July 2019 Discussion - Prison Abolition & Crime

Monday July 29, 2019

7 PM

Dundonald Park, Ottawa (Somerset and Lyon)

Readings

—

Abolition:

“I think the criminal justice system places a lot of emphasis on the deficits of people, as do psychiatric and medical models – that people be reformed or rehabilitated rather than think about their access to social services, mental health supports, or community. The system criminalizes and “deters” migration rather than questioning why people are displaced in the first place and how Canada is complicit. Rather than constructing prisons and detention centres, we need to focus on building access to dignified means of life and all the things you need to survive as human beings.“

https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/abolition-architecture

Prison:

"To me, it’s inevitable that there will be more Indigenous women in prison, as we continue to deny them their rights and resources in their own communities. I think that there is a real need for feminists and Indigenous women to work together. The alliance-building has to start in earnest, especially in the face of this prison industrial complex that is unfolding. We are too few to count alone, and it’s time for us to start working together.”

https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/criminal-injustice





Abolition:

“Central to abolitionist work are the many fights for non-reformist reforms — those measures that reduce the power of an oppressive system while illuminating the system’s inability to solve the crises it creates.”

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/prison-abolition-reform-mass-incarceration





Prison:

“Modern prisons have become places of irredeemable harm and trauma. J. C. Oleson surveys these dehumanizing warehouse prisons, where guards have overseen systems of sexual slavery or orchestrated gladiator-style fights between inmates.”

https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/mass-incarceration-prison-abolition-policing





Abolition:

“In the real world, there are people who have committed serious violent crimes, like serial domestic abusers. If those people were all suddenly freed one day, they would likely resume the pattern of abuse, because it’s very hard to transform a person overnight. If you are concerned not just with the injustice inflicted on defendants by a brutal prison system, but on victims by violent aggression, then prison abolition just amounts to blindly focusing on stopping one injustice while ignoring the potential consequences for increasing the amount of another injustice.”

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/08/can-prison-abolition-ever-be-pragmatic





Crime:

“An overemphasis on the structural causes of crime overshadows the fact that about half of the people in state prisons are serving time today for nonviolent offenses, many of them property or drug offenses that would not warrant a sentence in many other countries. Many others are serving savagely long sentences for violent offenses even though they no longer pose serious threats to public safety”

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/criminal-justice-reform-minimum-sentencing-mass-incarceration





Abolition:

“As Yale Law School professor James Forman, Jr. has cautioned, “The Jim Crow analogy encourages us to understand mass incarceration as another policy enacted by whites and helplessly suffered by blacks. But today, blacks are much more than subjects; they are actors in determining the policies that sustain mass incarceration in ways simply unimaginable to past generations.””

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/beyond-criminal-justice-reform-black-silent-majority





Prison:

“[P]risons, despite the fact that they are public institutions, have this extraordinary ability to resist inquiry from the outside. They are able to commit abuses and atrocities because they have been able to remain sealed from public inquiry. And it’s an extraordinary thing that they are allowed to do that, considering that they are funded at taxpayer expense and that they are charged with keeping the public safe.”

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/prison-strike-uprising-attica-today-heather-ann-thompson





Crime:

“It was Bishop L. Robinson, the city’s first black police commissioner, who began the push to criminalize squeegeeing. His intentions were as pure as a policeman’s can be. “I introduced it in the best interest and safety of the children,” he later told the Sun. “It was not intended to send children to jail.””

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/plight-of-the-squeegee-kids-philo





Crime:

“The current political climate and electoral success of conservatives sometimes seems like proof that democracy is not such a good idea after all. Conservatives have hijacked some valid and popular ideas lately. While progressives defend the individual’s right to exist and express themselves in public, conservatives have come to power—at least in city politics—by defending the public as a whole. In brief, conservatives are defending what used to be a progressive cause: Public Space.”

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/quality-of-whose-life





Abolition:

“We should continue to send violent offenders to prison. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that this will solve North End problems. Filling our prisons with more young Aboriginal men – over seventy percent of inmates in Manitoba are Aboriginal – will not stop the violence. These street gang members bring the wisdom of experience that has been missing in the public debate about inner city violence. They are part of the problem. They know that. But they can be part of the solution if we collectively have the courage to go down a different road, and create real opportunities for them.”

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/if-you-want-to-change-violence-in-the-hood-you-have-to-change-the-hood





Abolition:

“What if, instead of talking endlessly about the supposed crimes of the poor, we instead tried highlighting the way the mass media regularly fails to condemn abuses of power and force by police and prison personnel and neglects institutionalized persons? What would happen if we chose to reject current theories of crime and criminality and instead focused on trying to prevent - and when unsuccessful punish - those who perpetrate the most harmful behaviours?”

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/if-you-have-come-here-to-help-me-…-why-women-are-in-canadian-prisons-kim-