Voters should reject Proposition 20 and instead build more universities in California

I was born in 1982 and graduated from high school in 2000. During that same time, California drew upon its tradition of fear and “othering” to enter into a massive stage of carceral construction, building 23 prisons and only one university.

California made the decision to invest in my generational cohort’s potential for incarceration over and against our access to education and a more stable future. A destructive, short-sighted vision, indeed.

California’s Central Valley, where I grew up, is home to 12 of the 33 prisons in the state, serving as a stark contrast to the region’s beautiful rural landscapes and proud reputation as “breadbasket of the world.” The culture of incarceration of the region and its undergirding “law and order” logics — rooted in anti-Blackness — is so steeped into the region that my wife and I made the decision to not raise our Black son there. Furthermore, the religious impulse of California’s Central Valley is akin to that of the South, as California’s Central Valley is described as the “Bible Belt of California.”

As a son of the Black church growing up in the shadow of the prison, I began to ask: what is the connection between our region’s conservative religious impulse and its deep commitment to punishment? This question is of critical importance to think about as California voters will decide over the next few weeks whether to embrace Proposition 20, a bill that seeks to problematically overturn progressive reforms of California’s overreliance on the prison as a solution to the various social crises that we face as a state.

A helpful analytic for us to use when thinking about religious and theological impulses that undergird the carceral system is offered by Womanist theologian, Emilie Townes. Townes highlights for us that, “the sometimes deeply religious and/or theological underpinnings of our basic attitudes concerning the nature of peoples and the kinds of public policies we must respond with remains unacknowledged or unconscious.” Our legislative decisions which are codified through law and shape our public life together are laden with religious meaning. Overreliance on incarceration is rooted within what Townes describes as “the cultural production of evil.”

The cultural production of evil reproduces theological orientations, which fundamentally conflate Christian categories like “fallenness” and “unredeemed” with Black bodies themselves — irregardless of the type of life a Black person leads — and reproduces them in the arena of public policy. Blackness as conflated with the criminal, removable, element in society informs what ethicist James Logan describes as “retributive degradation,” which is the “punitive practice of (authorized) social vengeance and status humiliation carried out on those convicted of crime.” The criminalization of Blackness itself informs the removal of Black bodies from families and communities and into the carceral institutions that dot California’s landscape. This process is undergirded by Christian theological categories. Mass incarceration is religious in nature.

We urge the voters of California to reject the same old tired narratives put forth by police, sheriffs, correctional departments and their unions (those who have funded Prop. 20) that are invested in the fear mongering that has depleted public coffers and assigned minoritized persons to status humiliation through the prison system.

We urge California voters to reject the religious impulses that demonize and other vulnerable populations marking them for carceral destruction. Instead, let us continue in the reforms of Proposition 47 (2014) and Proposition 57 (2016). While reform bills are not the ultimate solution to dismantling the state’s investment in carceral logics, they are a step in the right direction. Let’s chart a future together, where over the next 40 years the state builds 23 universities rather than 23 prisons.

This story was originally published October 18, 2020 at 12:00 AM.