Trans campaigners want to abolish prisons - wonder why?

[stumbledin]

... Mermaids, Stonewall, Be:North, CliniQ, Consortium, Galop, Gendered Intelligence, GIRES, and Sparkle have partnered together with the aim of creating “lasting change for trans communities in healthcare and criminal justice systems.” The working group published three “community engagement reports” for their TRANSforming Futures series after listening to “a diverse range of trans people in England.” Continue reading The Prison System is Transphobic and Must be Abolished, Say Transgender Activists | Women Are Human.

... Participants are calling to abolish prisons, explaining that “work on abolition directly confronts criminalisation of trans communities.”

... The report does not provide suggestions on how to manage such violent and sexual predators as murderers, rapists and child rapists in the absence of a prison system. ...

(So male prisoners who have been found guilty of violence against women can now trans(fer) to a women's prison, and in the future not do any prison time at all. Really??)

Info from www.womenarehuman.com/prisons-are-transphobic-and-must-be-abolished-say-transgender-activists/

Link to the actual pamphlet www.transformingfuturespartnership.co.uk/criminal-justice funded by the National Lottery Community Fund.

I suppose it's true that not all societies had prisons, but they had ways of dealing with crime that would be unpalatable to us. Execution, mutilation, public humiliation, exile, surrendering of property, enslavement.. or at the other extreme, a person could pay their way out of a crime as serious as murder. I want to know what the 'anti-carceral' campaigners suggest instead of prison.

A quote from the report

"Recently, a number of ‘sex-by-deception’ cases have been brought against trans people. In these cases, individuals argue that their partner not disclosing their trans identity and/or trans history is a form of deception that invalidates consent"

Then,

"This has led to instances of trans men and transmasculine people being prosecuted in the context of intimate relationships. We spoke to Alex Sharpe, a legal expert in sex-by-deception cases, from their experience they detailed how complainants in these scenarios are more likely to press charges where the defendant is trans, and what is at issue in these cases is not particular sexual acts, but discomfort surrounding the defendant’s gender"

There's a lot to unpack there starting with the emphasis on the criminalisation of transmen.

Where TW are mentioned it is in reference to them being beaten up by men.

Interesting.

Packingsoapandwater you're so right.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_abolition_movement

The movement seems to be driven by the fact that the American prison system has grown out of control, and black people are disproportionately imprisoned.

A suggested alternative is 'supervised release, probation, restitution to victims, and/or community work.'

Surely that's insufficient for the more serious crimes - and it'd probably be difficult to get 'restitution' from many criminals anyway.

@NonnyMouse1337

There are discussions worth having around prison reform in general and rehabilitation etc, but there seems to be a rather loopy extremist version that peddles the idea of total abolition of prisons. These sort of proponents seem to have zero understanding of human nature and behaviour - really violent and dangerous offenders are not the sort of people that any kind of civilised or sane society want in their midst.

It's better to focus on many of the underlying issues that might contribute to antisocial and criminal behaviour in the first place so that less people find themselves getting into a life of crime or stuck in a criminal justice system that seems to exacerbate such behaviour. These kinds of long term measures will serve to reduce prison sentences and prison populations in general.
However, there is always going to a percentage of people (and by that I mean mostly men, however they identify) who are an extreme risk to society due to their violent and aggressive nature. They absolutely cannot be trusted not to hurt or kill other people, especially women and children.

The type of 'anti carceral feminism' that infests certain academic and legal circles seems completely captured by queer theory. I attended a public event a few weeks ago that was eye opening. I really recommend women attend these sort of seminars and listen to what is being said and ask questions because it has to be seen to be believed how bat shit crazy some of this stuff is. The speaker was talking about media reporting around Karen White (boo hoo so sad). She was making this bizarre association that women objecting to trans prisoners being housed in female prisons due to the nature of their crimes and sex is the same as homosexuals being imprisoned in the past because they were deemed to be a perversion and risk to society and also black men being unfairly imprisoned. All couched in queer theory phrasing but implying that trans prisoners (like Karen White - that's the only example she used) are being unfairly monstered by media and society.

Oh and also the media printing pictures of trans women who are murderers, sex offenders etc - you know what she called that? Visual deadnaming. So we shouldn't be showing the public the pictures of trans women criminals because..... You know.... We can tell.... 😉 And this is a bad thing because it causes hurty feelings.

A number of woke bros were attending this event and gushing what a great talk this was and how much they agreed with it all. It was sickening how little regard was given to vulnerable women in prisons.

Really... we need more women to attend these events and see for themselves what's taking place in these closed circles. These sort of academic and legal people sit in their ivory towers divorced from reality and sanity, their brains soaked in queer theory and they find ways to push their ideas into policy and legislation. These so called professionals need their ideas to be robustly challenged instead of the usual circle jerk of everyone agreeing with them.

Spot on

You might want to tell that to Angela Davis and the many other feminists who have called for prison abolition. If you think Davis was simply calling for abolition you have only read the headlines!

@andyoldlabour

There are clearly some very serious psychological and mental issues going on with anyone who wants to see prisons abolished. It really is that simple.

There are also a fair few, I suspect, whose hard-drives wouldn't stand close examination and want to issue themselves with a pre-emptive get out of jail free card.

It speaks to a certain type of privilege, I think, that you've been so insulated from the reality of the impact of violence that you can call for the abolishment of prisons. If they had a realistic understanding of it, they'd be calling for prison reform not complete abolition.
And they do. Its always calling for pure abolition without any restrictions.
That would mean freeing men like Ian Huntley. That tells me they've completely lost the plot and are putting ideology over the most basic common sense.

I think that complete abolishment of prisons is completely unrealistic. However I'd be interested to see what research they had to back up their statements. For example- I don't think that short prison sentences are necessarily effective for people who have committed crimes such as theft to fuel drug addiction- when money could go into better drug rehabilitation/ housing (loads of people are released from prison homeless only to re-offend etc).

This is is very much dependent on the type of crime and viewing the sex differences in offending:

Women and men commit different types of offences and for different reasons. Overall women commit significantly fewer serious and fewer violent offences than men. For example:

• Women make up only 3% of all arrests for sexual offences

• Women make up 5% of murder convictions receiving a life sentence

• Offences for which multiple men and no women received life sentences in a given year include: rape, attempted murder, GBH, robbery and kidnapping

By contrast, some “lower-level” offences are over-represented amongst women. For example:

• 70% of TV Licence evasion offences are committed by women.

• Women commit 70% of all truancy offences

• Women commit 55% of all benefit fraud

• 30% of all prosecutions for shoplifting are of women

These differences in offending are reflected in the sentencing patterns for men and for women, with women, considered as a group, receiving shorter custodial sentences than men, considered as a group. For example, 72% of immediate custodial sentences for women were for 6 months or less.

There are strong links between women’s acquisitive crime, for example theft and benefit fraud, and their need to provide for their children. These links are considerably less likely in the case of male acquisitive crime. Coercion is also an important factor in female crime: almost 50% of women committed their offence to support the drug use of someone else, usually their male partner. This compares to under a quarter of men

www.keep-prisons-single-sex.org.uk/women-in-prison

TLDR: avoiding prison for shorter sentences related to poverty and drug addiction makes sense to me and having more community detox/ rehabilitation/ psychiatric and social services as part of parol. But violent crimes or sexual assaults- definitely still prison. So, what evidence do they have for the breakdown of offenses for the group they advocate for?

One of the things I find interesting is that there is an acknowledgement that trans prisoners are more likely to be in for sex offenses but it's usually painted that this is down to them being persecuted for sex work or prostitution related offenses rather than sexually offending against others.
As far as I can tell, there's little evidence for the former and plenty for the latter, which is quite a worrying reframing.

I think it's fair to say that, especially in America, people (especially black people) are over-sentenced, especially for things like non-violent drug offences. And once you've got a felony on your criminal record it becomes much, much harder to get housing and a job. It destroys families when parents are incarcerated.

I support prison reform- conditions in so many prisons are completely inhumane and there are lots of people in there who aren't dangerous and who should pay for their crimes through alternative methods, such as community service. There needs to be better support and rehabilitation to stop people from reoffending (or from offending in the first place).

But there will always be dangerous, violent people who cannot live amongst us. Most of these people are men. What do these anti-carceral campaigners propose to do with serial killers, domestic abusers, terrorists, rapists and child molesters?

The sad thing is that the original anti-carceral movement came from a good place.

About 20 years ago, I went to a showing of a documentary called "Juvies" with a discussion with the female director afterwards. It tackled racial bias not just in sentencing but in the way crimes were charged in the first place.

Naively, prior to seeing this, if I'd heard the phrase "in a gang-related crime" I'd have immediately assumed that this was a truly awful crime and custody was the only option. However, gang-related is quite often used to bump up the charge sheet. A bit of shop-lifting? Rap on the knuckles for a white kid from the suburbs. Same, but with two black or hispanic kids who (in virtue of there being two of them from the same neighbourhood) can have "gang membership" added to the charge sheet. Suddenly it becomes a "gang related crime", the DA argues for trial in an adult court, the sentence can be bumped up to 10 years rather than the one year in juvie they might initially have got.

So race, class, a desire to be seen as "tough on crime" leading to ludicrous sentences for what are actually relatively trivial crimes - all these are arguments for prison reform, and in a lot of cases, alternatives to custodial sentences.

But you'll always have the Karen Whites and Ian Huntleys and Cray twins of this world - men so psychopathic and dangerous they need to be warehoused safely for indefinitely long periods of time somewhere they can't get at normal people. That warehousing should be humane and decent, with leisure and educational facilities - but there are some criminals (and some crimes) where people simply have to be "taken out of circulation."

Cross-post with Lammergeier.

Incidentally, should make clear that "Juvies" is about the US system. But some of the same issues arise here - what we are not so entrenched in is the "prison-industrial complex" where prisons are privately-run, for-profit businesses, which are then used to provide a pool of indentured labour (something like a third of furniture for sale in places like Home Depot is made using cheap labour in prisons), so there's a vested financial interest in long custodial sentences. (Though I worry very much about companies like Group 4 - I think we could easily head the same way).

Agree with Lammergeier and Cara.

Plus, a lot of anti-carceral emphasis is on the prevention of crime, not denying it when it happens.

Abolish prisons. Just when you think that things can't get any nuttier, it does. It's the same as the BLM manifesto, isn't it?

I watched this a little while ago. It's about how Auckland Pride was completely derailed by a small number of activists whose focus was prison abolition and related causes. It went against what the Pride committee wanted and I suspect most of the LGBT community who were usually in attendance.

It's not the most well made video but it does give good insight into how this type of entryism takes place. It seems like anything LGBT is extremely susceptible to being co-opted and used as a vehicle for something other than it's original purpose.

Yes, this is another example of an American talking point being shifted to the UK without checking to see if it makes any contextual sense. Clue: it doesn't. We already have more non-law enforcement link up supporting vulnerable people than the US does. Could it be better? Sure. But there's no need to "abolish" our already considerably less monetised prison system.

@CaraDuneRedux

The sad thing is that the original anti-carceral movement came from a good place.

About 20 years ago, I went to a showing of a documentary called "Juvies" with a discussion with the female director afterwards. It tackled racial bias not just in sentencing but in the way crimes were charged in the first place.

Naively, prior to seeing this, if I'd heard the phrase "in a gang-related crime" I'd have immediately assumed that this was a truly awful crime and custody was the only option. However, gang-related is quite often used to bump up the charge sheet. A bit of shop-lifting? Rap on the knuckles for a white kid from the suburbs. Same, but with two black or hispanic kids who (in virtue of there being two of them from the same neighbourhood) can have "gang membership" added to the charge sheet. Suddenly it becomes a "gang related crime", the DA argues for trial in an adult court, the sentence can be bumped up to 10 years rather than the one year in juvie they might initially have got.

So race, class, a desire to be seen as "tough on crime" leading to ludicrous sentences for what are actually relatively trivial crimes - all these are arguments for prison reform, and in a lot of cases, alternatives to custodial sentences.

But you'll always have the Karen Whites and Ian Huntleys and Cray twins of this world - men so psychopathic and dangerous they need to be warehoused safely for indefinitely long periods of time somewhere they can't get at normal people. That warehousing should be humane and decent, with leisure and educational facilities - but there are some criminals (and some crimes) where people simply have to be "taken out of circulation."

That's a really good point, you can see where BLM are coming from with situations like those you described.

I think that there is a big difference between reform and abolishment.

Sounds like they want to allow evil.

It does make me wonder if the next exciting activist point will be to demand Obamacare in the UK.

@TartrazineCustard

It does make me wonder if the next exciting activist point will be to demand Obamacare in the UK.

Hahaha- yes!

I agree Nonnymouse

A friend just recommended this talk on biological essentialism on her Facebook wall. www.crowdcast.io/e/saini/register?fbclid=IwAR2z7yp8ep3eytcAJO64kExcqh_LvjDUUw79EO7Zdg37m_rd4Fusg7OzPZ8

I mean, on the face of it lots about it looks fascinating and worthwhile and we do need to be having discussions about race and how it is socially constructed. And Saini is clearly extremely bright and has lots to say. But the whole it blurring into a talk about gender is....interesting. My friend who posted it stressed how relevant it is to our ideas of what it is to be male and female. This being a friend who has a Phd in a science subject, and who had a really awful birth last year, with her FB account of it including things a horribly sexist doctor said to her which were borderline abusive when she was at her most vulnerable. It was an experience shared by many women, I'm sure, where the care was bad in part because she was female.

OP your post horrifies me. I suppose if they're being open about this stufff, a few more people will have a look and go, excuse me, what?!

I think they should close many (not all) women's prisons in favour of restraining orders. Short prison sentences are very expensive and reoffending rates are very high. Female prisoners are responsible for childcare- nearly all children who's mothers are sent to prison are uprooted from their homes. This does not affect men who's children do not get taken into care during a 3 month stay in prison for a male prisoner.

The fact that Trans women are now being included in female prison statistics is undermining this effort already. Their crimes are in line with those of the male estate, sex crimes, violent crimes, now included in the data for female prisoners which doesn't help the case for reform on the grounds that women's crimes are mainly non-violent.
Now with this new Trans campaign s just going to overwhelm and drown out this campaign and to centre trans issues, as has happened to all the other female centred issues over the last few years.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/women-prison-mothers-children-jail-homes-reform-trust-a8430786.html

Great discussion.

This is it isn't it Nonny, It was sickening how little regard was given to vulnerable women in prisons People just don't give a shit. It's why we still need feminism.