Content Warning: SV, SA, CSA, Incarceration, Abuse, Racism
Every rapist is a cop without a badge.
Every cop is a rapist with a badge.1
Almost no rapists are ever imprisoned. Prisons do not punish rapists.
In fact, many rapists thrive and succeed in their careers, attaining power, wealth, and prestige.
On the other hand, survivors who kill their own rapists or abusers are very likely to be incarcerated as a result. Prisons punish people who fight back against rapists.
Prisoners are routinely sexually assaulted in prison; assault by guards, staff, and authorities is anecdotally more common than assault by other prisoners. In other words:
Prisons are run and operated by and for the benefit of rapists; prisons reward rapists with access to a group of victims who cannot escape or resist. Prisons punish violent resistance.
Abolishing prisons therefore necessarily entails liberating a population of survivors who killed their rapists. It entails liberating them from the custody of prison guards who are also rapists.
The Prison Industrial Complex is not and never has been an institution for punishing people who violently dominate & harm others.
The Prison Industrial Complex is not an institution of justice.
The Prison Industrial Complex is an institution of racial slavery.
Although abuse & assault are complex phenomena and people who are marginalized can and do engage in these acts of domination, the great majority of all sexual violence in the so-called United States is committed by cis heterosexual white men (regardless of the gender or age of the victim.)
The Prison Industrial Complex vastly disproportionately mass incarcerates Black and Indigenous people.
The Prison Industrial Complex disproportionately incarcerates Black, indigenous, queer, or trans people, women and minors, for killing or violently resisting their rapist. Especially if the rapist is a cis white man.
Black and Indigenous people are not disproportionately violent. White men are. But white men are not disproportionately imprisoned. Instead, a majority of prison guards are white men.
The great majority of prisoners are not rapists or abusers.
Ergo, the great majority of Black and Indigenous prisoners are not rapists or abusers.
Rapists & abusers are disproportionately non-imprisoned, free adult white male citizens protected by the law, the community, and the cops.
Black and Indigenous people, trans, non-binary, and queer people, women, and children are the majority of victims and survivors of sexual violence.
Among these, people at more than one intersection of oppression are at even higher risk of rape.
People at more than one intersection of oppression are also at higher risk of incarceration. When incarcerated, they are then trapped in a cage guarded by white male rapists with badges and guns and tasers–instruments of authority, threat of death, and torture.
An abolitionism that centers the de facto protection, safety, and “rehabilitation” of rapists and abusers from the voluntary, autonomous, individual or collective insurrectionary resistance of survivors and their allies is an abolitionism that centers the protection and safety of non-incarcerated free cishet white men.
An abolitionism that benefits primarily non-incarcerated free cishet white men, and/or in any capacity seeks to shield rapists and abusers from being subject to their victims’ acts of direct action is an abolitionism that benefits the powerful at the expense of the marginalized.
An abolitionism that starts from the presupposition that “freeing and rehabilitating prisoners” is synonymous with “freeing and rehabilitating rapists, murderers, and abusers” is a racist program that falsely conflates incarcerated Black and Indigenous youth with “rapists, murderers, and abusers,” by accepting the fascist, reactionary lie that the mass incarceration of Black and Indigenous youth is in any way a project aimed at “punishing rapists, murderers, and abusers.”
When someone is seriously injured and requires therapy & care to recover, that is called “rehabilitation.”
Incarcerated victims of the Prison Industrial Complex & racial slavery have been seriously injured. Rape victims have been seriously injured.
Rapists are not seriously injured by their own decision to rape someone, and they do not need to recover from the experience of raping someone.
(27a.) Abuse or trauma in a rapist’s own past is unrelated to their decision to rape someone. Their own potential experience of victimization should be addressed in its own context, not in the context of someone ELSE’S–namely, their victim’s–experience & needs.
An abolitionism that benefits disproportionately cishet white men at the expense of disproportionately Black, Indigenous, trans, & queer people, women, and children is not an abolition of the Prison Industrial Complex at all.
An abolitionism that centers the needs of rapists & abusers, and benefits white men at the expense of the marginalized is an accomplice and colleague of the Prison Industrial Complex, because:
Every rapist is a cop without a badge. And:
Every cop is a rapist with a badge.
1 Some resources on police sexual violence can be found at the following sites: (a.) The California Law Review, “Police Sexual Violence, Police Brutality, #MeToo, and Masculinities”; according to which at least 36.5% of police officers in a national study had committed some form of Police Sexual Violence, and crucially, their colleagues knew and protected them via the infamous “Blue Wall of Silence,” moreover Black women were found to be drastically more likely to experience Police Sexual Violence than white women; (b.) Stinson et al. “Police Sexual Misconduct: a National Scale Study of Arrested Officers”, which found that, in a study of officers arrested for sex crimes, egregious sexual violence by police officers are not isolated events, and most victims (71%) were under the age of 18 with a modal age category of 14-15; (c.) Isidoro Rodriguez, “Predators Behind the Badge,” in which one officer says that targeting Domestic Violence victims seeking help is like “shooting fish in a barrel”; (d.) Walker and Irlbeck, “Police Sexual Abuse of Teenage Girls: A 2003 Update on “Driving While Female,” which finds that 40% of reported cases of Police Sexual Violence involved teenagers, (e.) Buffalo News, “Abusing the Law,” which reports that an officer is caught in a case of sexual abuse every 5 days, and (f.) Lohse’s “Since 2010 At Least 1300 Women and Children Have Been Sexually or Physically Attacked by UK Cops,” an extensive 4 part series on police sexual violence and its victims and survivors. When we say, “Every cop is a rapist with a badge,” we mean that in the same way we mean “All Cops are Bastards.” There are no good cops because the ostensibly good ones still enforce the rule of the bad ones; there are no cops who do not protect and ally with rapist-cops, who do not explicitly or implicitly collaborate with rapist-cops against victims.
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Note: Reposted retroactively before December 21st, 2022 to be more in line with when this was reposted on Twitter.
