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.”
‘Seattle University law professor Dean Spade has the answer: care and accountability circles.’
That’s because at least emotionally and intellectually Spada is about 12, grew up and lives in privilege, and likely has never suffered anything worse than a hangnail. Getting pretty tired of these insular trust fund children being put in positions of authority, particularly in law. It would be funny were it not so dire.
I agree with another poster: their ideas are so puerile and absurd they are almost impossible to even argue, and you sure as heck can’t argue sophisticated topics with the mental acuity of a child. These are not adults, and they are not well.
They wouldn’t last five seconds outside of their cushioned enclaves, and they know it. Rather than evolve they will drag the rest of the world down to their level because they are also spoiled and entitled to the skies and many, likely sociopaths; their ‘altruism’ isn’t about charity, but rather, preserving their own levels of personal comfort, both physically and emotionally.
There were warnings. Few cared to listen. I don’t like to think of anyone as ‘broken’, but these leftist twits make a good case for it.
James,
I beg to differ.
I do not think they know they would last five seconds outside their cushioned enclaves. They have never been outside of those enclaves. They do not know nor have experienced any kind of real hardship. They think of the world like some kind of warm and fuzzy Disney land like existence and only bad things happen over there.
Another stupid and childish comment from a high school dropout.
@Upstate
Great point! They are wholly unaware any reality beyond their personal one exists, or if it does, it’s an error. So let’s add malignant narcissism to their prognoses.
You could easily abolish prisons by punishing minor offenses with flogging, more serious with amputation, and the most serious with execution.
Right, take no prisoners.
Perhaps we might just accept that the Left has a contingent made up of the Mentally Ill….that unfortunately has formed an echo chorus that permeates the media, academia, and the Democrat Party…that has been well funded by a few very rich folks and foreign interests that wish to see the destruction of the United States. Then, with that in mind we can frame our response to that.
The Professor gets it straight in his comments.
Those arguing against him must have missed being raised in a home where misbehaving did not draw a Motherly response that resulted in no recidivist behavior by the young Perp. Society has Rules of Conduct….some social, some civil, and some criminal.
Society has the right and duty to protect its citizens.
Soft on Crime, which this is all about, does not work, does not protect the Victims, and certainly is wrong headed as it can be.
The Trans Professor quoted by the Professor is straight up an example of what is wrong with the basis for the arguments being made by those on the Left.
The “Trans”. movement makes up a very very very small percentage of the Population and should be rendered an equal treatment of its views and values. That it is made up of some very confused people only adds to the notion their own involvement In the a circle fails them. Why should we apply that kind of thinking to violent offenders who kill, rape, rob, and maim?
Codswallop. Res Ipsa is a fine place to learn something new. Here, an alternate for rubbish. I have one thought on throwing codswallop into focus. Are we still going to find guilt by trial to a jury of peers? If not, what mechanism enters the individual into a “care and accountability circle”? If so, read me the language of the judge’s sentencing upon a verdict of guilt.
Well, some cities and states have already adopted a “abolitionist” like policies. It is called no cash bail. A criminal commits a crime, and not long after their arrest and initial hearing, they are released. More than a few go on to commit crimes after release. And some, even go on to commit murder or rape.
But then people like those pointed out by the good professor, just ignore when things like that happen.
Abolitionist policies? So when a “criminal” commits a crime… Do you understand what you wrote? So only criminals commit crimes?
Cash-free bail, often called “cashless bail,” has been part and partial since forever. You get that? It replaces money bail with decisions based on public safety risk and likelihood to return to court rather than a person’s ability to pay.
They like crime. It’s a value.
Come On Man – even Stalin knew you could not create a new superior society until you destroyed the predecessor culture. American society will benefit from the cultural bloom that arrives when the prisons are emptied onto the streets of AmeriKa. They will be actively seeking jobs (oops, I mean CASH), applying for the ‘NEW’ generous public assistance programs so their SNAP can be traded for liquor and cigs, scoping out victims (oops, I mean interacting with their neighbors), and establishing their crime territory (oops, I mean allowing their Entrepreneurial Spirit to kick in). All the skills learned in prison and recidivism with no consequences will be part of our NEW CULTURAL EXPERIENCE. Enjoy Fools.
That about says it all regarding the “prisoner abolitionist movement:” A collection of “learned” nutcases who simply can’t accept the fact that some people are just plain bad to the bone and need to be removed from civilized society for the safety of all.
BTW, great word, “codswallop!”
If it “about” says it all then what is missing?
@Anonymous–
“…what is missing?”
Well, Russell forgot to include “learned women” in his otherwise wonderful observation. But then, of course, we have to consider the time, 1959, when the statement was made. Women were not exactly on equal footing with men at that time.
Just “forgot”? Maybe, just maybe, it was intentional.
Equal footing, so in 1959 women had one leg?
@Ned–
You’re almost as boring and tiresome as @Anonymous.
Hard to do, but I have to give you an “A” for effort. Or, maybe, just an A-.
“The prison abolitionist movement . . .” (JT)
That insane movement is a dramatic illustration of the Leftists’/socialists’ utter disdain for the innocent — for our safety, our property, our right to live free from those criminal monsters.
For another visceral illustration of that disdain, watch the video of Mamdani and AOC yucking it up during the 9/11 ceremony in NYC. You are deluded if you believe that socialists are concerned with the innocent who suffer. Their only concern is for absolute power.
Please remember: If you’re white, they don’t believe you *can* be innocent. So they’re definitely untroubled by your argument.
Planned Perphood is an ethical alternative to relieve “burdens” of State and mind for those who have taken affirmative action to entertain abortive ideation. And lesser offenses of transhumane proportions, too? Maybe, baby, but no DEIsm or minority reports.
Entertaining ideation and an actual abortion are two different actions.
You are what you think.
Starbucks is turning into a dog kennel.
“. . . Spade makes the remarkable claim that ‘care and accountability circles work better’ than prison *for those who have committed* rape or other sex crimes.” (JT, emphasis added).
No doubt those “circles work better” *for the rapists*. For their victims and the innocent, not so much.
What spade means is we not only believe in the value of sex crimes we enjoy getting together and exchanging stories, also. We believe in the value of sex deviations.
There should be a separation of press and state. Then there will be true freedom of the press.
The Trump-Kimmel thing shouldn’t even be a thing.
There should be a separation of press and state…. its called the 1st Amendment.
In its present form, it is not working very well. It should be amended for the better, instead of accepting its flaws.
“You can’t insult Trump and get away with it”. – Howard Lutnick
Are these the words of someone who has a deep belief and understanding of freedom and the Constitution?
Sounds more like something a dictator’s or druglord’s henchmen might say.
Reruns of Matlock had better ratings than Trumpapalooza! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Anonymous– and that is a perfect example of how worthless your com padres are. Don’t listen to anything the other side has to say. It might give you a headache having to actually think for once.
You must have a lot of headaches then.
honestlawyermostly,
They cannot think.
That is why they are watching reruns of Matlock.
Speaking about not thinking, that from a high school dropout. Stranger things have happened.
Just more utopian crap plopping out of the lefties.
How about we let victims and their families impose their choice of punishment on rapists and murderers?
Nah, I think the entire left is either insincere or dumb. You can usually tell the two apart too.
It is important to note that the medieval mind that made such wide use of incarceration is the same mind we have today. Next to nothing has changed biologically, evolutionarily, or morally. We still have prisons, the mass extermination of peoples, forced-labor camps, and gulags all over the place.
The New York Times notwithstanding, how can these writers know much about humanity except through their own circles of accountability? For the most part they preach to one another. Students are caught up in the vortex of their theories, and many cannot escape.
The left seems to live with a tremendous contradiction within its own sphere. While advocating an end to incarceration, police, and the like, it celebrates the murder of its opponents.
“We still have prisons, the mass extermination of peoples, forced-labor camps, and gulags all over the place.” Huh?
First off, who is we? Americans? And where have you seen forced labor camps and gulags in the USA? Mass extermination? Um… that’s a bit tough, you mean abortions? Or the supposed extermination of Indians and black slaves?
You claim to be a retired professor right? You’re a fool and a clown.
gdonaldallen,
“While advocating an end to incarceration, police, and the like, it celebrates the murder of its opponents.”
Great observation.
Fortunately I am attending a community college and have not seen any of this kind of mind set of either the students or the faculty.
Have not seen at a CC? What an utterly juvenile and stupid comment. And why is it fortunate you are attending a CC? And who would ever regard a CC as a bastion of intellectual thought?
Saw that too and thought, fortunate attending a community college. Framer is so out of his league.
Continue to observe. It may be hidden.
Community colleges are still in the business of teaching content, unlike many of the four year colleges, intent on indoctrination.
>> Next to nothing has changed biologically, evolutionarily, or morally. <<
I do not believe this is true.
Historically, individual members of the human species sought partners for reproduction who held certain dominant traits: attractiveness, strength, intelligence, religiosity, and others. In 1800, infant mortality rates were around 50%. At such a high infant mortality, genetic mutations that did not select for those dominant desirable traits were few. The offspring that did hold undesirable traits either died in infancy or if they lived to the age they could reproduce, they were social pressures that made it difficult for them to find partners. That meant undesirable genetic mutations were not passed down to successive generations in the gene pool.
Today, infant mortality rates in advanced, industrial societies are often less than 1%. That allows for undesirable traits and genetic mutations to be passed down that would not have happened when infant mortality rates were 50%. In addition, the culture has changed to not only tolerate those with less desirable traits, but venerate and celebrate them. The dominant culture used to engage in shame and other forms of non-coercive suasion to pressure the young to seek out the dominant traits the species had always relied on for its survival.
The result of allowing genetic mutations to so easily be passed down is we now have a species that is objectively uglier, fatter, weaker, mentally unstable, less conformist, and by some measures less "intelligent" despite having credentials saying they are more intelligent.
@gdonaldallen
I think that many of them have either forgotten, or rejected, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The need for safety is one of the most basic needs of every human being. From my perspective, this movement is counter intuitive. I would prefer to see resources dedicated to the prevention of crime.
One thing is for certain: not one of these far-left Fascist professors and academics is willing to open his or her home to house violent criminals (or illegal aliens, for that matter). They live in large houses, with strong locks on their doors and windows, while demanding the most violent members of society be unleashed on poor neighborhoods that they only drive through with car doors securely locked and windows rolled up, or fly over on their way to some posh junket.
Wha? You criticize leftists for not opening their homes to criminals? How do you know what size houses they live in? What a bizarrely sick opinion.
It’s an ideological stretch to advocate abolishing prisons for everyone except President Donald J. Trump.
I was thinking the same when I realized they don’t want prisons because they intend to commit crimes and they won’t need prisons for the people who disagree with them either.
“They intend to commit crimes”? When and how did you realize that stupid thought?
I’m talking about all the crimes the leftys are talking about intending to commit. Do you not follow the news?
Prisons get in the way of criminals, big hassle for them.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste. reading is fundamental.
You are not good at this. Please read the other lefty screeds here. Those are the best examples of leftys letting out there TDS rage. It’s cathartic for them and entertaining for us. You’re just bottling in all that emotion with your short posts with ‘stupid’ in them. If english is a second language for you, just translate some of your culture’s curse words, we’ll get your drift. If that doesn’t work, well, they’re doing wonderful things with medications these days…
Atty Benisch wins for the best comment of the day. They want to let illegals who have committed violent crimes stay free and put ICE agents in prison.
The idea of banning prisons is so stupid as to make it almost impossible to argue against. They forced no-bail down our throats and we have poor people like the girl on the bus getting stabbed to death becoming a reality. We all know it is a small percentage of the men committing most of the crime and yet these insane empaths want to let them roam among us.
They wanted Trump in prison form a real estate deal and they want rapists to be forced to go to a lecture.
OPERATION LET THEM SPEAK will win us elections.
Best of the day? Ahem… the day is not over stupid.
The idea of banning prisons is so stupid as to make it almost impossible to argue against. So in other words you’re too stupid make a rational argument against banning prisons?
That real-estate court case in NY had no prison attached to the crime, it was a XL fine and forfeiture.
ANOTHER guy who says stupid a lot????
a rational argument against banning prisons? how’s this: The criminals will go free if we ban prisons.
Now I’m thinking “stupid!” a lot, but I’m NOT gonna say stupid, stupid.
Very good points, Bobby. Having been through the criminal-justice meatgrinder a few times, as a victim of violent felonies, I can attest that perps already get preferential treatment, at least if they’re black.
So-called crime victims? They are despised and mistreated throughout the process. My friends and I simply stopped reporting crime at all. One more reason the official stats should not be trusted.
What a stupid comemnt.
You use that word a lot. Got stupid on your brain? I think it’s TDS.
haha
Stephen B. Benisch, Esq.
They need their version of Emmanuel Goldstein to rage at in their TDS induced two minutes of hate.
Huh?
1984.
Its not the question of abolishing previsions, it should be about expanding insane asylums. Take this blog, it’s estimated that 99.7% of the commenters here suffer from serious mental problems, consoidering the average age of 78 years old made up of male geriatrics. Dementia is the primary illness of that group, resulting in a loss of mental focus i.e., time namely and the transition to an surrealistic state of mind brought about by high alcohol intake.
Dementia? I don’t have dementia and I’m not going to stand for that kind of talk, especially from some know-it-all 4-foot Giraffe wearing a Hillary Clinton mask just because it can fly. now get off my lawn!
The Psychiatry and Health Sciences of John Hopkins University conducted a study of 30 random Professor Turley columns, analyzed the comments section and found 85% of comments to be center right, of above average intelligence, and educated. 10% were on the left end of the political scale, of low intelligence, having to resort to using either AI or cut and paste from far left leaning media in order to make a comment. It was also found that 10% suffered from extreme TDS. 4% used the moniker of “anonymous” were of very low intelligence, serving no meaningful purpose in life or adding value to society. 1% of those using the moniker of “anonymous” actually did make meaningful comments.
They should include the count of the leftys that say ‘stupid’ a lot!
-A little troll for our TDS friend here.
Viddy well, little brother, viddy well.