Rethinking Global Justice: Black Women Resist the Transnational Prison-Industrial Complex

Abstract

This article explores the role of Black women in the U.S. and Canadian anti-prison movements and argues that anti-prison organizing is a critical site of anti-globalization activism. In the context of domestic economic restructuring, aggressive military interventions abroad and the global spread of neoliberal socio-economic policy agendas, increasing attention has been paid to the multifaceted global justice movement. At the same time, commentators in the U.S. and Canada have noted the underrepresentation of Black participation in anti-globalization activism. By identifying the work that prisons do in absorbing and disenfranchising communities who are surplus to the needs of global capital, and repressing and deflecting dissent to U.S. imperialism, the author reframes anti-prison activism as an overlooked site of global justice organizing. The article identifies six types of antiprison work—human rights advocacy; challenging “post-incarceration sentences”; campaigns for decarceration through legal reform; moratorium activism; abolitionist organizing for alternatives to the prison-industrial complex; and campaigns for the release of political prisoners—and examines Black women's labor as community activists and movement intellectuals in each.