Findings

Abolitionist reforms can be understood as those that have the potential to liberate and challenge the popular narrative. Reformist reforms are those that only temporarily ease a symptom of the bigger issue. This type of reform and its processes ultimately validate the system by improving it. Reforms can and should support radical systematic change, and seek to address the root cause of the issue, challenge power structures, and purpose alternative structures, in addition to implementing reforms.  Often, reformist reforms and their proponents, reformers, possess limited scope and fail to fundamentally challenge the existing power structure. This type of reform is often employed by state officials. Reformist reforms and reformers  tend to, purposefully or accidentally, serve to demobilize movements and placate the public. 

The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC)  is defined as a set of governmental, private, and corporate interests that develop policies and practices in order to exert social, political, and economic control, and to perpetuate social processes that are biased by race, class, gender, and political perspective. The PIC is the political and economic investment in prisons. This results in prisons perpetuating the crime they were built to address. The prison's goal of crime reduction and rehabilitation is actually anti-ethical to the economy's goal of profit. 

The Non-Profit Industrial Complex, like the Prison Industrial Complex, is deeply entrenched in our society, and people are invested in its existence for both personal and monetary gain. The NPIC has become a web of interconnected businesses, policies, governmental contracts, and practices that align with corporate and government interests. This often results in maintaining the issue that non-profits were originally created to address. Then non-profit's goal of solving a social issue is actually anti-ethical to the economy's goal of profit. 

Author Paula X. Rojas explores the irony and the potential downfalls that could come from the collaboration between non-profits and the government. Rojas argues that cooperation with the government ultimately undermines the work of nonprofits. And if a nonprofit organization is being paid by the government, this leads to even further potential for government control. Non-profit collaboration with the government allows for the government to keep an organization from truly challenging the system, while the nonprofit gives up its full sovereignty.

Humane is a prison reform organization, with the singular goal of getting end-of-life care inside of prisons. While this is necessary, I have come to suspect that this goal and the way it is gone about within Humane can be defined as a reformist reform. I will explain two points of evidence that suggest this to be the case. The first is the fact that Humane is partnered with the state through a collaboration with the California Department of Corrections. As stated in earlier, it is often the state who uses these types of reforms to demobilize movements (the abolition movement) and maintain power. The second example comes from directly asking the Executive Director of Humane whether we have ever considered partnering with a prison abolition organization. She immediately said no, and that she thought that prisons were necessary and that some people really did belong in prison. This confirms that she has and directs with a reformist mindset. That is a belief that the system is broken and can be fixed, but a belief in the system nonetheless. This is in opposition to an abolitionist mindset which believes that the system is not broken, but inherently rotten.

Humane is a non-profit organization that works in prisons. This means it exists at the intersection of the Prison Industrial Complex and the Nonprofit Industrial Complex. In my field study I often thought, is Humane not a part of the prison industrial complex? It is an organization that employs people who make a living off of prisons, yes reforming prisons, but prisons nonetheless. They have economic interest vested in the existence of prisons, even if that economic interest is secondary, even tertiary to humanitarian and human rights interests. Similarly, if a non-profit could not exist without the set of issues they seek to address, is our society, policy, and that non-profit not, at least somewhat invested in maintaining these issues? I will add that there was a time when my executive director said “the point of this is to work ourselves out of a job”, so there was awareness within my organization that the implementation of an end-of-life program in prisons was the priority, not the continued existence of the organization. Yet there is no denying that Humane was an active part of both of these industrial complexes. 

The Humane Prison Hospice Project began working in collaboration with the California Department of Corrections (CDCR) this year to complete a palliative care training manual for those experiencing incarceration. There is an irony in partnering with the very entity whose practices necessitate the need for reform in the first place. There is also organizational sovereignty and autonomy lost, as I witnessed multiple times throughout my field study when we had to pivot to accommodate the CDCR’s requests. This loss of autonomy was also apparent when the CDCR made decisions that Humane disagreed with, that actually threatened the organization's very mission, and the executive director of Humane insisted on graciousness above all else to maintain the partnership with them.