Stanley-Eric-Captive-Genders-Trans-Embodiment-and-Prison-Industrial-Complex

Captive GendersStates topped $49 billion, up from $12 billion in 1978. 69 Prison expenditurein Britain has increased from £2.84 billion in 1995 to £4.33 billionin 2006. The U.K. now spends more per capita on prisons than the US. 70Increases in law enforcement budgets are directly related to cuts inwelfare, housing, medical care, and community programming. Massiveamounts of public money are being channeled into military, policing,and imprisonment regimes, while queer and trans-specific services, suchas HIV prevention, drop-in centers, education supports, peer mentoringprograms, employment training, and violence-prevention programs arechronically underfunded. Not surprisingly, there is an inverse relationshipbetween the amount of money a country invests in social welfareand the amount of crime it experiences: States with better welfare systemsand more equal distribution of wealth tend to have lower incarcerationrates. 71 When we consider what might be accomplished if even a fractionof prison and policing budgets were redirected into community-basedviolence prevention projects, the fiscal injustice of the prison system iseven more striking.8. Prison growth is reaching a global crisis, and LGBTQ people arebecoming increasingly complicit in its expansion.Using prisons, policing, and militarization as a response to social, political,and economic problems is a phenomenon that has grown dramatically inthe past thirty years. Though the modern prison is a relatively new inventionthat only dates back to the 1800s, its most dramatic expansion in theUnited States, Canada, and Britain has occurred in the past thirty years.Consider the following:• Between 1994 and 2004, the number of children sentenced topenal custody in England and Wales increased by 90 percent,despite declining rates of recorded crime by children. 72• As of April 2010, there were 12,918 people serving indefinitesentences in Britain, compared to fewer than 3,000 in 1992. 73• The racial demographics of the US prison population underwenta complete reversal in a mere four decades, shifting froma population that was 70 percent white at mid-century to 70percent black and Latino by the 1990s—even though racial patternsof “criminal activity” did not change significantly duringthat period. 74248