There’s an interesting dynamic to the argument “we need prisons because of [x group]” where x group is whoever that individual thinks is the worst sort of person, and eventually that sort of thinking becomes “well, yeah also [y group]” and then you have more and more people add groups of people until you have a draconian system that, if it actually worked efficiently, would have far far more people in prison than our current carceral state, and I guess that’s a progressive or radical politics.
The problem is that communities should be able to reject people who pose a threat to their safety and well-being and as much as I sympathise with prison abolitionism, I’ve never seen abolitionists propose an alternative. You just can’t let the rapist, pedophile or abuser live in the community and expect people to be happy, and not to exact their own much harsher justice.
1) I think there’s actually a substantial amount of work that has been done to look at what solutions might replace carceral frameworks of Justice. You might not like them, but they exist, it’s not for a lack of actual documents. Both Transformative and Restorative Justic approaches are answers to carceral logics. The UNs office on drugs and crime as a report called “Alternatives to Imprisonment”. There are quite a few alternatives that have been proposed, too many to list here.
2) claiming to care abt rape but also advocating for prisons to me is incompatible- prisons are one of the most centralized areas of sexual violence.
3) even your three categories have expanded the amount of people in prison a substantial amount.
Notably, in an efficient function of your system, the term “abuse” could encompass a huge number of people. Like, imo hitting children is abuse- but studies find around 94% of parents (of 3-4 year olds) have hit their child as a form of punishment in the past year.
After all, all the things you list are in some sense already a cause of imprisonment and are illegal. So the problem is either that imprisonment isn’t efficient enough (read: we need far far more people in forced labor and liable to sexual assault) or that it isn’t effective at addressing the social ills its punishing. I’m not super on board w expanding imprisonment or continuing it as a primary method of (inadequately) addressing these social ills
James Gilligan is a psychiatrist who is an example of someone who has done work specifically around violence and prison systems. He worked in prison facilities for 25 years and did research that showed that there can be a different way to do things other than incarceration and the prison system. His work talks about how prison systems reinforce violence just by their very nature, and offers alternatives to the prison system that would actively deal with the root causes of violence rather than reinforcing and perpetuating it. He’s even said himself that not every one should be released back into their communities because too much damage has been done but that work can be done to decrease the violence that they perpetuate. The idea that prisons should continue to exist because “there are no alternatives” is patently false and just advocates for the perpetuation of violence amongst people who are generally the specific results of trauma, violence and shame themselves. When ever Gilligan talks about the patients he’s had within these prison systems, usually the most violent offenders, there has been a running theme that they’ve come from extreme childhood violence, trauma and dehumanization.
If people are going to recognize that perpetrators of violence and abuse have themselves been victims of it, then we need to recognize that they need actual help for that rather than being shoved away and forgotten. Ultimately when you do that they just learn to perpetuate more violence and more abuse. Part of the work that some of my family and my communities does/has done as indigenous people is offering alternative solutions to dealing with people in our communities who do these things, otherwise we’re just continuing a cycle that colonization started in the first place. If we’re going to recognize that abusers exist in our communities we also recognize that they’re only abusers because they learned it from our colonizers. We can’t just continue to punish them because they were once victims too, if we continue to punish and ostracize them rather than offer them solutions, a chance at rehabilitation then we’re just hurting our communities more than we’re helping them. It’s work that is tedious and it’s work that continues through our generations because of how much damage has been done through residential schools, high rates of incarceration in prisons, the foster care system, and the MMIWG2S (Missing and Murdered Women, Girls and 2-spirit) issue that plagues our communities - including the recent murders of our indigenous youth, Colten Boushie and Tina Fountaine. But it’s necessary work if we’re ever going to undo the damage that’s been done and heal our communities.
And, if we’re also going to recognize that prison systems unfairly and disproportionally impact specific groups of people because of racist, homophobic and transphobic systems that exist in the first place, then you’re already admitting that the system doesn’t work at all. If you want to talk about the safety of communities, communities I assume are meant to include marginalized people, then how can you equate trusting a justice system that is already stacked against the members of your communities with more safety? There is a certain kind of double think that exists here and refusing to address that by just saying “that no one has proposed alternatives” is worrying? And maybe, racist? Because indigenous people on this continent, at the very least here in Canada have been advocating for their own forms of judicial systems separate of that from Canada’s. Specifically to address the issues that are latent with the system, and so that we can modify it to suit our needs and our ways of dealing with things. We inherently recognize that the justice system that is in charge of incarcerating perpetrators of violence and abuse, and the prison system does not work.
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