Decarceration as Post-Conflict Reconstruction for the US

So I’m sitting here in Berlin, thinking WTF?  25 years ago, this was a divided city.  70 years ago, it was part of the Third Reich.  Today, it is a place where art and culture flourish, where you can take public transit everywhere from the Wannsee to Potsdam (with your bike or your dog, for that matter), and where abandoned airports are turned into beautiful parks.  Babies splash naked in fountains, teenagers bring bottles of beer down to the canal and watch the sunset, women walk down Kottbusser Damm with cell phones tucked into their headscarves for hands-free networking. 

At all hours of the day and night, people are in the streets: walking, riding bicycles, waiting for 24 hour buses.  Fresh, healthy, and even affordable food is available on almost every block, and even on hiking trails.  No, not even the forest is a food desert in Berlin!  And if I fainted from too much beauty, as I very well might, I am confident that I would receive medical treatment without emptying my bank account.

Sure, there are problems.  Potsdamer Platz is a nightmare of capitalist realism.  The caravan parks and squats that flourished in the 90s are struggling to survive, and they want the Yuppies ‘Raus (although someone spray-painted a P over the Y, making it Puppies ‘Raus).  Turks, Eastern Europeans, and other immigrants face overt racism and systematic forms of social, political and economic exclusion.  

Berlin isn’t perfect.  And yet, it’s remarkable how this city has managed to come back to life from almost unimaginable conflict and terror, and from not one but two massive carceral systems, within the past century.

Contrast this with the wreckage and diaspora of the Ninth Ward, still evident seven years after Katrina.  With the ruins of Detroit.  With California’s Golden Gulag.  With the wall we are building in the US-Mexico borderlands.  Or even with my own suburban neighborhood in Nashville, where the only time people come out of their houses is to cut the lawn.

The US has utterly failed to pull off a post-conflict reconstruction project, as W. E. B. Du Bois noted back in 1935.  We have still not rebuilt from the civil war.  We have still not rebuilt from slavery.  We have still not rebuilt from the genocide of Native peoples.  Or rather: we have built prisons and walls rather than communities.

What we needed back then, and what we still need today, is a meaningful post-conflict reconstruction plan for the United States. 

By reconstruction, I mean literally rebuilding the burnt-out apartment buildings and abandoned strip malls that litter the US landscape.  But I also mean (re)building community, (re)building public space in a way that both acknowledges the trauma of history and makes a commitment to work through it, (re)building and (re)claiming places where people can enjoy a life in common. 

We have not done this in part because we have lacked the courage to face the fact that the US has been at war with itself for centuries, and it is still a war zone.  Listen to this report from Harper High School on the South Side of Chicago.  Tell me that those kids are not living in a war zone.

A cornerstone of any reconstruction plan for the US must be decarceration.  The prison industrial complex blocks the successful rebuilding of communities across the US.  It shuts down schools while building prisons.  It separates parents from children and then blames them for not raising their families right.  It forces men and women in prison to manufacture equipment for the same military industrial complex that obfuscates the war zone in our own backyards and diverts money from what ought to be a massive reconstruction effort. 

Many middle class Americans will agree: Yes, that’s terrible (for them).  But what they don’t realize is that even wealthy people in the US lead impoverished lives compared to the gorgeous bounty and humanity of everyday life in Berlin.  You are not free if you live in a gated community, barricaded behind layers of security devices, unable or unwilling to walk down the sidewalk with other people (and/or puppies) with whom you share a place in common.

I know this sounds cheesy, but you can’t buy a meaningful sense of community.  But you can invest in a strategy for reconstruction that may someday bring it about, given enough love, intelligence, creativity and hard work.