Opinion: Mass. has the lowest incarceration rate in the US. Let's continue this trend.
Let’s Decarcerate
On Jan. 24, the Massachusetts Department of Corrections (MCI) announced the closure of MCI-Concord, a medium-security men’s prison that once detained Malcolm X, is scheduled for the summer.
Citing mounting costs, major repairs, and a matter of justice as the main drivers for the closure, Gov. Maura Healey’s administration has taken a laudable step in the right direction.
Since 2019, Massachusetts has had the lowest state prison incarceration rates in the U.S., and they have continued to decline. Closing MCI-Concord will accelerate the trend of decarcerating the criminal justice system in the state.
This announcement comes only seven months after operations ended at MCI-Cedar Junction, a maximum-security men’s facility whose closure was announced in 2022.
Even so, the potential for a new women’s prison to replace MCI-Framingham continues to threaten the positive trend toward decarceration.
And though the Barnstable County Sheriff's Department was the last in New England to terminate an agreement, called a 287(g), with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the state Department of Corrections has a 287(g) agreement with ICE.
To decarcerate goes beyond bringing down the brick walls — it means undoing the racist systems of profiling and prosecuting, it means undoing the xenophobic systems of immigrant detention and deportation, and it means undoing systems of bail and probation that hold poor families hostage to exorbitant fees.
And those claiming that prisons work to house violent people, there are millions of victims of sexual and gender-based violence who would beg to disagree.
The rotten thread running through is the predatory companies and policymakers who promote and manipulate social friction to decimate communities for profit.
As Mariame Kaba reminds us in "We Do This 'til We Free Us" (2021), “A system that never addresses the why behind a harm never actually contains the harm itself. Cages confine people, not the conditions that facilitated their harms or the mentalities that perpetuate violence.”
Decarceration will not leave a vacuum in the social order if we divert the resources that fund the prison industry into health, education, affordable housing and community development. For MCI-Concord, the recovered funds are nearly $16 million in annual operating costs and another $190 million that would have renovated the 150-year-old facility.
On the road to abolition, our destination, we encounter creative prevention practices and alternative ways of policing and public safety. The golden thread running through is an ethics of care that prioritizes relationship and responsibility.
The end of mass imprisonment in our state has already begun — by declining agreements with ICE in Barnstable, by closing MCI-Concord and MCI-Cedar Junction and by rejecting a new women’s prison in Framingham.
Change is here. Let’s decarcerate.
Murylo Batista of Mashpee is a graduate of Sturgis Charter Public School and a public health researcher on violence prevention.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Opinion: Mass. has the lowest incarceration rate in the US
