Imprisonment as a Waste Landscape

Thinkpiece on CSSD event How to Abolish Prisons: Gender an Analytic

By Arsema Asfaw

Tucked away in St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in West Harlem, CSSD hosted an evening gathering for community members and students interested in abolition and the criminalization of women. Scholars Professor Sarah Haley, writer and organizer Rachel Herzing, and community organizer and director Romarilyn Ralston, sit at the front of the room to discuss  what it means to abolish a carceral feminist vision that refuses the normalization of imprisonment. 

The scholar-organizers began the discussion with provocative questions surrounding the prison as a built environment as a way to visualize abolition; specifically, what implications arise when community spaces are changed (or, degraded) into prisons. What does it mean for a neighborhood to be marked over and over by institutions that turn care into captivity? Sarah Haley contextualized this question with a historical account of a prominent community support building in Harlem that became a prison: the Young Women’s Hebrew Association.  At the end of the 20th century, South Harlem received many Jewish residents –around 79,000 – who brought with them institutions like the Young Women’s Hebrew Association. The Y.W.H.A. building served as a place of gathering and support for newly immigrated Jewish people, and later during World War 2, served as a rest and relaxation place for Black veterans. However, by the 1970s, it had fully transitioned into a Harlem women’s jail under Governor Cuomo. What had once been a space of freedom, mobility, and community care became a site of confinement. Space is made from what inhabits it; when the body inhabiting the carceral site are women, predominantly women of color, the entire landscape becomes reshaped by a logic of punishment rather than one of community. Prison becomes the diametric opposite of community: a site where brutality, not belonging, becomes the operating principle.

Students listening in to the discussion.

Women of color; specifically,Black women, have been disproportionately criminalized and pushed into carceral institutions designed to contain, punish, and disappear their lives. The prison industrial complex depends on these layered forms of difference, on the belief that some lives can be cast aside. The scholar-organizers bring up this concept by describing prison as a “waste landscape.” What is determined as “waste,” after all, is relative and changes across culture and time; in our present moment, Black women are designated as waste and imprisoned to these carceral sites. The speakers returned to the idea of feminist abolition in praxis, a feminism grounded in self-determination and community support, rather than state violence or “carceral feminist” appeals to punishment. The speakers emphasized the importance of  practicing forgiveness in every way we can. They ask: What would it mean to imagine a feminism that refuses the logic of imprisonment altogether? 

The discussion came to a fruitful close after many inquisitive students asked questions on the praxis of abolition; however, the initial question still lingers: What could the building have been, and what can it still be?What does it look like to refuse the inheritance of brutality and build instead toward liberation? The fight over the building continues today: it was promised to become low-income housing but is now planned as a co-op. We see a repetition of space being stripped from centers for community, care, and justice to profit, and consequently, exclusion. Hope is not lost, though. Community organizers are working towards establishing mutual aid institutions that serve those who need them the most; the ones who will inherit and make up Harlem. The state recognizes how fundamental community is to producing thriving, determined individuals. Our solutions must return to this foundational pillar. We must recenter community for the future we want to build: a future free from carcerality. It existed once before, and it will exist again.