#decarceration

[justrandomthoughtsandthings]

what amuses me about any "reform vs abolish" topic is that, like many things in life, people speak of it as if the situation (and thus its solution) is black and white when in reality they are intertwined. like the rise in mixed-methodology research and the awareness of intersectional identities, and the combined success of both the Black Panther Party and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, both extremes are needed to ensure revolution of whatever issue is being addressed.

take for example incarceration. there are those pushing for safer conditions in carceral settings, those pushing for alternatives to incarceration, and those pushing for decarceration as a whole, when in reality, all of these things on their own will not solve the issue. oh, sure, we can instill policies to make prisons safe but there'll still be the issue of mass incarceration. and sure, we can fund alternatives to incarceration like community based corrections and SUD treatment facilities but without addressing the issues that make prisons unsafe, we're just providing a new setting for the same treatment (the same way slavery was abolished but share-cropping was literally the 'rose by any other name'). and sure we can work towards decarceration but it will either take a while, leaving people in unsafe situations, or it will be like when mental hospitals were closed and a lot of people were left without the supports of a system they were conditioned to be reliant upon and often no knowledge of the world they're released into.

but if we work to make prisons safer, while investing in alternatives to incarceration that address the issues of mass incarceration (largely, honestly, substances and commercial sex economy), then steps can be taken towards smart decarceration, with supports set up so we're not just releasing millions of folx with no game plan.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Release Two Transients Locked Up in Town Jail,” Kingston Whig-Standard. January 10, 1933. Page 1. ---- MERRICKVILLE, Jan. 10— Tearing the lock off the town hall cell, a group of local young men over the week-end released two transients who had been locked up for causing a disturbance. One at the guards was out for a meal when the "jail delivery" occurred and the other was instructed to leave the town hall while the prisoners were released. An investigation into the matter is being held and the town considering the advisability of employing a regular constable. The two offenders were to have been released after one night’s incarceration.

[AL: A wild story. Merrickville is a pretty small town on the Rideau Canal, and had no police force in 1933 - that a group of local young men felt justified in releasing prisoners is remarkable as well. Direct action gets the goods!]

[solarpunkwitchcraft]

The Real Dragons Rise: Prisoners Across the US and World Engage in Uprisings in Midst of Pandemic

By: Huey Dessalines Italian prisoners riot in response to COVID-19 pandemic UNITED STATES: Militant incarcerated workers across the country ushered in April with a series of riots, strikes, and sta…

Prisons in the US are severely overcrowded, thanks to the War on Drugs war on oppressed nations and the working class. Incarcerated workers have correctly risen in righteous rebellion against being forced to live in unsanitary, crowded facilities where “social distancing” and other prescriptions of health authorities are impossible. There is very little soap, no disinfectant, no clean sheets, no clean clothes, open sewage in many facilities, and bunks/cells are within arms’ reach of each other in open dorms. We unite with progressive demands from incarcerated workers and call for the immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners, older prisoners, immunocompromised people and others, along with the building of unity of the incarcerated and outside movement. As Ho Chi Minh said and George Jackson repeated, when the prison gates fly open, the real dragons fly out.

[jemelle]

If you have 10 minutes to spare and want to take a tangible action in support of decarceration, please consider calling/emailing Governor Newsom of California to demand that he Close DJJ the Right Way

Some background: After taking office last year, Newsom said that he would transfer The Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) to the health department. However, due to COVID-19, the division is now going to be shuttered entirely. While the disbandment of the DJJ is undoubtedly a good thing due to its history of “horrible conditions, terrible outcomes and excessive spending,“ the alternative, county-level control, is not better. Instead, the legislature has proposed establishing the Office of Youth Justice, which would provide oversight of the counties and incentivize the creation of ‘“trauma-informed” rehabilitative programs,’ among other initiatives

Here is a document that outlines who to call/email in support of this legislation and what to say! (Non-California residents are encouraged to take action as well)

[exigencelost]

Reminder to everyone, at 9am tomorrow (Monday 23) to call this number [phone] and say this!

[bossybroads]

Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind

In three decades of advocating for prison abolition, the activist and scholar has helped transform how people think about criminal justice.

'But why, they asked. And before she could answer, one said, “But what about the people who do something seriously wrong?” Others chimed in. “What about people who hurt other people?” “What about if someone kills someone?”

...

“I get where you’re coming from,” she said. “But how about this: Instead of asking whether anyone should be locked up or go free, why don’t we think about why we solve problems by repeating the kind of behavior that brought us the problem in the first place?” She was asking them to consider why, as a society, we would choose to model cruelty and vengeance.'

[prehistoricmancunt]

Friends, I've made a redbubble account! I have 4 designs up currently.

All the profits will again be donated, and the orgs they'll be donated to are listed in each product description. While I get less of the money this way per purchase, it's more accessible to share and I'm hoping that that will mean more people will buy them than my more minimal reach. The orgs are: #FreeBlackMamas, Divest/Invest, and JustLeadershipUSA which works on decarceration efforts.

You can buy stickers of all of them, pins of a couple of them, and shirts of the floral design. If there are other products you want available for a certain design lmk and I can activate it.

https://www.redbubble.com/people/bitterfeminist/shop?asc=u

all designs my own.

Receipts will be posted at the end of each month on my instagram @/bitter_feminist 

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Under the ideology of 'reintegration', the offender has to be taught some lessons in reality: he has to cope and find a legitimate role in the community. And this is supposed to be done using 'modalities' which look suspiciously like the old one-to-one treatment relationships which have dominated the [penal] system since its inception. It is still the offender who has to change, not the community. Community control emerges as another round in the game of blaming the victim. Ryan's original expose of the ideology which justifies inequality and injustice by finding defects in the victims of inequality and injustice, still applies. The new control agencies are less interested than the old in rooting out original causes - faulty psychic plumbing or subcultural status frustration - but in other ways they are the same. 

The community is deemed to be vaguely responsible but intervention skills are directed at the individual, resulting in what Ryan calls the 'terrifying sameness in the programmes that come from this sort of analysis'. There is, though, one ironic difference. Certain older victim-blaming strategies actually allowed for genuine forms of social intervention in the form of compensatory education, neighbourhood-renewal projects, attacks on racial discrimination, improving health. care and creating job opportunities. Whatever their problems or results, these programmes had the central virtue of connecting with the real master institutions of society. The new community professionals think of prevention in a quite different way. The stress is either on disembodied 'situations', 'behaviour sequences' or 'environments', or else remains individualistic. There is now less room for genuine reform and social intervention - who needs this if the offender is, after all, more or less ambulatory and back in the community? Away from the prying eyes and narrow minds of the old custodians, the offender's values, behaviour, cognitive skills or cultural defects can now really be corrected. Of all the modes of community control, only 'community service' (restitution, reconciliation, reparation, compensation) evokes most directly the vision of community. These schemes have been heavily criticized as forms of net-widening, cheap labour, new sanctions in the sentencing tariff, and as a version of the same ideology of work and discipline developed in the prison, but they do come close to the original vision of involvement and integration. This is particularly so when punishment takes the form of direct victim compensation - vandals repairing the windows they have broken.

There is another quite different· sense, however, in which the move from individual to 'community' is happening. All the forms of community control I have discussed here are punitive or treatment efforts directed at individual (usually 'soft-end ') deviants after they have offended. For many more visionary ideologues and observers, however, the day is ending for all forms of individual intervention. The real master shift about to take place is towards the control of whole groups, populations and environments - not community control, but the control of communities. In this movement technology and resources, particularly at the hard end, are to be directed to surveillance, prevention and control, not 'tracking' the individual adjudicated offender, but preventive surveillance (through closed-circuit television, for example) of people and spaces.” - Stanley Cohen, Visions of Social Control. Crime, Punishment and Classification. Polity, 1985. p. 126-127.