The prison system is not broken, it is functioning precisely as intended. From its inception, it has been a tool of racial terror, class warfare, and colonial control.
Anarchists don’t ask for kinder cages or gentler jailers. We demand the destruction of the entire carceral state. We do not seek reform. We seek abolition. We seek insurrection.
The United States government is not a democracy in any meaningful sense; it is a violent, imperial machine built on genocide, slavery, and theft. Its legal codes and institutions, especially prisons and police, exist to uphold this order.
The prison system is not about justice. It is about control. It is about disappearing the poor, the Black, the Indigenous, the defiant. It is about erasing dissent, suppressing rebellion, and maintaining the smooth functioning of capitalist exploitation. It is fascism dressed up in bureaucracy.
The U.S. holds over two million people in cages. More than any other nation on Earth. This is not a side effect of injustice, it is the architecture of white supremacist empire. The 13th Amendment legalized slavery under the guise of criminal punishment. That loophole fuels the modern prison-industrial complex: a billion-dollar industry that thrives on the forced labor and dehumanization of mostly Black and Brown bodies.
Police arrest the poor, prosecutors criminalize survival, judges rubber-stamp incarceration, and corporations profit from the blood. Prison labor builds furniture for government offices, sews uniforms, staffs call centers.
This is slavery.
This is fascism.
And yet liberals talk about “reforming” sentencing guidelines, as if tweaking the chain makes it less of a shackle.
Prison is a tool of racial terror. It isolates, it punishes, it kills. The state calls it justice. We call it war.
Police Are the Domestic Army of Capital
The police do not exist to protect people, they exist to protect property and power. Their origin is soaked in blood: slave patrols, settler militias, Pinkerton thugs hired to murder striking workers. Today, they fill the same role: armed enforcers of racial capitalism.
They carry military grade weapons, funded by bloated city budgets, to wage war on communities of color, the unhoused, and anyone who dares to resist. They shoot Black children in parks. They tear gas protesters. They evict families from homes.
They kneel on necks until breath is gone. These are not “bad apples.” This is the tree.
This is what policing is.
And what happens when people rise up?
The state shows its fascist face.
Protesters are beaten, kettled, surveilled, doxxed, and jailed. When the people demand liberation, the state responds with riot cops and tanks. What clearer sign is there that we are not free?
The U.S. State Is Fascist in Structure and Function
Fascism is not just goose-stepping uniforms and flag salutes, it is the merging of state and corporate power, enforced through militarized violence, nationalist mythology, and mass incarceration. The United States fits this definition. It always has.
It tells its people they are free while keeping millions in cages. It spreads empire through bombs abroad and police raids at home. It weaponizes nationalism to silence dissent and brands resistance as terrorism. It erases its genocidal past and calls it “history.” It strips people of healthcare, housing, dignity, then blames them for dying in the streets.
This is fascism. It is not coming, it is here. It is embedded in every prison wall, every police badge, every border, every surveillance camera.
No Reforms. No Compromise. Burn It Down.
We do not want better prisons. We want no prisons. We do not want gentler police. We want no police. We do not want a more inclusive empire. We want no empire.
Anarchism is not chaos,it is the struggle for a world without coercion, without rulers, without chains. It is mutual aid, collective care, radical imagination.