Copaganda in an Age of Reform
Over ten years after the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, views on policing by most Americans, especially White Americans, have hardly shifted. Is there any way to shift the established narrative around cops? Photo courtesy of spurekar.
My grandmother is a felon. I don’t believe I've ever told someone that. I haven’t even told you, only quietly written it.
Her first husband, the closest thing my mother had to a father, was also a felon who spent much of his life in federal prison. Yet, I feel so far from the prison system. If asked, I’d tell you that I had no association with it beyond an intellectual belief that the US carceral system is fundamentally abusive. Why am I unsure of my distance from prison? The apparatus that held my family. The system that I watch for entertainment in the movie theater or read about coldly in the newspaper.
In one of her most famous works, Are Prisons Obsolete?, Dr. Angela Y. Davis posits that the U.S. prison system operates as a paradox in the American imagination. Davis, who rose to fame in the 1970s after then-California Governor Ronald Reagan attempted to remove her from her professorship at the University of California, Los Angeles, for being a member of the Communist Party, has long been a symbol for anti-capitalist, pro-Black, and generally leftist movements in the United States. In this series of essays, she argues that all Americans—even those with a personal experience with the carceral system—are socialized to accept prison as natural, but they “are often afraid to face the realities they produce.” An individual’s constant cognitive distancing from the prison system, as described by Davis, leads to the prison being both “present in our lives and, at the same time… absent from our lives.” The paradox deludes individuals into thinking they are outside of the reach of the prison system. Yet, they are connected to, and actively participate in, the carceral system by imagining the prison as solely a place to sequester individuals. In this, individuals mentally distance themselves from the overall institution while upholding its importance as a solution to criminality.
While Davis' work remains central to many who advocate for prison abolition and even smaller reforms, Are Prisons Obsolete? speaks to the 2003 moment in which it was written. Davis focuses her critique on the proliferation of prisons in the physical and media landscapes. Needless to say, the nation has changed greatly in the last twenty years. The United States experienced a 24 percent decline in prison population between 2009 and 2022, racial disparities in drug sentencing have fallen since 2010, and there have been sharp declines in pedestrian stops and arrests in major metropolitan areas like New York City. These trends should point to some improvement within the carceral system.
More significantly to Davis’ theory, there has been a cultural reckoning around the role of police and their participation in a larger system of anti-Black racism. After a series of high-profile, violent, and racially-charged police encounters in the 2010s, the Black Lives Matter movement ushered in a nationwide reckoning around policing and anti-Blackness. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, a Gallup poll found that White Americans reported a lower rate of confidence in the police—with 56 percent feeling a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in police, compared to 60 percent in 2014—yet this rate remains nearly double that of African Americans. Despite widespread reporting on the disparate effects of policing on Black Americans, police are still viewed favorably by the majority of White Americans. Although Floyd’s murder may have seemed like the beginning of a new era in criminal justice, it has become clear that this supposed racial reckoning was insignificant in the long term for the average White American.
In the face of White Americans’ stagnant views on policing despite reporting on obvious inequities, Davis’ observation on the power of perception within the prison system still rings true. Recent studies show that a higher percentage of Black Americans experienced street stops initiated by police officers than any other racial group, 18 percent compared to 15 percent of White people. In street and traffic stops, police were also more likely to search and arrest Black Americans. Even for those without direct contact with the criminal justice system, Black people, particularly Black women, disproportionately face the burdens of mass incarceration. For example, Black women have, on average, two family members incarcerated, whereas White women can expect to have just 0.14. These disparities ensure that White Americans, less likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested by police and to not know anyone incarcerated, are often physically disconnected from the carceral system. Without any practical knowledge of prison or policing inequity, White Americans are primed to accept prisons because it is “difficult to imagine life without them,” in Davis’ words. They provide us with the simplest solution to the issue of “crime.” Without direct contact, people then turn to media, both nonfiction news coverage and fictionalized narratives, to develop thoughts on the police.
A study researching CNN and Fox News’ coverage of George Floyd’s murder and its subsequent protests on Twitter, now called X, found that coverage diverged into distinctly pro-police, in Fox News’ coverage, or pro-police reform, in CNN’s reporting stances. The durability of police approval ratings is thus unsurprising, as Americans are free to choose the news source that confirms their preformed opinions. It is also notable that the US lacks any large-scale news source that gives a critical view on the policing system, rather than simply critiquing individual actors or specific instances of civil rights violations. In fact, local news media coverage supportive of police effectiveness actually increased 4 to 6 percentage points quickly after the death of George Floyd. Despite perceptions from some that news media shifted towards a more critical stance on policing and criminal justice, the reality remains that the views of prison abolitionists, or even more critical reformers, lack the mainstream platform that Davis posits is essential to shift views on police and the carceral system.
Fictionalized media, particularly the rise of true crime shows, documentaries, and podcasts in recent years, has also impacted the public’s beliefs on policing. In a recent study, the consumption of true crime media caused a greater support for law enforcement. Again, this highlights the strong influence of media choice and provides the opportunity for individuals with pro-police views to simply reinforce those views with their media choices. Moreover, it’s important to note that these programs are, at the end of the day, entertainment. Moments are dramatized and sensationalized to keep a viewers’ attention while they choose from a plethora of Netflix docuseries or cold case-centered podcasts. However, a media environment that is largely devoid of media critical of the police breeds a world where people form opinions on the carceral system through fictionalizations.
Despite a seemingly shifting public opinion, Dr. Angela Davis’ thesis remains true. In a society that constantly reinforces the necessity of policing and the larger carceral system through entertainment and the news media, Americans’ views on the police seem destined to never change. Even with my blood connection to the prison, most everything I see and absorb, both framed as fiction and nonfiction, reinforces the need for our current carceral system despite the disparate abuses it creates.
Gabi Fabozzi (BC ’28) is a rising sophomore studying political science and a Yale Law School Liman Summer Fellow. She can be reached at glf2126@barnard.edu.