US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3654

On May 29 2022 03:35 BlackJack wrote:


I’m not the one that injected race here. Plasmid said police only serve the rich and white and they destroy other communities. NewSunshine questioned whether abolishing the police is better than having them constantly assailing non-white communities. I don’t think white people should defer to black people on all decisions. I think if you’re flirting with the idea of abolishing the police and one of your primary reasons is to stop police from destroying or assailing minority communities then it’s critically important to listen to what those communities have to say on the matter.

To answer your 2nd question, I’m in the reform the police camp.

Jenn Jackson, political scientist, Syracuse University:

By “abolish the police,” I mean building a world where we do not rely on anti-Black, white supremacist institutions of order to regulate society. This means that alternative forms of order might be embraced, like community care networks and justice structures rooted in restoration rather than punishment.

Yes, defunding police authorities and reinvesting in communities that are most affected by structural inequality is an approach. However, organizers are doing amazing work right now to think through many approaches and methods that might build a freer world and sustain Black futures. A good example is the “8 to Abolition” plan put together by young organizers and scholars. This campaign includes defunding police authorities. It also encourages decarceration, accessible housing, and decriminalizing Black, Brown, and poor communities.

By creating solutions that address police abolition and its relationship to mass incarceration and institutional racism, organizers are developing broad and complex mechanisms to address this problem.

When 27-year-old trans woman Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco lay lifeless in her cell last June, correctional officers at New York City’s Rikers Island stood outside her cell laughing, according to recently released security footage. She had just had an epileptic seizure, but prison staff had failed to conduct the 15-minute-interval health check-ins that are required for prisoners held in solitary confinement. Staff told investigators that they thought she was sleeping.

It was her third seizure in custody.

Earlier this month, an investigation by the Bronx District Attorney’s office cleared prison staff of any wrongdoing in Polanco’s death, even though the DA report also indicated that correctional officers had left her alone for up to 47 minutes, contravening jail regulations.

“The video is the last piece of the puzzle,” David Shanies, an attorney for Polanco’s family in a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of New York and several Rikers staff members, told NBC News. “It’s the last bit of indifference to her life that we saw and recklessness to a person who obviously needed help.”

On May 29 2022 05:02 Falling wrote:

Sounds great and all, but you realize every institution relies on the police as the back stop. From security guards to social care to healthcare, every institution is trained to remove themselves in any situation where they could be violently attacked. When things get hairy, every worker is told to withdraw and let the police deal with it. Are we sending social workers into the fray now? Even think of the horrific shooting- people are rightly calling on the police to have done more, not less. Would a team of 'community care social networks and justice structures' suffice during an active shooting?

I also note that 8 to Abolition proposes on emptying the jails, prisons, nursing homes, and "'alternatives to incarceration' that are carceral in nature". Suppose buddy boy who shot up the school got captured rather than shot... are we putting him back on the street with 'community care social networks and justice structures?' Or are we locking up for a reasonably lengthy period of time because he is clearly a danger to society.

On May 29 2022 10:37 gobbledydook wrote:


The article you linked to hand waves away any possibility that some people are just bad people and need to be kept away from society. It starts from the utopian premise that if only everyone was well supported enough no one would commit crimes.
It also presumes that because perpetrators of serious crimes don't get caught often that the system is useless anyway. But I'd say most people would argue, zero is worse than some.

Since the 1980s, the prison system has become increasingly ensconced in the economic, political and ideological life of the United States and the transnational trafficking in U.S. commodities, culture, and ideas. Thus, the prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards’ unions, and legislative and court agendas. If it is true that the contemporary meaning of punishment is fashioned through these relationships, then the most effective abolitionist strategies will contest these relationships and propose alternatives that pull them apart. What, then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice?

An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment—demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.

The creation of new institutions that lay claim to the space now occupied by the prison can eventually start to crowd out the prison so that it would inhabit increasingly smaller areas of our social and psychic landscape. Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished communities of color—including the presence of armed security guards and police—and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prisons. The alternative would be to transform schools into vehicles for decarceration. Within the health care system, it is important to emphasize the current scarcity of institutions available to poor people who suffer severe mental and emotional illnesses. There are currently more people with mental and emotional disorders in jails and prisons than in mental institutions. This call for new facilities designed to assist poor people should not be taken as an appeal to reinstitute the old system of mental institutions, which were—and in many cases still are—as repressive as the prisons. It is simply to suggest that the racial and class disparities in care available to the affluent and the deprived need to be eradicated, thus creating another vehicle for decarceration.

To reiterate, rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society. Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.