Famiboards

“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” -Eugene Victor Debs: Statement to the Court Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act | September 18, 1918


This thread is a resource for my fellow anarchists, communists, and even pinko liberals, to discuss and share resources about both the brutality inherent in police and prisons and to think of other, alternative systems of community power and accountability. From Oscar Grant to Eric Garner, the police have an indefensible amount of power to take our lives and face no accountability. The lives they take are disproportionately Black, disabled, or from other marginalized groups. The reason for this is not a lack of training but rather they are working as intended. The police do not exist to serve or protect you or I but to protect property and control designated “unruly” populations.

So, what is to be done? The naïve answer is more training and reforms such as citizen accountability boards which are a good stop gap for the time being. But ultimately, there is no justice in a world with prisons and police. Prison, rather than protecting us from violence, is itself both a threat and an act of violence unto itself. Police, by virtue of their power, are consistently able to dodge both monitoring and accountability. Prosecutors have strong incentives to treat officers with kid gloves. They are officials whose elections depend on the participation and endorsements of police unions. Their ability to function at their jobs requires the cooperation of police officers.

The answer is to rethink our core assumption that we even need police and prison. The liberal or conservative might scoff at this very notion. If we were to release all the inmates at once and fire all the officers there would be chaos they would say, that is undoubtedly true. That is why no one is advocating for pulling the plug right away, all at once, within the system of order and power that we have right this second. Instead, I would advocate for the replacement of criminogenic features of society: the criminalization of drug possession, homelessness and poverty, hunger, the presumption that people must work to eat, must work to earn the right to work, with a broader change. We don’t have to wait for a revolution like waiting for a messiah, the basic tools exist now.

What I am talking about is building alternative power structures that exist as alternatives to police. Worker owned cooperatives and unions are a good place to begin with organization. An even simpler area to start with, if the police are not necessary to handle a situation. Do not call them. You do not need to call the police because a houseless individual is sleeping on the sidewalk. You do not need to call the police because black people are enjoying the pool and having an outdoor picnic. Narrowly focused mediators can handle most other forms of disorder and conflict. These are but some ideas. That is a great start to reducing the majority of crime.

Vanishingly few people are like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer and there is little evidence that police protect you from folks like that. In fact, the Supreme Court has held that the police have no obligation to protect you: See “Willie Hortonism” in the links below. A forgotten category of offender is created entirely by the criminal justice system itself, the poor person who gets bogged down in municipal fines and a cycle of failures to appear, sometimes for private debts to debt collectors. Their crime is an artifact of their poverty.

Point is, the current way of doing things cannot continue. The practice of torturing people by stuffing them inside a box for years on end, oftentimes tacitly allowing offenders to experience sexual and other forms of violence, then releasing them onto the street as pariahs with no job prospects, disqualified from public housing and other assistance, and giving them no valid path forward. That is not going to make them or anyone else better. Right now, during this global epidemic, jails and immigrant detention centers are epicenters of disease. The indifference and silence to the mass graves this will result in is deafening.

Inmates' lives matter. There is only one bad day separating you and a prison inmate, be it a lost temper, a cycle of out of control fines, or a set of false allegations. As Foucault’s writings teach us, the methods of social control developed for use on inmates do not stay in prison. Like in the quote above, while there is a soul still in prison none of us are free.


A thoughtful and persuasive TED Talk about a world without police. Great for starting the discussion.




This story shows that even good cops, are up against a systemic bureaucracy that is inherently corrupt, has corrupt incentives, and whose fundamental purpose it to protect property rights over people’s rights.

Citations Needed has had number of wonderful episodes about the media’s role in protecting and propagandizing for the police because of their default setting of white supremacy.








You’re Wrong About has had some good episodes about the problems with holding the wealthy accountable even as we live in a supposed tough on crime country.

Why No One Went To Jail for the Financial Crash

Gangs

Victim’s Rights Movement

Philosophy Tube has also had a number of great videos reflecting on the carceral sta

Foucault: Crime, Police, & Pow

Foucault 2: Government Surveillance & Pris

Should People in Prison have a Right to Vot

Racism, Law, & Politics (Race Part

Islamophobia, Racism, & Feminism (Race Part

Adam Ruins Everything

Prison (paywalled but worth it)


Abolition means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of vital systems of support that many communities lack. Instead of asking how, in a future without prisons, we will deal with so-called violent people, abolitionists ask how we resolve inequalities and get people the resources they need long before the hypothetical moment when, as Gilmore puts it, they “mess up.”
....

Gilmore has come to understand that there are certain narratives people cling to that are not only false but that allow for policy positions aimed at minor or misdirected — rather than fundamental and meaningful — reforms. Gilmore takes apart these narratives: that a significant number of people are in prison for nonviolent drug convictions; that prison is a modified continuation of slavery, and, by extension, that most everyone in prison is black; and, as she explained in Chicago, that corporate profit motive is the primary engine of incarceration.

For Gilmore, and for a growing number of scholars and activists, the idea that prisons are filled with nonviolent offenders is particularly problematic. Less than one in five nationally are in prisons or jail for drug offenses, but this notion proliferated in the wake of the overwhelming popularity of Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” which focuses on the devastating effects of the war on drugs, cases that are primarily handled by the (relatively small) federal prison system. It’s easy to feel outrage about draconian laws that punish nonviolent drug offenders, and about racial bias, each of which Alexander catalogs in a riveting and persuasive manner. But a majority of people in state and federal prisons have been convicted of what are defined as violent offenses, which can include everything from possession of a gun to murder. This statistical reality can be uncomfortable for some people, but instead of grappling with it, many focus on the “relatively innocent,” as Gilmore calls them, the addicts or the falsely accused — never mind that they can only ever represent a small percentage of those in prison. When I asked Michelle Alexander about this, she responded: “I think the failure of some academics like myself to squarely respond to the question of violence in our work has created a situation in which it almost seems like we’re approving of mass incarceration for violent people. Those of us who are committed to ending the system of mass criminalization have to begin talking more about violence. Not only the harm it causes, but the fact that building more cages will never solve it.”

But in the United States, it’s difficult for people to talk about prison without assuming there is a population that must stay there. “When people are looking for the relative innocence line,” Gilmore told me, “in order to show how sad it is that the relatively innocent are being subjected to the forces of state-organized violence as though they were criminals, they are missing something that they could see. It isn’t that hard. They could be asking whether people who have been criminalized should be subjected to the forces of organized violence. They could ask if we need organized violence.”