Nicolas Lampert - Just Seeds Portfolio Project

Prison Culture is an attempt to document how the current prison industrial complex operates and to underscore the ways that it structures American society.

I created this blog as way to make sense of all of the information that comes my way through the work that I do.  I started the blog for myself. It was sort of a running work journal; a place to catalogue all of the ideas, thoughts, musings, and resources that I have about mass incarceration, transformative justice and the prison industrial complex (PIC). 

Since launching the blog in late June 2010, it turns out that others have also found things that are of interest to them here. This is an added bonus. I hope that some of those who read the blog might also become motivated to take action to abolish prisons. We can use more abolitionists in the world. So welcome to Prison Culture!

I rely on a definition of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) developed by Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA) as:

“a massive multi-billion dollar industry that promotes the exponential expansion of prisons, jails, immigrant detention centers, and juvenile detention centers. The PIC is represented by corporations that profit from incarceration, politicians who target people of color so that they appear to be “tough on crime,” and the media that represents a slanted view of how crime looks in our communities. In order to survive, the PIC uses propaganda to convince the public how much we need prisons; uses public support to strengthen harmful law-and-order agendas such as the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terrorism”; uses these agendas to justify imprisoning disenfranchised people of color, poor people, and people with disabilities; leverages the resulting increasing rate of incarceration for prison-related corporate investments (construction, maintenance, goods and services); pockets the profit; and uses profit to create more propaganda.”[1] see also: criminalization,  street-based economies, “quality of life” policing”