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.”