January Colorful Column - Azkaban is Real: Prisons, Part I
Hello there, and welcome back to our monthly Colorful Column! Over the next couple of months, we will be discussing prisons and the Prison Industrial Complex. Why? Well, because we believe there is no way to meaningfully engage with racial equity and representation without acknowledging the system that - as Michelle Alexander writes in her essential book, The New Jim Crow - functions as the modern iteration of slavery. And lest we think this has no relevance to our little fandom, well, keep reading.
Before we get into the weeds, a quick note. I, Mod Theo, am working and writing from the perspective of someone born, raised, and living in the United States. The sources and resources linked here will reflect that fact. Later columns will explore these themes in a less US-centric context.
Go back to the first time you read Prisoner of Azkaban (or saw the movie, or engaged the narrative in fic, whichever came first). Do you remember what thoughts you had about Azkaban, about Sirius Black and his fate? Do you remember finding out that there existed, in magical society, a prison so relentless that no one had ever escaped from it? Do you remember reading about the Dementors - about how they sucked all the life out of the air, everything good out of the soul - and how they patrolled Azkaban at all times, subjecting the prisoners to their specific brand of torture? And do you remember when Harry finds out that Sirius Black was his godfather - his parentsâ best friend - and had betrayed them to Voldemort, leading to their murder? And then do you remember finding out he was innocent all along?
Now, do you know where the nearest correctional facility is in relation to where you are right now? Do you know how many people are held there? Do you know what percentage of prisoners there have committed violent versus nonviolent crimes? How many havenât been convicted of anything at all but are awaiting trial and have been unable to afford bail? How many took plea bargains, even though they are innocent? How many are disproportionately Black, brown, indigenous, trans, disabled, and mentally ill? How many will die there?
Before you knew he was innocent, did you think Sirius Black deserved to live out the rest of his life in Azkaban?
Thatâs an awful lot of questions. You donât have to know the answer to all, or even most, of them. The reason I ask is because I remember thinking Sirius Black deserved to live out the rest of his life in Azkaban. But more importantly, I remember thinking - and I gave thanks for this, and it was one of few times I was glad the world of Harry Potter was not a real one - that Azkaban existed in a fantasy about magical beings and unspeakable evil and unequivocally awful crimes, and thatâs it.
Thatâs a lie. Magic isnât real, I begrudgingly accepted, but Azkaban is. And 2 million of the population of my own country is currently living there. Â
First, full disclosure: both of your Mods are staunch prison abolitionists. That means that we inherently disagree with the existence of prisons and want to work towards a world in which prisons, prisoners, and police do not exist. If that sounds absurd to you, donât worry. You donât need to agree with us to read this column or follow this blog. (And if youâre intrigued by the concept of prison abolition but donât quite know where to start, weâd recommend you start here or here.) For the sake of this column, the only thing you need to know is that prison abolition - and really any liberation movement - requires a lot of imagination. Luckily, thatâs something we here in the Wolfstar fandom have in spades.
The HP fandom is especially well suited for this conversation, because we have our own built in example of carceral justice. When we are introduced to Azkaban, we immediately understand it as a Bad Place, a place where Bad People are sent when they have done Bad Things as a means of punishment through Bad Treatment. And Azkaban is an excellent parallel to our own, real life prison systems.
The reasons we think Azkaban makes an especially good case study for our own real life systems of criminal justice are a few. First, the Ministry doesnât pretend that Azkaban exists for reasons other than punishment. We are often told that our prison systems are at least partially rehabilitative, but the data regarding American prisons suggest that the opposite is true. In Azkaban, prisoners are tortured and witness horrifying things. The same is true of our real life prisoners. Second, Azkaban represents a place where people are sent when they have done something âbadâ, partially as a method of keeping them from those whom they could potentially hurt again and partially as a form of isolation from the community. And third, Azkaban allows us a direct and extreme example of the prison system from which we can generate meaningful dialogue. Maybe we want to think prisons are somewhat nice places where captives are able to build friendships and read books and get ripped. Azkaban, in turn, is a place where captives are isolated, subjected to vicious and cruel guards, and prevented from building any kind of community at all. Strictly for the sake of argument (wink, wink) what if we talked about real life prisons the way we talk about Azkaban? What if we assumed the two are not so different after all?
The real life criminal justice system is based on three main assumptions. The first is that doing bad things has consequences. The second is that these consequences will deter others from doing similarly bad things. And the third is that there are certain people who - as a result of doing certain bad things - deserve to be isolated from the rest of society, either for some predetermined period of time or for the remainder of their lives. So whatâs the difference between these three assumptions and the assumptions made in canonverse?
Letâs talk, first, about a difficult subject. What is a crime? What is a Bad Thing? In canonverse, we are to understand that inmates of Azkaban have, primarily, committed some sort of violent crime, the majority of which being murder or complicity in murder. And surely we can all agree that violent crimes deserve punishment, right? (Well, no, not necessarily, and a brief introduction to why is here.) Canonverse has not provided us with exact statistics on the criminal makeup of Azkaban inmates. But real life has. And since we know that the majority of inmates have not committed violent crimes, what if Azkaban held these people too? What if Harry and Ron went to Azkaban for stealing the flying car? What if Gillyweed was an illicit substance? What if canonverse treated non-violent criminals the way we do?
In real life, when someone is arrested, the depersonalization and dehumanization begins immediately. The person is invasively searched, their photograph is taken, they are asked a multitude of often very personal questions, fingerprinted, and placed in a holding cell. Bail is set. If the crime is minor enough and the person does not have any prior convictions, they may be released without having to pay anything. If not, bail can be any amount from a few hundred to a few million, depending on the crime. If youâre lucky (see: financially stable, see also: white), you are able to post bail and return home while you await further action. If you are not (see: poor or non-white) you remain in prison until the case is dismissed, you reach a plea bargain, or you go to trial (which, mind you, can be years later). And this is all before youâre even convicted of a crime. Sirius Black, shackled and screaming at the camera, embodies this experience pretty well. Except in real life, you arenât allowed to scream. The shackles are financial and emotional and societal and spiritual as much as they are physical. And - in some ways - theyâre there forever, and escaping them is about as possible as transforming into a dog and swimming away.
And then thereâs prison. And I could go on for paragraphs and paragraphs about the horrors that await someone there, but I wonât, because youâve seen it. Youâve seen Sirius emerge from twelve years in Azkaban, a shell of the person he once was. Youâve seen Dementors suck the soul and happiness out of someone.
We know some of you will be enraged by this first column. Maybe youâll say âbut what about the victims?â, and with fair reason. Some of you will say - and abolitionists hear this over and over again - âwhat about rapists and murderers?â and to that, we tell you: we only have so much space to cover these topics, so we hope you are patient with us as we write the next column. But also, we encourage you to do your own research, think seriously about how much good it did Harry that Sirius (or Peter, the real culprit, for that matter) had been imprisoned, how it did not protect him from the abuse he lived through or give him the resources to address his own trauma and grief. We invite you to add your ideas and thoughts in the notes, reblog, discuss with us or your friends, tell them how bananas you think this column is - weâll get to talk about it later, and we hope we can give you some resources to further your reflection and discussion.
So what does Azkaban teach us about our own prison systems?
The answer is: whatever we allow it to. We can continue to remain willfully ignorant of the state of carceral justice in our world just as we can reduce Azkaban to a creation of a fantasy world. We can pretend âbad peopleâ are worthy of the punishment they are receiving, just as we felt Sirius Black deserved his own punishment before we knew better. But we wouldnât be here if we did. We wouldnât have this fandom. And I wonder: what other worlds are our beliefs keeping us from imagining?
