erratticusfinch:

demi-marvel:

mothmanlair:

demi-marvel:

anarchistcuddles:

maxi-snacks:

erratticusfinch:

Why is “prisons are bad and you can’t make them good” such a hard concept to grasp

Except you could give prisoners proper health care because remember how the government loves locking up people of colour for smoking weed??? Do you think those people deserve to be sick without help??? And never mind people in prison for nearly no reason???

It’s not “don’t make prisons better,” it’s “instead of engaging in the misguided and futile work of improving prisons, abolish them”

The point being that prisons and generally a punishment based “justice” system is intrinsically unjust and fucked up and is not redeemable. Any attempt to make prisons better is a band-aid solution not solving the real problems.

Band-aid solutions definitely are good and help people, but we need to focus on real solutions and work on dismantle horribly broken oppressive structures rather than wasting our energy patching them.

Though, if you disagree with us on the idea that prisons are irredeemable… I don’t even know what to say.

Maybe I haven’t read enough on this topic but I’m genuinely curious about what you think we should do with murderers and rapists then?

Look up community-based policing

Ok community-based policing is great and it’s has proven results but it’s a preventative measure. Without prisons, what do you do with the worst of the worst offenders?

Your question presumes that even with preventative measures (which I wouldn’t include “community-based policing” under anyway) and major cultural/political/social changes to be achieved through struggle (like the overturning of patriarchal social relations), society would still be producing such a significant number of rapists and murderers that it would justify a system of incarceration. Which I think is a big presumption of the inevitability of those modes of violence.

But if you’re concerned about sexual violence, prisons are probably not worth defending since they’re an environment that propagates sexual violence, and the population of prisons has never been and will never be just rapists and murderers. More generally, although there’s a lot of debate on whether prisons themselves are criminogenic, U.S. prisons (which are generally understood to be uniquely awful in their treatment) have a tremendously high recidivism rate, so even the deterrent characteristics that prisons might have are offset by churning out people who are more broken, more violent, more traumatized by their time in prison, and more likely to go back in.

What the prison system would be replaced with is of course an open and understandable question, but there are answers out there. Rather than treating crime as though it emerges in a vacuum or springs fully formed from the evil hearts of humans and therefore can only be addressed through the medium of incarceration, we should recognize that crime (even the most objectively detestable forms) always emerges within a web of social factors that can themselves be changed. (And it’s important to recognize that crime itself is a historically and politically contingent category, one that is used regularly to control and exploit deviants and the victimized – drug addicts and users, the mentally ill, sex workers, political dissidents, ethnic minorities – and this is a function of prison that cannot be whisked away.)