years ago, i first grew suspicious of some prison abolitionist ideas for marxist reasons, not yet realizing how male supremacist the movement was. primarily the idea that detaining anyone at all ever is an inherent injustice that is incompatible with the world that socialists want to build. this idea may cause a whole host of problems for people who claim they want a revolution, but those issues wonât come to forefront any time soon lol, since western socialists donât really organize on a mass scale. how do you ensure a revolution doesnât get rolled back by the militant enforcers of the fallen empire without, at minimum, detaining the counterrevolutionaries? itâs a thought experiment that kind of gets eclipsed by all of the male supremacy in the movement. itâs much less discussed or clarified as a result.
on that note, one of the most prominent prison abolitionists in the US, mariame kaba, got ran off of social media in the wake of Oct 7th for saying that the Palestinian resistance should have never taken hostages and that they need to be released. her leftist audience seemed to agree with her about doing away with detaining peopleâŠuntil she was being ideologically consistent by applying that idea to everything, including zionism. her audience of prison abolitionists appeared to think that israelis ought to be detained for enforcing colonialist violence (correct)âŠbut the same standard shouldnât apply to americans at home? or maybe, an even more sinister thoughtâthat a lot of prison abolitionists think male violence isnât worth detaining people for but colonialist violence definitely is. because, you know, men are viewed as the primary victims of colonialism. this leftist flavored misogyny needs to be confronted as harshly as right wing misogyny. mariame kaba was just being ideologically consistent in her opposition to detaining people, but her audience drew the line somewhere. in 2019, she even defended a male sexual abuser who ended up claiming more victims after she advocated for his freedom and participated in a âcommunity-basedâ âaccountabilityâ process that the abuser disregarded. this didnât cause her to get expelled from online leftist spaces, though. defending a male abuser doesnât get you cancelled. much to say about it!
and further, there is a significant amount of them who want the âcommunityâ to deal with abusers, but they rarely have a sufficient answer for the possibility that the âcommunityâ produces and enables abusers. that the âcommunityâ is as much a vehicle for patriarchal violence as the ruling class state. they want to reduce violence and abolish criminalization by eliminating privation and poverty, which is correct, but they get really mad when people ask what happens if a sexual abuser happens to exist after this ideal society with no enforced privation is achieved.
i think a marxist would say you gotta detain that person for the practical reason of rendering them unable to physically attack people. you donât gotta subject them to psychological abuse, inhumane living conditions, labor exploitation, nor solitary confinement. but you gotta, like, detain them so they are physically unable to continue the abuse. ideally they would be receptive to rehabilitation, but if they arenât, they should remain detained so as to not enact more violence onto people. in a world with no enforced privation, i like to think arresting people will be rare and minimal. but the prison abolitionists who think detaining people (mostly men lol) is an injustice will likely say sexual abuse just wonât exist at all if poverty is abolished, so thereâs no need to worry about that possibility. or, you gotta leave it up to the âcommunityâ to give the abuser a stern talking to or beat them up and that will be enough to solve the problem. no mention of what happens if they donât want to be rehabilitated at all. you just canât detain them!
this kind of prison abolitionism isnât just male supremacist it is just not very conducive to addressing any kind of violence, even the state violence against men that leftists sincerely oppose. neither the ruling class state nor the âcommunityâ want to detain abusers and their motivations tend to converge on the naturalization of male supremacy. đŹđ§ i think the prison abolitionist movement needs to seriously contend with this instead of hemming and hawing about how no one wants to imagine a better future, or whatever. the platitudes just arenât thick enough to hide the bile underneath, i think. the culture around prison abolitionism has a sexism problem!
