Essay On Are Prisons, Electronic Monitoring, And Border Walls

The Dangers that Prisons, Electronic Monitoring, and Border Walls Represent to Democracy The use of prisons, electronic monitoring, and border walls have increased drastically in modern years. These carceral technologies in the United States perpetuate systemic racism and classism but still have been integrated within a democracy claiming equality and equal opportunities for the people. The carceral technologies described in Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete, Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law’s Prison by Any Other Name, and Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty such as prisons, electronic monitoring, and border walls perpetuate systemic issues within the United States democracy that if continued will weaken our democracy continuing

Our democracy claims equality and equal opportunities but in reality, the systems within our democracy continue to perpetuate systemic racism and classism. The prison itself was a way to continue slave labor after slavery was abolished in 1865 and because of a loophole within the thirteenth amendment which states that slavery and involuntary servitude would not exist in the United States except as a punishment for crime. In Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete she explains the systemic racism engrained within the prison industrial complex and explains “In the twenty-first century, antiprison activists insist that a fundamental requirement for the revitalization of democracy is the long-overdue abolition of the prison system” (Davis 35). Davis annunciates that in order to revitalize democracy the prison system must be abolished as when systems built on inequality are allowed to continue those inequalities continue to be perpetuated. When these inequalities and inequities are perpetuated by democracy-endorsed systems it shows how weak democracy itself is. The prison industrial system perpetuates the inequalities that exist within democracy and if we allow these systems to continue democracy will continue as a system endorsing inequality. Along with the prison industrial system other carceral technologies such

Border walls were built with the goal of repelling migrants, smugglers, drugs, and contraband. As with most carceral technology the goals of building a border wall rarely come to be. Border walls instead are expensive to maintain and exasperate the issues they claim to be trying to solve. They also insinuate xenophobia and are used as a phycological defense weapon that encourages nationalism, harming democracy. Democracy is thought to be an open society where all are welcome but walls that surround democracies perpetuate the exact opposite of what democracy stands for. In Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty she explains how “[border walls] generate an increasingly closed and policed collective identity in place of the open society they would defend” (Brown 52). Border walls weaken democracy as they create a closed society with a nationalistic identity in place of one that is supposed to be open to all and open to ideas from everywhere. Border walls perpetuate a militaristic society and nationalism that creates a superiority complex of those living within the walls which is something one doesn't want to be represented in a democracy that was built to be open and welcome