I noticed that the thread changed from something about Angela Davis to Prisons and the Left. Unfortunate. Davis has actually already thought about that.
She takes the concept from DuBois's concept of 'Abolition Democracy'. DuBois, responding to the concerns of the day. DuBois argued that reconstruction required and was met by a social movement demanding a radical reconstruction of the fundamental institutions of democracy in the first place. (for a fuller explanation, here(relevant quote below) http://acc.english.ucsb.edu/conference/grad2005/Lipsitz%20Abolition%20Democracy.pdf
She says, and this is what Carrol meant I believe, that it's not about destroying the prison system, but about also focusing on what to build in its place. For Davis, this would include creating the kind of world where people don't turn to crime in the first place. (the point about poor being victimized by crime, no shit, but they are victimized by other poor people in their neighborhoods). It would be about creating a world where the mentally ill who commit crimes are treated _as such_. She calls it _restorative justice_. We could go on and on about what all that might mean, but the point is, as John seems to be saying, considering the context within which these crimes are taking place.
The other thing that keeps going through my head is how much some of the vindictive, I mean, retributive justice stuff sounds like some of the women in my feminist book reading group. Instead of asking about _why_ people appear to be ripping off "welfare", they focus on their vengeance: basically saying, I want them to have to pay for it, to suffer, just like *I* have to.
Remember, the anger was that another mother, the one supposedly living high on the hog collecting section 8, wasn't having to *pay for it* just like she has to. In other words, she suffers by having to work and pay for daycare. *She* would like to be ina position to not have to work (or work so much) but as long as she isn't, she doesn't like to see anyone else getting away with the life she'd like to live, without having to *pay for it*, *earn it*, do something to *prove* that you deserve it.
As for retributive justice, I'd be interested too.
Thing is, if our system is about justice for a crime against the *state* then why is the *state* in the business of gaining retribution for anything? I'm sure this is taken up by the retrib justice argument.
Be that as it may, why *not* think of it as a failure of society? If society is operative here, as our justice system is supposed to be about crimes against society, embodied by the state, then what place does retribution have? Society was harmed by an individual when that individual broke a law. Why is it that society doesn't say, "Woah. Looks like we fucked up somewhere and created this individual that doesn't care about the law. What can we, the society, do to make this right?"
I don't know if I'm an abolitionist. I was only recently introduced to the ideas surfing for something to listen to while at work.
I don't agree with Carrol that there are any particular issues a left movement has to focus on before it can be considered worthy, but I do think that leftish movements have to strive for something, and that angle would be, well, like I have to do at my feminist book reading group: listen to what people are saying, understand why they are saying it, and looking for ways to systematically open up spaces to say something different. My experience is, taken from my own life, that the people who want to hear it will.
Du Bois demonstrated how slaves fighting for their freedom soon realized that it would not be enough to be merely 'free' in a society premised on their exclusion. In the course of staging a general strike in the fields, running away from slavery to swell the ranks of the Union army, and joining together to work land liberated by military force, they formulated a political perspective that Du Bois named 'abolition democracy' (Du Bois, 1995). They fought for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. At the Charleston Black Convention in 1865 they called for more than nominal freedom, for the development of their full being as humans. Between 1865 and 1877 they fashioned alliances with poor whites to elect progressive majorities to office, and their successes led to the first universal public education systems in the South, to governments that subsidized the general economic infrastructure rather than just the privileges and property of the elite.
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