Are Prisons Obsolete
- em 💌has quotedlast year
According to Peter Biehl, “We tried to explain that sometimes it pays to shut up and listen to what other people have to say, to ask: ‘Why do these terrible things happen? ’ instead of simply reacting.” 136that is a really great thing of Amy’s parents to forgive them but i still dont feel any of the solutions given are strong enough where we would no longer need prisons as a whole.
I 100% agree with tackling the inequality in impoverished areas and decriminalising sw, drug use and communities esp communities of colour but i feel like even though tackling these issues would significantly reduce most crimes, i dont feel any of it is strong enough to stop men and the way they view women because its so incredibly ingrained into society i dont know how we’d fully remove misogyny from society where women dont get murdered and raped and those evil people need to be removed from society where they would just continue to harm more women because fundamentally they just do not care about women. - em 💌has quotedlast yearThey are sent to prison, not so much because of the crimes they may have indeed committed, but largely because their communities have been criminalized.
- em 💌has quotedlast yearRadical criminologists have long pointed out that the category “lawbreakers” is far greater than the category of individuals who are deemed criminals since, many point out, almost all of us have broken the law at one time or another.
- em 💌has quotedlast yearIf we insist that abolitionist alternatives trouble these relationships, that they strive to disarticulate crime and punishment, race and punishment, class and punishment, and gender and punishment, then our focus must not rest only on the prison system as an isolated institution but must also be directed at all the social relations that support the permanence of the prison.
- em 💌has quotedlast yearThe point feminist movements attempt to make—regardless of their specific positions on battered women’s syndrome—is that violence against women is a pervasive and complicated social problem that cannot be solved by imprisoning women who fight back against their abusers.
- em 💌has quotedlast yearAs at the Ford Center, family members also should be permitted to participate. But unlike the Betty Ford program, they should be free of charge.
- em 💌has quotedlast yearAlternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.
- em 💌has quotedlast yearUnless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished communities of color—including the presence of armed security guards and police—and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prisons.
- em 💌has quotedlast yearHow can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment?
- em 💌has quotedlast yearWhat, then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit?
