The Intricate Functioning of the Prison Industrial Complex in Atlanta and Beyond
12 months after 2020's protests rocked ATL, the city got a massive police training center
We go to The Mainline for this week's long read by Micah Herskind, read the whole article “Cop City and the Prison Industrial Complex in Atlanta.” We include key excerpts below to convince you it’s worth your time.
From Local News Headline to Corporate Donations, the PIC is Everywhere.
The matter before City Council was a proposal to raze 85 acres of Atlanta’s South River Forest and replace it with a new police training center. Reflecting the center’s plans to include a mock city for police and fire training, organizers who mobilized against the plan had dubbed the proposed facility “Cop City.”
And yet, when playback of public comment ended and the council’s discussion began, council members largely failed to acknowledge the hours of public comment they had just heard—much less the far-ranging movement that produced such overwhelming dissent. Ultimately, the Council voted by a margin of 10-4 for the creation of the $90 million facility premised on the destruction of at least 85 acres of the South River Forest.
The City Council’s actions raise a question: how could there be such overwhelming public opposition to a proposal, and yet so little consideration from those in power of whether to push it through? Making sense of city leadership’s blatantly anti-democratic actions requires understanding how the prison industrial complex (PIC) functions in practice to expand policing and punishment at enormous human and environmental cost.
Underscored
The week after the City Council voted to table the Cop City ordinance in August, the Editorial Board of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) published an editorial urging the creation of Cop City and denouncing the delay of the legislation that would authorize it. The “crime wave,” the editorial argued, left no time to waste in creating Cop City.
Why was the AJC (Atlanta Journal Constitution)’s coverage and opinion space so one-sided? What is the paper’s stake in policing?
While the AJC made clear where it stood on the Cop City proposal in its editorial and surrounding coverage, the paper left unsaid a key relationship that might influence its coverage: the AJC is owned by Cox Enterprises, whose CEO Alex Taylor is chairing the fundraising campaign to raise over $60 million in private and “philanthropic” funding for Cop City.
In addition to serving as CEO of Cox Enterprises, Alex Taylor chairs the Atlanta Committee for Progress (ACP), which describes itself as “a partnership between the city’s top business, civic and academic leaders, and the Mayor of Atlanta to support positive change in our city.” Founded in 2003, ACP focuses particularly on development projects in Atlanta, and its board is mostly leaders of major corporations, including Delta Airlines, Equifax, Chik-fil-A, Koch Industries, AT&T, Home Depot, Mercedes Benz, Coca-Cola, and Georgia Power, as well as a number of Georgia-based university presidents and foundation representatives.
Think back to ACP’s mission, which explicitly links “public safety”—policing—with attracting “businesses and investment.” There are no secrets here, no conspiracy—just the interlocking forces of policing, gentrification, and wealth accumulation. It should be, then, no surprise that ACP’s Board Chair agreed to spearhead the fundraising for Cop City, or that the media outlet he owns reported so favorably on the initiative.
Bottom line
The ongoing story of Cop City in Atlanta is a window into how the PIC works to protect policing and profits at major human and environmental cost.
The relationship between the actors that constitute the PIC is symbiotic. They work together, not in a grand conspiracy, but rather through mutually-reinforcing relationships under a racial capitalist system that produces mass racialized poverty and hyper-concentrated wealth—a system that needs police to manage the former and protect the latter. In a system organized around profit, capital’s representatives and governments work together to pave the way for both future capital accumulation and the punishment infrastructure needed to secure it. Corporate-owned media rationalize and justify policing through sensationalist reporting that drives their own revenues. And the police crush dissent against the system that results in so much premature death and suffering.
Meanwhile, the relationship between the PIC’s actors and the rest of the public is parasitic. If constructed, Cop City will weigh most heavily on the predominantly Black communities closest to the proposed site, who will be forced to live under additional noise and land pollution. Fortified police presence will continue to result in police murders, arrests, and jailing, disproportionally of Black and poor communities. And climate disaster will hasten as Atlanta’s canopy is destroyed, natural flood-prevention mechanisms are dismantled, and temperatures rise.
Read the whole article here.
Resources: State policy changes. News. Bureau of Prisons updates. State court changes. Prison holistic self care and protection. Jailhouse Lawyers Handbook.
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