We are seeing a groundswell of explicitly antifascist activism. From public conferences to informal gatherings, organizers are training and educating people both to understand fascism and to incorporate antifascism into their work. While studying Project 2025 and other right-wing playbooks, countering vigilante violence, and building antifascist power are necessary, we also need to analyze the role the prison industrial complex plays in the existing and emerging threat of fascism.

Many common understandings of fascism are rooted in interwar Europe, illustrated with images of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco addressing crowds during military parades. It is a mistake to read today’s threats solely through yesterday’s symbols, however. Fascism may arrive through a strongman with supporters from the military, but it also pervades the machinery of liberal democracy. Examples include the recent wave of anti-trans legislation seeking to make transgender people’s lives untenable and the escalating criminalization of protest across the country. Fascism uses xenophobic, racist, misogynist, and homophobic notions of a common enemy to build authoritarianism and to protect capitalism. The U.S. Border Patrol and the U.S. Marshals hold immigrants, migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in conditions reminiscent of Japanese American internment.

Fascism is maintained by force, and in the contemporary U.S. that force is implemented through the prison industrial complex, the interdependent relationship between public and private interests that use imprisonment, policing, surveillance, courts, execution, and the cultural elements associated with them to maintain social control and power differences while claiming to provide safety.

Some of the keenest insights about fascism have come from imprisoned organizers. George Jackson’s analysis of fascism, for instance, pushed beyond interwar Europe to show how the prison industrial complex is the infrastructure needed to maintain the fascist programming baked into the material conditions of the United States. In her 1974 autobiography, Angela Y. Davis called surveillance and repression of the racialized and radicalized a kind of incipient fascism.  Through disruption, containment, and intimidation — by restricting movement or association, denying access to resources and credentials, separating family members, and disrupting employment, among other things — elements of the prison industrial complex stifle resistance to hegemonic power. While not all activity funneled through the punishment system is fascistic, fascism cannot take hold without the coercive force of the punishment system. Countering fascism in the U.S. requires paying attention to the ways that the state integrates the violence of the prison industrial complex into daily life and how fascist forces employ the punishment system as their enforcing arm.

The prison industrial complex is also where the local state is transformed toward fascist ends. Places like eastern Kentucky, where all three of us are actively involved in anti–prison industrial complex efforts, are sites of struggle over jail and prison growth in multiple communities. One example is Laurel County, which became home to a new $24 million mega jail in 2020. By 2022, approximately two out of every 100 working-age people in the county were locked up in the jail on any given day, a jail incarceration rate six and a half times that of the country as a whole. The details of how this came to be are important to understanding how the relationships that make the prison industrial complex also make and remake places like eastern Kentucky. After coal revenue dried up, the people running Laurel County sank public resources into jail construction so that they could “rent” jail beds to the Kentucky Department of Corrections and federal agencies to pay the county’s bills. The quiet jail boom is about the brass tacks of political economy: county managers use jails to “keep the lights on,” while simultaneously building out the architecture of fascism.

Elsewhere in eastern Kentucky, in Letcher County, the federal government is trying to build another prison. If completed, it would be the fifth federal prison built in eastern Kentucky since 1992, an addition to the 16 state and federal prisons already in central Appalachia. These jail and prison projects are just some of the many recent examples of the prison industrial complex’s exponential growth over the past 40 years. The machinery of liberal democracy has increasingly taken shape in and through the state’s punishment capacities.

Without a solid understanding of the violence of the prison industrial complex, activists and organizers may not be adequately prepared for infiltration, disruption, harassment, arrest, or imprisonment as a result of contact with the punishment system. Without a strong analysis of that system, people feeling an urgent need to crush fascism may find themselves reaching for instruments of state repression, such as cheering for the imprisonment of Jan. 6 rioters, nearly one-fifth of whom worked as police or military personnel. We need analyses of fascism and antifascist politics that can adequately account for the ways both the rioters and the system designed to contain them may be expressions of a fascist movement.

At a time when prison industrial complex abolitionist sensibilities have a broader reach than they have had previously, more people are claiming those politics as an identity. But in order to strengthen antifascist analysis and power, much more than an identity will be required. It is essential that antifascist strategy include organizers who have sustained experience in abolitionist campaigns. Such organizers can contribute more than tactical assistance in managing confrontations with the cops, offering jail and court support, and enabling bail funds. They also can offer a grounded analysis developed from sustained practice to help antifascists develop strategy and diminish the harms of the enforcement arm of the fascist agenda. They would guard against the sort of law-and-order and rule-of-law politics that liberal democracy suggests is our best defense against fascism.

Fascism can flourish within a liberal democracy. The legacy of Jim Crow as a states’ rights issue is not such distant history. Critical race theory bans, attempts to roll back limited defunding of police budgets, and quashing the victories of tenant organizing echo the revanchism of the capitalist state in crisis. Prioritizing stability over liberatory transformation facilitates fascism’s taking root in everyday life. It may also discourage people from the active participation in civic life on which democracy depends. Well-intentioned reformers who ignore abolitionist organizers in order to make minor adjustments to the current punishment system strengthen the forces of incipient fascism.

These are times of widespread suffering and many interlocking crises. Efforts to expand policing and imprisonment by appealing to their purported ability to provide everything from healing and treatment to racial and social justice serve only to reinforce the hold the punishment system has over all our lives. The Laurel County mega jail boasts of its imprisoned population’s access to everything from tablets and classes to fresh bread. Similar examples include proposals for a “feminist jail” in Harlem, the adoption of the so-called Nordic model in California, and post-2020 police reform legislation that purports to “say their names” while supporting murderous cops. In contrast to these re-formations and contortions of the prison industrial complex infrastructure, abolitionists reject the very premise that people are disposable and can be consigned to the punishment system. Abolitionist values offer a direct counter to any fascist program.

Prison industrial complex abolitionist organizers will not miraculously light the path forward for antifascist organizing. But if we do not remain focused on the prison industrial complex in the context of a growing fascist threat, we risk missing the forest for the trees. Abolitionist organizers are essential to the long struggle ahead against the prison industrial complex and fascism, which — as history and everyday life teach us — go hand in hand.