« LAPD officers more likely to stop, search and arrest minorities than whites, report says | Main | Hiding Out In Prison Bonds---How Lease Revenue Bonds Work »
October 22, 2008
Activists publish comics exposé on 'real cost of prisons': A Q&A
Activists publish comics exposé on 'real cost of prisons': A Q&A
By Larry Parnass
10/22/2008 - 13:57
NORTHAMPTON - All this decade, Lois Ahrens of Northampton has been working to reveal the social, emotional and plain old dollar cost the country faces by jailing 2.3 million people.
Tonight at 7 p.m., she and Ellen Miller-Mack will talk about their "Real Cost of Prisons Comix" project at Broadside Bookshop, at 247 Main St. in Northampton.
Three comic books they and other writers and artists created over the past several years - works that explore the consequences of the nation's policies on incarceration - have been gathered in a single volume by PM Press of Oakland, Calif., with a new preface, introduction and reader statements.
Without taking any pay for her labors, Ahrens has mailed 100,000 copies of the three earlier comic books to readers around the country - a place that jails seven times as many people per capita as Canada.
Ahrens spoke about her ongoing work.
QUESTION: Will collecting the comics into a single paperback book enable this work to reach a wider audience?
LOIS AHRENS: I'm hoping that the book will allow the comics and the materials that go with them to reach a different audience. My big hope is that places like public libraries buy it and that it will be used in college classes. That it will be sold to the public in a way the comics never were, since they were given away. It will reach maybe not a wider audience, but a different audience.
QUESTION: How do you overcome the belief, held by some, that prisons make everyone outside safer?
LOIS AHRENS: It's an ill-informed belief. Criminologists have never been able to prove that there is a correlation between incarceration and the rise and fall of the crime rate. Incarceration has been going steadily up. From the end of WWII to 1970, there were 200,000 people in prison in the U.S. From then to now, it has grown to 2.3 million people - and the crime rate has not really changed. There are all of these studies now that show that when you have the kind of intense incarceration that goes on in cities, the crime rate goes up, because whole neighborhoods become eviscerated. It doesn't cause less crime, it causes more crime.
QUESTION: Now that a massive prison-industrial complex is built, what realistic hope is there of dismantling it?
LOIS AHRENS: The hope is that it hasn't existed for centuries, it's been built over the last 30 years. It's been built because people have been willing to pay for it. It could be that people are starting to see they haven't gotten much for their money. In Massachusetts, the budget has more for prisons than for higher education. Maybe people would rather pay for higher education than for prisons. Maybe the days of pure punitive policy are not something people still want to pay for, especially now. It's going to take people saying they think this is a bad idea - and they're tired of paying for it.
Daily Hampshire Gazette © 2008 All rights reserved
Source URL: http://www.gazettenet.com/2008/10/22/activists-publish-comics-expos%C3%A9-039real-cost-prisons039-qampa
Posted by lois at October 22, 2008 01:54 PM