Prison Abolition is NOT Just Getting Rid of Prisons

I was not sure what I would get it of reading the group interview on Bazaar regarding Abolition. Feminism. Now..

In 2003 author, scholar, and world-renowned activist Dr. Angela Davis published Are Prisons Obsolete, a landmark book arguing that prisons, along with other carceral institutions, should be abolished. It’s a subject that Dr. Davis has been rigorously studying and organizing around for decades, especially during her own period of incarceration and then acquittal on murder and kidnapping charges in the ’70s. Now Dr. Davis, in collaboration with fellow scholar and writers Beth Richie, Erica Meiners, and Gina Dent, has revisited the subject of anti-prison activism in her latest book Abolition.Feminism.Now.

While I agree on the uselessness of prison, I was worried that this book would fall into the same error as the abolish the police movement - remove, not remove and replace. I was wrong:

...We think about the process of getting rid of prisons in conjunction with presenting new modes of justice. We cannot continue to have a retributive justice system if we want to imagine new ways of addressing the issues that prisons simply cannot address. Justice, in the form that we know it, is always designed to deal with one individual case, leaving all the structures intact that are responsible for the reproduction of that violence. But we see justice as transformative, as transforming not only individuals but transforming our societies. This is one of the major arguments of the book, that in the same way we have to learn how to think in structural terms about racism, we also have to think in structural terms about gender violence.

But it is so easy for politicians and bureaucrats and judges to preen about being tough crime like they were Batman  patrolling Gotham City. As if toughness were all that was required to make citizens feel safe. Batman still has to rud Gotham City of The Joker, or to improve the lives of Gotham City's citizens 

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1/22/22