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Today, states grapple with decarceration and deinstitutionalization, not necessarily because of an ethical recognition of the continuing harm of confinement and segregation, or because of an understanding of the intertwined histories of capitalism, white supremacy, ableism, and punishment in the United States, but because of a desire to curb public spending on social services. These include the very services that people need as alternatives to more oppressive edifices and as preventive measures to winding up in such places. While public neighborhood urban schools, public housing, and mental health clinics are shuttered, private companies and “not for profit” services partially fill the void.

Alternatives emerge when facilities shut their doors. Closures, as prison justice organizer Angela Davis suggests, provide an opportunity for not only a “radical imagining” of the kind of social landscape desperately needed—but also the moment to build it. As people move between different forms and scales of cages, and as patterns of surveillance and punishment morph, new forms of capture do emerge and yet resistance is also possible. The state often refuses to offer services in place of the ones that were shuttered, leaving the responsibility to the individual (or her family and the market). This is a moment to collectively demand, fund, and build public infrastructure that will move everyone closer towards a world that does not rely on segregation and confinement, or access to private capital, as its mode of dealing with structural inequities.