Trans campaigners want to abolish prisons - wonder why?

Boys wouldn't grow up watching gangster films, or being taught violence is a part of male life in the playground or in a culture saturated with sexualised images of women.

I do not think this "feminised" world will ever happen, or is even desirable. In every society, even lovely Nordics, men feel a drive to be ready to fight to protect women, children and property if attacked. There is evolutionary pressure for men to feel a desire to possess the women who will bear his children.

Remember too that some people are just nasty bullies and general dickheads. If such a person is a man he can use his superior size and strength to be awful to women. Women can do damage too of course but generally to other women and children, much less so to men.

While culture does change levels of violence, there will always be violence in society.

I would not abolish prisons on a promise of all men becoming mild pussy cats if we ban gangster movies, GTA make all images or interactions with women be with them fully covered up in baggy clothes, stop all addiction and somehow give everyone a good job and fulfilled life.

jj1968

Street gangs and knife crime were not caused by austerity cuts (even though it didn't help matters), it has been going on for decades, since the 1980's. We are only just beginning to officially recognise "County lines" drug gangs, which have existed for ages. I never carried a knife when I was young and I didn't know anyone who did.
People have to take responsibility for their actions, and if they transgress then they pay the price. Violent crime has to result in custodial sentancing. This has to be done in order to protect law abiding people.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangsta_rap

If you defund the police and get rid of prisons then we can see what happens in countries around the: wealthy individuals live in gated communities with private security who accompany them on trips out. Poorer people are dragged down by a cycle of corruption and criminality. More dystopian thn utopian

And you are in a chicken : egg situation. Which is the main sticking point. Because something has to be done to curb violence in the men without the utopian education whilst the youth are being indocrinated - which will be the main objection to it.

You've seen incel and MRA writing, haven't you?

The main barrier to any of the young men we saw fully engaging in the programme was peer pressure and their fathers, uncles, next door neighbours, any older male. Most never did fully engage. Most went on to re offend in various ways. Many were incarcerated.

But when you start, "defunding the police", or not using prison, in the real world we live in today, it's obviously kind of dangerous.

I don't disagree but the vision and principles can be used to make change now. When austerity policies pretty much shut down youth services in London, the EMA that encouraged poor kids to stay in school was abolished and student fees raised to eye watering levels that was a massive fuck you to young working class people condemned to an ever more precarious life of minimum wage work, zero hours contracts and unaffordable housing. Pretty much everyone from those communities, especially youth/probation/education workers knew this would increase youth crime, and it did, there was an explosion of gang related knife crime just a few years later. And now we need more police and prisons to deal with it and that just creates a spiral of increasingly damaged, violent and impoverished people. Had the principles of defund the police been applied instead by investing in services and young people themselves instead of more cops then we probably wouldn't be in that situation.

I would support LGBTQ wings in prisons but some might argue that’s just another form of discrimination - it seems the safest option to me ...

I can’t believe any lesbian or bi woman prisoner, given the choice, would pick a mixed sex prison over an all-female one. GBTQ wings maybe....

It looks bonkers when expressed as abolish prisons instead of work towards making prisons mostly unnecessary through:
(a) using non-prison methods of punishment and protection where suitable
(b) decriminalising some things (TV licence?)
(c) changing society so fewer people commit criminal acts

Jumping to the end point would be like lobbying to have me being sent up to ISS as an astronaut despite being too unfit, no astronaut training, not a military pilot because if I had been trained and was fit and had been given the opportunity to train as a jet fighter test pilot then I might well have been good as a space explorer so let's blame society for those things not having happened and send me up to tinker with Hubble to be fair.

So, what does that actually mean? He gets to go to anger management classes, is told how badly he has behaved, agrees and apologises, maybe volunteers to help out in a community project to show his remorse?

Well it could also include some kind of monitoring, which under Davis' vision would happen in the context of strong communities in which male violence towards women was no longer normalised or endemic. Boys wouldn't grow up watching gangster films, or being taught violence is a part of male life in the playground or in a culture saturated with sexualised images of women.

I think the work you've done, which is admirable btw, shows there is merit to solutions beyond prison. Imagine what could be achieved in a very different kind of society? That's what Angela Davis is getting it, we need revolutionary reform because the current system is not working and can't be fixed.

Whilst it might sound utopian, for many men and women of colour, and many who are just poor in the US, and elsewhere, the current system is a horror show that demolishes people and so a bit of utopian thinking on how to get out of that is a good thing.

Perhaps hypothetically if you could apply all these various policies you would have a very different kind of society. OK perhaps.

But when you start, "defunding the police", or not using prison, in the real world we live in today, it's obviously kind of dangerous.

Who is most likely to be the victim with that kind of policy? I will suggest it's law-abiding people at the bottom of society including plenty of minority persons.

Yes there are socio-economic factors which can play a role in criminality. Yes, some people are born in much less lucky circumstances. However, you still need to insist that people are responsible for their actions and can be punished accordingly.

Imagine if the first time a man raised his hand to a woman or behaved sexually inappropriately she felt empowered to report it and immediately a system of education, rehabilitation, and potentially reparative justice kicked in.

So, what does that actually mean? He gets to go to anger management classes, is told how badly he has behaved, agrees and apologises, maybe volunteers to help out in a community project to show his remorse?

I have news for you. I used to work in just such a programme. I still work in part of it. Back in the 90s/2000s they took very young violent men and did all of that. Notes from the research, echoed in some mainstream, published studies was that:

If the young man came to us after his first violent crime and fully engaged then he was far less likely to re offend than another who was incarcerated

If a young man came to us after a number of offences, no arrests or sentencing, and fully engaged, he was a little less likely to reoffend than another similar who was incarcerated.

If he came to us after incarceration, was already a recidivist, then neither he nor the others in that group would engage with the process and many / most would reoffend.

And, oddly, the process of punishing young men who are violent against partners usually follows that pattern: offer them courses, understanding, education and training; offer a more structured education and more community reparation; prison - though the first 2 steps can, and often are, not followed depending on the levles of violence or a decision based on the attitudes of all involved.

However Angela Davis never quite grapples with the thorny issue of what to do with violent offenders and how to prevent them committing further violent offences. She discusses it a bit at the very end of the book but it's just not good enough:

I agree that some of the answers I've seen from the prison abolitionist movement about how to deal with serial rapist sor murderers, just as an example, are unsatisfactory. But I think it's important to recognise where Davis is coming from. Prior to the birth of the GC movement feminists of all stripes were pretty much united that male violence was not inevitable - biology isn't destiny cuts both ways - and so was feminism to be successful and overthrow patriarchy then male violence against women, in it's current endemic form, would disappear.

It's hard to imagine what such a world would look like. But if boys were not constantly given the message that they have a sexual right to women's bodies and that successful men use violence to get what they want then society would very likely develop along different lines. So much of masculinity is tied up with being really hard and shagging loads of women and I don't think that is the natural state of being male - I don't think there is a natural state of being male.

And if such a society were also to end the drug war and the vast criminal empire it creates, create economic and racial equality to the point that everyone's needs were met, and organise our lives in a very different way to the current capitalist economy then I suspect a large amount of crime would disappear as would the culture surrounding it. Davis is a committed anti-capitalist after all, she is talking about revolutionary change

Whilst it might sound utopian, for many men and women of colour, and many who are just poor in the US, and elsewhere, the current system is a horror show that demolishes people and so a bit of utopian thinking on how to get out of that is a good thing.

The question is would that be enough to end male violence. Firstly her position isn't that getting rid of prisons means getting rid of all forms of justice. Imagine if the first time a man raised his hand to a woman or behaved sexually inappropriately she felt empowered to report it and immediately a system of education, rehabilitation, and potentially reparative justice kicked in. That would seem preferable to me than waiting until he's done it enough times that society thinks it's a problem and locks him up in a system he is likely to come out of twice as violent as before with little recourse to even find a decent job and learn to become a different type of person.

I think if these kinds of social changes were brought about, then it's at the very least arguable that 99% of prison places would no longer be necessary. My feeling is even then the Peter Sutcliffe's of the world may well still exist, but could they be dealt with by a mental health system - which he actually currently is - or some form of home confinement? Or something else? Once you're only dealing with a very small number of people all kinds of different possibilities open up. So I think her ideas have a lot of merit, but they do depend on the kind of revolutionary change that most feminists of her era were fighting for, and some still are.

I actually came back to challenge JJ on the Davis book again, But see @LangClegsInSpace has very eloquently beaten me to it.

Davis started from a place most people never inhabit and her prison reform is embedded deeply in her personal experiences. She makes very many salient points, points that need to be heard, but she often buries them deep under her personal belief that all violent crime comes from personal inequity and the rich give to the poor, white to black, oppressor to the oppressed, etc etc, and all will be well!

Hers is an empassioned view, but utterly impractical on many levels.

True colours emerging though, that's what we need, more sunlight.

Ooh! Look, JJ's doing the DARVO thing.

How cute!

I rather assumed this was in response to the rather compelling case made by women that putting rapists, murderers and other violent men in the women’s estate is an utterly inhumane and illogical thing to do

Yep. Putting TW into women’s sports is unfair, so
let’s argue that sports are unimportant and should be abolished (unless it’s just for fun)

Putting TW into women’s prisons is dangerous, so let’s argue that prisons should be abolished.

Looks very familiar ....

@jj1968
Yes, because they’ll just sit on this research and do nothing with it at all...
Also, they’re not a university, this hasn’t been done just out of academic curiosity.
Do you understand how campaigning groups work?

Still, at least you’re back on topic now, your derailing earlier in the thread nearly had me calling British Transport Police

Thank you for the link jj, I've been meaning to read this book for a while.

www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Angela-Davis-Are_Prisons_Obsolete.pdf

It's a devastating account of how, in the US, slavery morphed into the prison industrial complex and how, in the context of capitalism and globalisation, the US model of profitable prisons has been exported around the world. Everyone should read it.

However Angela Davis never quite grapples with the thorny issue of what to do with violent offenders and how to prevent them committing further violent offences. She discusses it a bit at the very end of the book but it's just not good enough:

Thus, aside from minimizing, through various strategies, the kinds of behaviors that will bring people into contact with the police and justice systems, there is the question of how to treat those who assault the rights and bodies of others. Many organizations and individuals both in the United States and other countries offer alternative modes of making justice. In limited instances, some governments have attempted to implement alternatives that range from conflict resolution to restorative or reparative justice. Such scholars as Herman Bianchi have suggested that crime needs to be defined in terms of tort and, instead of criminal law, should be reparative law. In his words, "[The lawbreaker] is thus no longer an evil-minded man or woman, but simply a debtor, a liable person whose human duty is to take responsibility for his or her acts, and to assume the duty of repair."

(pp 113-4)

Davis's approach depends on the perpetrators of violent crime being sorry for what they have done.

Also it depends on society's ability to evaluate the debt or the 'duty of repair' owed to victims of violent crime. I don't think it's right or possible to put a $$$ value on the harm done to victims of violent assault, sexual assault, CSA, rape, murder ... a violent criminal is not 'simply a debtor' and it's absolutely right that we don't treat these two as the same.

The example given for this approach is Amy Biehl who was brutally murdered age 26 during the course of her activism in the last days of apartheid. The four men who were convicted of stabbing and stoning Amy to death were sentenced to 18 years. They then petitioned to the Truth and Reconciliation Commision and their apology was accepted by Amy's family. The men were released after one year in prison and two of them were later given plots of land by her family to help them rebuild their lives. Amy continues to be dead.

This is awful but I get it (sort of - really not sure about the gifts of land). Where there is a chance of ending decades long violent conflict, or decades long systems of violent oppression, it may sometimes be worth making horribly unjust and heartbreaking compromises in order to avoid several more decades worth of victims.

But this does nothing to address the people (massively overwhelmingly male) who are in prison for violent and/or sexual crimes in the UK. We are not in a war situation and vanishingly few violent criminals in prison today committed their crimes because of politics.

Nowhere in this book does Angela Davis suggest what should happen to rapists, serial rapists, child abusers, sadistic murderers, serial killers, family anihilators bla bla. She doesn't give any suggestions for how we should deal with people like John Worboys, Fred and Rose West, Ian Huntley, Jimmy Savile, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley or any of the other equally sadistic murderers and abusers whose crimes have not (yet) made national headlines.

She talks about sexual abuse of female prisoners and is very eloquent about the way sexual abuse is institutionalised in female prisons (and it is, she's right!) but she doesn't suggest any ways of dealing with sexual abusers. She doesn't really consider the subject of violent offenders beyond the example above, of murder committed in the course of political conflict.

Sadistic murderers and abusers are not sorry and they will do it again if they get the opportunity. No 'anticarceral' movement is worth listening to unless it comes up with solid solutions to this issue.

Oh and they're good at killing people and lying about it

Jean Charles menezes
Sean rigg
Smiley culture. Suss as fuck
And so many more

RIP to all the black men who have died in custody at the hands of the met.

Also Ian Tomlinson RIP

I will have missed people I'm sorry.

Can point me to the stats for trans people who have died at the hands of the met and the police have LIED AND LIED?

You see these assertions. About who is the most oppressed. Come on then. Tell me. Show me.

Not hate crimes. Being murdered by the police. Let's hear it.

I read the link as well and was also confused as it was mainly asking the opinions of victims of crime.

I have no doubt that trans people as a group have issues with the police. Same as, well, any number of groups.

The feeling I got was that the respondents were scared of being criminalised themselves. This is a (realistic) fear that many other groups feel.

Yet again. I wonder. Why it's seen as unique to the trans community. To not trust the police. To not report. To KNOW that the criminal justice system is not for them. It is NOT FOR THEM.

I see a lot of stuff about how white middle class women are free from the threat of male violence. I don't understand this.

I haven't trusted the police since I was. Dunno. I have had experiences with the met. I don't trust them. I don't like them. When I see police I feel worried. I mean not that you see them on the street much.

They aren't working for the public. The police work to protect the ruling classes. Sorry that sounds a bit mad Marxist.

It's true though.

I had a crime at my place. I had a crime I reported from my parents place.

My place (1 bed flat mostly rentals) nothing.

My parents. 2 very polite coppers turned up and were very nice and stayed for ages.

The police do not work for the people. They work to protect the important people.

Sorry that's a rant. But it's true of the met at least.

For race related police issues then this is s good site -inquest. I live in met area where the police are pretty good at killing black men even without being routinely armed

www.inquest.org.uk/

And Google gave me this as well that I admit I've only skimmed

irr.org.uk/article/mental-health-police-deaths/

I'm confused as to why they are making an extra 500 spaces for women?

Is it too address long term over crowding or what?

Maybe as there are so many less women in prison, families have to travel further to visit? This is a big issue.

The issues of the prisoners in the male estate, across the board. Are very different to the women's.

I have no idea why people see male on male violence in prisons as just one of those things. There was a heart breaking story about a young man who killed himself in prison who had a complex background of mental illness and drug abuse. He was failed. I can find a link if anyone wants.

The issue of how prisons impact people, I worry. A lot of people with mental health problems or terrible childhoods end up in the system.

Incarceration is important for those who are dangerous. Are likely to do it again. Have done something awful.

Prison is for

Protect the public
Justice seen to be done
Rehabilitation

It's a massive conversation. And totally different to the USA which is another thread entirely.

Again if anyone is interested www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk are the ones to support/ follow.

I'm not quite sure I grasp what you are saying Hettie - but I think that the report is pretty clear re what it is on about - i.e. it contains the results of a community consultation.

MH is a hot button issue. If you look for other reports and consultations I think you might find there is some consensus around the issues you raise for all communities and not just trans.

I've been involved in similar projects (writing up results from community consultations) and they are what they are - a reflection of community voices.

Reading that one with a GC eye it's easy to see 'the same old' in it and many aspects we don't agree with - but the suggestions within are not policy recommendations in their current form.