Committing a crime does not remove…
Committing a crime does not remove someone’s humanity. I would rather live in a society where rapists and murderers are still treated as human beings, even in a prison, because preserving their right to be human is as important as protecting my right to be…
Wow ok I’m not gonna treat or think of rapists with compassion literally ever thx xoxo
sorry not sorry
Okay so this thread has really started to irk me.
Everyone crying “BUT WHERE WILL ALL THE RAPISTS GO?!?!?!” at those for prison abolition really miss several points here. And one of them is that actually, the vast majority of rapists actually DO NOT end up in prison.
If only 56% or estimated rapes are reported and only 3% of those charged with rape ever see a jail cell, who’s to say that most prisoners are rapists? In fact it seems a minority of prisoners actually are violent offenders. Meanwhile, a rising number of people in prison are actually “drug offenders” (AKA young people of color who sell or use drugs) who’ve been racially profiled. According to wikipedia:
As of 2006, 49.3% of state prisoners, or 656,000 individuals, were incarcerated for non-violent crimes. As of 2008, 90.7% of federal prisoners, or 165,457 individuals, were incarcerated for non-violent offenses.[22] Drug offenses account for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population since 1985; approximately half a million people are in prison for a drug offense today compared to 40,000 in 1981—an increase of 1,100 percent.[23]
The reason we demonstrated in front of a women’s prison on Mother’s Day is because incarcerated women, especially women of color, are disproportionately survivors of violence and trauma. Many of them are incarcerated as a result of their abuse; many fight back, many get duped by their abusers, and many consequently have to leave their families behind. Also, with regards to transwomen, many are profiled by police under the suspicion of being sex workers, and have had to fight off hate crimes. Eve Ensler, who I usually feel iffy about, has made an excellent documentary and play called Any One of Us, and Victoria Law has written a book called Resistance Behind Bars, which articulates women’s struggles in prisons and outside of them. Angela Davis has also written extensively on the subject as a black feminist and former political prisoner. These works show that these prisoners don’t need to be confined; they need serious help.
If the current criminal justice system was any good, the assholes on Wall Street would be done for, and so would roughly 94% of rapists. If it was any good, my own father wouldn’t have been thrown in prison under the racist pretense that he was undocumented, when he actually showed up to court to pay a debt. But instead, prisons uphold white supremacy and slavery, and continue cycles of abuse for marginalized people. So you all need to do yourselves a favor and read up before you start attacking prison abolitionists, instead of individualizing a structural problem by saying things like “But I need prisons!” When you obviously have no idea what happens in them or how most people get there. No sympathy for rapists, but no excuses for a fucked up prison system.
Yeah Suzy!
I should also add, too, that this kind of argument completely erases the fact that prison subjects bodies to rape in hugely escalated ways. IE, people go to jail for, say, drug possession and then are raped or (less rampantly) become rapists. There aren’t really stats on this, but the idea that most prison rape is committed by other prisoners bothers me and is probably not true at all. Prison makes bodies particularly vulnerable to rape by cops, guards, doctors, janitors, fucking everyone. A prison industrial complex, a prison system at all, is always going to be what we call a “rape culture” because it is a culture which removes economic and legal value from bodies, which completely separates bodies from their autonomy, which by definition erases the right/power/capability that any body has to exercise anything that looks like “consent,” and which makes a rape of these bodies unpunishable by any means.
And (if you watch SVU you know this all too well) a support of prisons is a complicity in using rape as punishment for (almost always) lesser wrongs, most of which are not actually bodily infractions but are capitalist ones—drugs, property theft. Rape becomes something that it is okay to do to certain bodies, and rape becomes something it is especially okay to do to bodies that fuck with capitalism. In prisons, rape props up capitalism. (And let’s not forget that this is literal: guess how many things in your home and neighborhood were made by prison labor? Guess how many things on your boobs were made using prison labor?)
If you fuck with capitalism you go to jail. If you go to jail you get raped. If you get raped you don’t go to jail. If you rape a prisoner you get a high five from Eliott Stabler.
I don’t want to overlook the important fact, though: dude socialists will always always use the PIC as a way to derail and redirect any conversation about accountability for rapists. Even though, as you said, most rapists are not in prison, nor will they ever be in prison.
a: I want my rapist to go to jail
dude socialist: you are propping up capitalism, and also I am probably going to rape you because that’s what dudes like me do*anarchists too, and really any dude, or maybe anybody, but I’ve met mostly the socialist ones
Smashing The Prison Industrial Complex In Three Easy Steps, According To White Dudes In Their Twenties:
- FREE ALL RAPISTS! ANY WOMAN OR QUEER PERSON WHO WANTS TO INVOLVE THE STATE IN THEIR TRAUMA IS AN ENEMY OF THE CAUSE AND SHOULD BE REMOVED FROM ALL ORGANIZING SPACES. ALSO PROBABLY RAPED.
- ANY PERSON WHO DOES NOT PROTEST MY WEED POSSESSION CHARGES* IS AN ENEMY OF LIBERATION
- IF WE SOLVE THESE PROBLEMS, ALL THE POOR BLACK PEOPLE WILL BE SAVED
*wherein I will never face jail time if I am white but am really mad about having to do community service
THIS IS IMPORTANT.
ONE CAN BE AGAINST BOTH RAPE/RAPISTS AND PRISONS,
and also
BOTH RAPE AND PRISONS SHOULD BE OPPOSED.
i agree. important conversation.
