving door where cats are doing life on the installment plan.
Marc Lamont Hill: Whew! Life on the installment plan, just back and forth.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: In and out, in and out. You know what I mean? And what it is is a form of predation. Call it by its name, predation. And what, you know, what Angela talked about, is transforming prisons into educational institutions, right? That dealt with people and gave them an ability to learn how not to, like, open the doors to these places, right?
Marc Lamont Hill: Right.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: So, you know, education solves many problems, but most importantly, it opens up minds–
Facility recorded voice: You have one minute left.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: — what people have learned over the years. There’s a book called On Violence, and it talks about the Massachusetts DOC, and the guy that was the head of the DOC Psychology Department began seeing how lifers got out and never came back. You know the one thing he found out of that was consistent with lifers who left and never came back?
Marc Lamont Hill: What’s that?
Mumia Abu-Jamal: All of them had an education. All of them had a degree. You going out and you got a degree, you ain’t gonna sling nothing on no corner.
Marc Lamont Hill: Right.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: You might be slinging books.
Marc Lamont Hill: Right.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: But you ain’t, you know, you ain’t hustling cuz you–
Marc Lamont Hill: And the thing is, education is the one thing that they cut out of–
Mumia Abu-Jamal: That’s the one thing ‘brother Bill’, the first black president, Bill Clinton, cut all of that.
Marc Lamont Hill: Right. No Pell Grant, yep, all of it. They shutting down prison libraries. Now they don’t even want books to get into the prison, which we’re gonna talk about in another episode, man.
Facility recorded voice: Thank you for using [unintelligible]. Goodbye.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: Love you brother.
Marc Lamont Hill: Love you too man. On the MOVE. Everybody you’ve been listening to The Classroom and the Cell Podcast, we want to thank you for listening. Make sure you check out all the episodes that are there on the site. You go to YouTube, “Marc Lamont HillOfficial”. Again, it’s on the “Marc Lamont Official” YouTube channel. You subscribe, you listen and you share. We love you all. We appreciate y’all, On the MOVE.
These commentaries recorded by Prison Radio.