• Advocacy groups in the South will partner with a press relations company or an ad agency to build the campaign. Some agencies, marketing teams, or P.R. agents in the state could be helpful, and finding abolitionist marketers and building the movement together is ideal.

• The national campaign will tell the stories of all that Southerners have contributed to the world in music, art, politics, civil rights, and their own unique culture.

• The second part of the campaign would consist of teams of traveling abolitionist educators who would go to churches throughout their state to educate churches on prison abolition.

• Create a prison abolition, church, and institution coalition in the South that helps rally for abolition, reform, and offer resources to those released from incarceration. Other things that are to be provided through this coalition are:

1. Legal Help: Have volunteers go to court with people who would be alone; otherwise, retain lawyers who will help clients pro bono.

2. Create a citizen crisis task force to help those who’ve been harmed or prevent those from getting a need met in a non-legal way.

3. Housing for previously incarcerated people

Emphasizing focus on decarceration in areas outside of the South leaves the most vulnerable populations in the United States behind once again in our country’s history. This single region incarcerates half of the people in prisons today. This region faces the most hurdles in changing things in terms of legislation.

• Advocate for police to jail less by using the “cite and release” protocol. Cite and release is an action where law enforcement releases a person on a promise to appear in court or pay a fine when involved in a crime.

• Get a team of researchers to observe sentencing inconsistencies, lack of choices instead of incarceration, and how many non-criminal violations filled the state’s prisons with persons convicted of low-level crimes. Find out how much imprisonment for minor infractions costs the taxpayer. The DCJ is an organization that could be beneficial in these actions.

The Data Collaborative for Justice (DCJ) works with local criminal justice leaders to research the operations of the criminal legal system. This model allows local decision-makers to understand their data, request data analyses to inform their thinking and identify operational changes and reform opportunities. At the same time, DCJ’s commitment to public release of our research ensures the public, press, and advocates have access to critical information about how the criminal legal system impacts communities.

• After acquiring the information, use it to target and change the sentencing for those low-level crimes. Eliminate mandatory sentencing for drug possession crimes, extend alternatives to imprisonment for drug offenses, make penalties for drugs like crack and powder cocaine sentences the same, and make many property crimes into delinquencies by increasing the dollar amount maximum for felony charges. Advocating for a fee and fine forgiveness or other alternatives to keep people out of prisons and jails using data. Inform taxpayers of what they are paying for and why it’s unnecessary.

• Decriminalize marijuana, sex work, and public intoxication.

• Find legislators in ones state that support decarceration. Help get bills passed that would change rulings, sentencing, bail costs, and how people are arrested (cite and release).

Jean Baudrillard prefaces Simulacra and Simulation with Borges’ fable. In this tale, an empire created a map as large as the kingdom itself. For Baudrillard, the map is hyperreality – the simulation of something that never was. (Baudrillard)

Baudrillard thinks society’s reality is an extreme version of the map story – instead of hyperreality detached from the real – we are confronted with a state of being where only a few pieces of life are the real, like meteors in space, humans are bouncing around in hyperreality . So many prisons in the South and their conversion from actual prisons to virtual tourist attractions are what Baudrillard would call “the murder of the real” by the virtual. (Baudrillard, 2000)

Baudrillard suggests that abstraction is “no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept.” That simulation is “no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance". (Baudrillard). When Baudrillard asserted the theory of hyperreality in 1981, it was dismissed in some circles and became a highly debated concept. The hyperreal of the time referred to advertising, video games, and coverage of major events like wars in the media. Today, hyperreality is an undeviating feature of life.

Much of today’s society is a hologram that we trust as reality. The hyperreal has gotten deeper through prison theme parks, the metaverse, fake news, smartphones, and reality T.V. The virtual world has its own economy with eCommerce, crypto, and NFTs. The portrayal of jails in the media and prison tourism is distorting and does nothing to help people understand the facts of the current and real incarcerated people or the United States history, which is entangled with criminalizing people of color, particularly Black folks, and the poor. Suppose society approves of and is entertained by the ludicrous exhibition of the prison as an assortment of attractions and a necessary evil. In that case, literal carceral environments remain ignored or seen as fixed. All the complexity, sadness, and pain are commercialized to placate social desires for a watered-down history and tacky, albeit a more digestible, version of reality. According to Marijana Bittner, the visit to a violence-related tourist attraction is motivated by cultural needs. Several respondents to her work stated the element that drew them to these areas of mass executions, wars, homes of the deceased, and prisons, is that they guide the culture of a nation. The visits can make one feel like humanity has evolved. The commodification of prisons and the pain inflicted upon the incarcerated as a standard cultural feature have normalized this shameful part of society. (Bittner) The terrible realization society can come to is that prisons weren’t ever required for public safety or justice, and the system has not evolved. The foundations of prison are exploiting underserved communities and upholding white supremacy and are continuing to function this way.

Just as protests around the country have gotten statues of the confederates and colonizers removed, abolitionists, and even reformists, need to come together and do the same to end prison tourism.

People who enter the criminal justice system are devastatingly low income. Two-thirds held in jails report annual incomes under $12,000. (Alexander) Incarceration spawns poverty by creating employment obstacles, reduction in earnings, reducing economic security through court-appointed debt, fees, and fines, and creating a barrier between previously incarcerated people and public benefits.

The poverty rate in the United States also leads to people engaging in criminal activity to have their needs met. 

The exploitative labor market and the concept of “low skilled labor” have held back workers from being able to support themselves while working full-time jobs.

Solutions to gaining economic justice in the South:

• Raising the Minimum Wage

• Progressive Taxation

  A progressive tax increases the average tax burden with income. (Aka, Tax the Rich)

• Bringing dialogue around poverty and pay into religious circles

  When traveling to churches, highlight poverty and how it impacts people’s lives in the South. Educate institutions about the disparity and ask them to support protests and legislation ending poverty.

• Expanding Access to trade schools & Higher Education in the region

• Use the NLIHC Advocates Guide to Advocate for Affordable Housing

  Every year, the National Low Income Housing Coalition publishes the Advocates’ Guide to Housing and Community Development Policy to educate advocates of all kinds about the programs and policies that make housing affordable to low-income people across America.

  Anyone can advocate for housing programs with our members of Congress and other policymakers, and this guide directs organizers on how.

 What we now know as the adolescent legal system in the United States can be followed back to the Puritan era in the mid-1600s. Colonizers duplicated the English justice system, incorporating “poor laws,” which forced children showing irresponsible behavior into a life of involuntary labor. (Lees)

The Refuge Era is a time that highlights when reform efforts were contributory to the development of distinct institutional settings for children and adolescents. These situations incorporated houses of refuge, foster homes, and reform schools. Juvenile “offenders” were positioned in houses of shelter through the courts. Most kids usually were in reform home homes until they were considered adults. Disciplinary tactics within places of refuge comprised things like losing privileges to being whipped. During this time, a group known as the child-savers became very well known. (Platt). The child-savers involved campaigners who advocated for the idea that kids are pure and children shouldn’t be held to the same standards as adults. Child-savers were anti arrests and legal trials for youth. They believed society should fix social problems for children who acted out. (Platt) However, at this time, Black and other children of color were not seen as equals, and they didn’t receive the same kind of activism as white kids. (Burton)

In the 1960-the 1970s, the juvenile legal system reflected that of the adult criminal justice system, even though the legal procedures were deliberately distinctive. ( National Research Council and Institute of Medicine.) This shift can be attributed to Nixon’s war on drugs. As the juvenile system changed, the country saw soaring rates of incarceration. The war on drugs, which most in the U.S. agree was an utter failure, focused intensely on punishment, a heightening level of arrests, and long-term incarceration of people with nonviolent drug offenses—all of which, unsympathetically at the time, affected children and families.

The path forward to ending youth incarceration and stopping vulnerable families from being destroyed due to a loved one, or parent, being imprisoned comes down to social workers.

• An MSW degree is tough to achieve and inaccessible to the people who could most speak to issues like poverty, trauma, race, and incarceration. The dissonance creates social workers who work in communities with bias. White cisgender women must make up less of the workforce in the future. According to the Council on Social Work Education (2015), approximately 70% of students working towards a social work degree are white. In contrast, only 25% of students obtaining the same degree identified as people of color. 83% of social workers are women. (CSWE, 2017) A program should be advocated for community colleges to offer social work accreditation, leading to people getting licensure or scholarships in social work programs specifically for people most affected by things like incarceration and poverty.

• Social workers must unionize. One reason for the dissonance, aside from obvious privilege, is that those who work in the field are underpaid and overworked. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median annual salary for all social workers in the U.S. as of May 2021 was $50,390, while the top 10% earned more than $85,820. Social workers must be paid better, particularly case managers who interact with clients most but are paid less ($15 - $27 an hour according to PayScale).

• Abolition tactics should be used before involving the state in all areas affecting children in the field.

Social work must develop into an abolitionist structure toward ending state-sanctioned violence and building and affirming relationships with groups that endorse similar values. Social work must change its practices by moving from a savior complex to camaraderie with those they serve. The profession will mutate into an anti-capitalist, decolonized field that does not lean on the criminal justice system. The domain must persistently work toward transparency and revolutionizing care for youth, or it should be abolished because it is a carceral function that doesn’t minimize the impact of incarceration and harms children.

“LANDBACK is a movement that has existed for generations with a long legacy of organizing and sacrifice to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands. Currently, LANDBACK battles are being fought across Turtle Island, to the North and the South.” (LANDBACK)

White people can assist in undoing the violent colonizer carceral state by supporting the LANDBACK Movement. L.B. can be one of many reparations made to the Black and Native American communities. Although these goals seem vast and hard to imagine, the LANDBACK movement has won victories, including the elimination of dams along the Klamath River in Oregon following a long campaign by the Yurok Tribe and other activists, and the return of 1,200 acres in Big Sur, California, to the formerly landless Esselen Tribe. (Thompson) In 2019 the United Methodist Church gave away ancestral land in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, to the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma. In 2020 the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Six Nations set up a roadblock on 1492 Land Back Lane to shut down a housing development on their unceded land in Ontario. (Bender)

In 2020 in response to protests at Mount Rushmore, the Indigenous organization NDN Collective drafted the LANDBACK Manifesto entitled: “The Reclamation of Everything Stolen from the Original Peoples.” The LANDBACK campaign was formally launched on Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 2020. (Bender)

The most well-known LANDBACK type of success was in Oklahoma in In McGirt vs. Oklahoma; a 5-4 majority on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Muscogee Nation’s reservation was never disestablished and state officials cannot try crimes involving American Indian victims or perpetrators on reservation land. (Miller and Dolan) The ruling can make it, so it includes the reservations of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Quapaw nations, encompassing most of eastern Oklahoma. (McGreevy)

“As organizers, oftentimes we do this work knowing that we may not be alive to eat the fruits of our labor,” says Krystal Two Bulls, director of the nascent LANDBACK campaign at NDN Collective. “But LANDBACK is one of those things that I know is possible. I will be alive to see Mount Rushmore closed and to see public lands in the Black Hills returned.” (Thompson)

When decarceration succeeds, prisons can be closed. These lands prions sit on, among other stolen lands that the government has in possession, can be given back to the original Native Tribes who owned them. LANDBACK goes beyond land possession and is generally a call for ending white supremacy and building modes of care within oppressed communities. It is a continuation of the work of indigenous people’s ancestors. 

Prison abolition is about ending colonial, racist, and oppressive violence inflicted upon people by the state. LANDBACK wants the same outcome. Those who care to end mass incarceration or the prison structure must support LANDBACK and include indigenous and Native people in organizing around prisons in the Southeast.

LANDBACK MANIFESTO

“It is a relationship with Mother Earth that is symbiotic and just, where we have reclaimed stewardship.

It brings our People with us as we move towards liberation and embodied sovereignty through an organizing, political and narrative framework.

It is a long legacy of warriors and leaders who sacrificed freedom and life.

It is a catalyst for current generation organizers and centers the voices of those who represent our future.

It is recognizing that our struggle is interconnected with the struggles of all oppressed Peoples.

It is a future where Black reparations and Indigenous LANDBACK co-exist. Where BIPOC collective liberation is at the core.

It is acknowledging that only when Mother Earth is well, can we, her children, be well. It is our belonging to the land - because - we are the land.

We are LANDBACK!”

ENDNOTE

When meditating on the layered history of prisons and the future that holds abolition, much of the paradigm shift has to happen within people along with these actions. Activists could take the leftist saying, "Kill the cop in your head'' and make it their mantra. Some might find the phrase too radical or violent so they should make one up that means the same thing. The expression is a reminder that one is a part of the colonized white supremacist structure, and therefore its values and concepts are placed into ones thinking from birth. Nobody can abolish the policing system and systemic violence until they abolish the policing system within. Everyone must dismantle white supremacy, colonialism, ableism, sexism, classism, anti-blackness, racism, homophobia, and transphobia while lifting up indigenous people’s work to have a society that doesn’t exploit people through prisons or any other way. People must do the internal work and help others do the same on the road to abolition. Humility and collaboration are at the center of prison abolition in the Southeast.