The prison abolitionist movement has been gaining steam across the country with the rise of radical left candidates such as New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier, who will soon be a member of Congress. Many have asked what will replace prisons in the post-carceral society. Seattle University law professor Dean Spade has the answer: care and accountability circles. If you are having that My Cousin Vinny moment of “you were serious about Dat?,” the answer is, yes, they are indeed very serious about that.
The abolitionist movement is the outgrowth of activists and professors who have argued for years that prisons are racist, oppressive, or simply useless.
One of the earliest abolitionists is avowed Communist and activist Angela Davis, who is ecstatic that her call for ending prisons has gone from a fringe movement to being taken seriously by academia and the media: “I feel like I’m living in a future I could never imagine … a future where people are (openly) talking about abolition.”
She has noted that the push to abolish prison stems from a growing acceptance of radical politics. She told Radcliffe Magazine, “As a matter of fact, rather than considering abolition a failure or as a nonviable strategy because of the emergence of a global prison industrial complex with its clear connections to racial capitalism, I would argue that this development was precisely the material basis for moving away from a politics of reform to a radical politics of abolition.”
Davis is correct that there has been a seismic change, particularly in higher education where departments have effectively purged conservatives, libertarians, and Republicans from the faculty ranks. Faculties now run from the left to the far left, and once-fringe theories are now more mainstream.
The latest voice is found in a recently posted clip by a Manhattan investigator of Seattle University law professor Dean Spade.
In the video, Professor Spade joined Professor Sarah Lamble of the Birkbeck University of London to discuss the end of the “carceral system” and Lamble’s book “Unsafe: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash.” In the video, Spade makes the remarkable claim that “care and accountability circles work better” than prison for those who have committed rape or other sex crimes.
In fairness, there are some credible points raised by abolition advocates that have long been discussed in this area, including how incarceration does not “address root causes of harm.” However, it does remove those who are victimizing others from these communities. While there is a need to discuss ways to reduce crime in society, that does not mean that prisons do not serve this critical public safety purpose. While prison may not reform a rapist, it will punish the rapist and isolate him from society. While that removal is precisely what abolitionists object to in cutting off avenues for support and rehabilitation, it also protects victims from dangerous criminal actors.
Moreover, whatever the social and economic conditions may be in a given community, most people do not respond to those conditions by raping or harming others.
Professor Spade insists that “care and accountability circles work better than punishing people who have engaged in sexual harm to make them stop.” Yet, there is a significant leap of logic in insisting that the “incarceral context… has set up a story about safety, culturally, that’s terrible for all of us. And it’s also set up the same structures internally, that are about getting safe by getting away from people we perceive as bad.”
I have spent my career as a criminal defense attorney, but the removal of rapists is not “some story” fed to the public “about getting safe by getting away from people we perceive as bad.” It is not a mere “perception” that rapists and abusers are “bad.” These are dangerous individuals who get a thrill or fulfill a need in sexually assaulting others. In the course of those crimes, they cause lasting injury to victims, destroying their sense of security and self for years.
Turning back to the transgender movement, Spade insisted that such a reformation of society will require a “militant struggle” that brings together a broader coalition to “fight[] back.”
Many in academia have embraced Spade for these views. New York University Law School invited Spade to give the Annual Rose Sheinberg Lecture where he spoke about the talk “No Prisons, No Borders, No Cops, No State?” Spade, who is transgender, bills his work as seeking “to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice.”
Spade is not alone in “abolitionist” writings, which both the media and academia have highlighted with little comparative interest in opposing views or criticism.
CUNY Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who teaches Earth and Environmental Sciences and Psychology, was given a profile in The New York Times Magazine about her work to abolish prisons entitled “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind.” Gilmore calls for massive increases in government-funded jobs, education, housing, and health care to produce “a productive and violence-free life.”
The New York Times exalts how she has succeeded in reframing the debate on “policing, jailing, caging and controlling of populations” and “has shaped the thinking of many geographers, as well as generations of graduate students and activists.”
The New York Times has long pushed abolition theories. In 1955, it was a column titled “Should Prisons Be Abolished?” that described a prison as the manifestation of an “anachronistic relic of medieval concepts of crime and punishment.”
In the NYU lecture, Professor Spade hits on many of the same radical concepts as Davis, lashing out at the state, capitalism, and the establishment. Spade heralds how we are at this “incendiary moment” that the professor never thought would come in seeking to abolish prisons despite the work of the “colonial government.” As a result of “big insurrectionary uprisings,” Spade says we can now end the “long history of repression” in the United States.
As part of this effort at the “delegitimization of the state,” Professor Spade emphasizes that the state exists to “extract the most from the people and the planet” and “redistribute wealth upwards.”
The abolitionist movement is central to this radical agenda and, as shown at schools like NYU and in papers like the New York Times, it is all the rage.
For some, replacing prisons with “Care and Accountability Circles” can seem reminiscent of the final scene in A Clockwork Orange when the minister apologizes to actor Malcolm McDowell while spoon-feeding him breakfast. He assures that he will be given an ample job and speaks hopefully of how “public opinion has a way of changing.”
That is precisely what abolitionists believe is happening in this “incendiary moment.” For years, students have been given a steady diet of such indoctrinating codswallop with little exposure to opposing views on their faculties. With so little diversity of viewpoints, it’s like going through college with your eyes wired open like McDowell.
I encourage you to watch the full video of this lecture to gain insight into the current state of higher education.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
These people have never met a career criminal. The kind of people that rob, maim and destroy even when there is no reason to do so.
Pretty clear this dope hasn’t the ability to think it through or is another insincere lefty.
They are paying this moron to sit in his high place and come up with crap like this so we shouldn’t be surprised when he does.
Imagine that this is the guy they hold in high regard for his intellect. A man who cannot think beyond his emotions. The man is a fool and he has idea! he should be embarrassed saying such nonsense.
Sometimes I wonder if these “voices” of anarchy are some kind of reserve psychology psyop, to reinforce the fascistic trends of our day. Considering the crazy Ai stuff that’s been happening, one can’t discount it. Sal Sar
The wild west in the making! Don’t jail ’em, just hang ’em high!
These people are excessively emotional. “Care and Accountability Circles” for rapists and other criminals!? What happens when one of these rapists assaults them during one of these, “Care and Accountability Circles”? Prisons exist to protect society from criminals. Criminals must be punished to set an example to others. Prisons should be hell on Earth, so others will avoid getting thrown in them by not committing a crime in the first place. Getting rid of prisons is insanity, and you are out of your mind to even suggest such a thing. Completely disconnected from reality.
Angela Davis just wants to be able to visit her friends without being searched.
Does that mean people can kill leftists and not go to prison?
I don’t think they have thought that far ahead…
Again I wonder: when it comes to administering the Congressional Oath of Office to these wokesters, how can they swear to ‘protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic’? Just about all of them are already on public record for wanting to do something else entirely. Chez Odysseus 2
There is an underlying, and unstated, belief held by the advocates for prison abolition. This belief holds that we are a product of our environment (the family, friends, schools, neighborhoods, …). Unfortunately, the science is quite clear that approximately 45% of our behavior, drives, interests, personality is genetically influenced, 5% is environmentally influenced, and the other 50% is due to happenstance. Prison abolition is based on an incorrect understanding of human nature and if implemented will have dire consequences.
One of the identifying characteristics of those who propose such a “problem resolution”, is that they universally have no direct experience with those who commit violent crime. Nor the victims, but they don’t really matter to the proponents of this type of regime. As noted by Dr. Turley, incarceration at least limits their pool of available victims to those with similar proclivities.
The really chilling thought is that they do realize it can never achieve what they claim it will and they just don’t care. It still drives their desired end result.
It appears to me the left is proposing something between anarchy and some form of authoritarian regime. A question arises to me as to what they will do with those of us who commit the crime of opposition in speech and thought to their policies. We have ample evidence from history that opposition to the new order cannot be tolerated and threatens the public order. Perhaps the empty prisons could be repurposed to re-education centers to house those recalcitrants who dare to threaten our new masters.
The ultimate resolution to the imprisonment problem is given by Dr. Rock Pig in the book “Word from Future.” Accountants attached to each court should calculate the cost involuntarily imposed on others by the convicted criminal, divide it by the fraction of similar cases that actually lead to apprehension, sentencing, and conviction, and require the convict to pay that price. The convict can be aided (in paying the bill) by bleeding hearts or insurance, if necessary, but the payment will have a steep interest rate that must also be paid. If a convict should end up owing more than the value of a human life (subject to annual vote of the citizenry and probably about $7M in today’s money), the convict must be euthanized. No jail is necessary, except for flight risks prior to trial. It is also understood that anyone committing deliberate murder is also committing suicide. (This is a condition of citizenship.) The suicide is ensured by the court within days after the conviction. No more free room and board in the Iron Bar Hotel. All costs of crime, including the costs of enforcement and adjudication are paid by the criminals, except, perhaps, those who pay with their lives. No fairer justice system has previously been conceived.
This is a great post. I am going to get the book. For my entire life the ‘system’ has been more concerned about the perpetrator (whitewashed to ‘person of interest’) and doesn’t give a care about the victim (and those who are the victim’s circle). No more leftist/bleeding heart bull. And, I don’t care about the perpetrators frame of mind or challenges said perp faced because Mommy didn’t abort (he/she/it) but birthed it into an unfair world. If you came into this world to foist evil on your fellow humans—-YOU must be eliminated.
What an atrocity to be subjected to this kind of anti social personality disorder each and everyday. Just unending crap left and right. It’s mania and hysteria when life used to be not much ever happened at all. The atrocity of this illogical media coverage is tragic.
I’d say the senseless murders happening are due to this media kind of coverage. It makes people crazy.
I’d say the senseless murders are committed by evil degenerates. Don’t make excuses for evil. Every human has free will.
“Care ad accountability ciricles” for thugs and criminals.
Isn’t that known as “gangs”?
El Salvador went from lots of crime to little crime
Answer JAIL Criminals!
Same Singapore