On Property by Rinaldo Walcott

Author:Rinaldo Walcott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2021-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

3. Abolition Now: From Prisons to Property

Whenever I did something wrong as a small child growing up in Barbados, I was threatened with being taken to Glendairy. HM Glendairy Prison was the only institution of its kind on the island and it was both scary and a touch mythical, too: no one knew anyone who had ever actually served time there, but we’d all heard whispers about people who knew people who had. Sadly, not knowing someone in prison or someone who has had recent interactions with the police is a luxury Black people now only infrequently have.

Glendairy Prison was built in 1855 and decommissioned in 2005, after being replaced with HMP Dodds. Glendairy remains a word that always portends for me the unspeakable. Built approximately three decades after the emancipation of slaves in the British colonies, Barbados having been Britain’s first in the Americas, Glendairy loomed as large for me as it did for all Barbadians, I now realize, because it was and continues to be a potent symbol of the still lingering effects of plantation slavery. For Black people, prisons are never far removed from the plantation and its actual and symbolic powers of control, entrapment, and the many punishments that can accrue from simply being a Black person in a society hostile to them.

Prisons remain terrifying places for most Black people; for most people, I expect. But the prison dominates our lives as Black people even when we think it has nothing to do with us. Politicians regularly point to it as a symbol of security, if a false one. The logic of law and order has so infiltrated and organized our lives as to make it one of the primary means through which contemporary social relations are routed and rooted. I mean by this that our political discourse often vacillates between economics, taxes, and security, with the latter often presented as the means through which we can maintain both our individual and collective economic advantage. As such, it has come to shape our social relations.

In 2003, the African-American intellectual, international activist, and renowned prison abolitionist Angela Davis posed an urgent question, one we all need to consider, with the title of her essential book: “Are prisons obsolete?” After George Floyd’s death and the ensuing protests, Davis was interviewed by key media about the history of and grounds for the recent call to “defund the police.” When she appeared on the Democracy Now! news program on July 3, 2020, Davis explained:

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