On Nov 18, 2011, at 1:16 PM, SA wrote:
> Today, there will not be 3.4 million Americans rallying to the cause of Abolish the Prisons. Under the best circumstances, the number of people struggling to end the outrage of convicted murderers going to prison will never reach even 1% of that number.
Speaking of which, I finally got Angela Davis' prisons book and paged through it. Most of it is pretty unremarkable stuff to anyone familiar with the topic. Maybe it's news to someone who's new to radical politics, so I don't want to disparage it as useless. But the core bit about prison abolition, about which she has little to say in detail as far as I can tell, is this:
> An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by elecnonic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching sttategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment-demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.
Much of this is a standard social democratic agenda, which I'm entirely behind. We criminalize too much behavior and jail too many people who are convicted of crimes under those definitions. I'm behind that too. But the social democratic part does, or should, have a lot to offer that middle 75%. So why label this agenda "prison abolition" and not "social justice"? And what does she plan to do with actual murderers, rapists, and armed robbers? I don't know. Maybe someone else does.
Doug