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A common (& understandable) question: "what's the alternative to prison? What will replace it?"
Making a thread because I’m tired of answering individually. The short answer: there isn't ONE alternative, and the question fundamentally misunderstands what abolition proposes. 1/
Making a thread because I’m tired of answering individually. The short answer: there isn't ONE alternative, and the question fundamentally misunderstands what abolition proposes. 1/
I’ve gotten this question from many people today, so this is my attempt to answer. It’s not exhaustive. It’s meant to be *an* answer that I can easily share with people who ask me, & I’d love for anyone to add their own reasons/quotes/thoughts etc. There are four parts. 2/
FIRST, any conversation about addressing violence must start by reframing violence. We need to re-evaluate what we consider to be violence & where violence comes from. Because violence is not just the things people like to throw at abolitionists (murder! serial killers!) 3/
Too often, our conception of violence is hyper-individualized. We consider individual acts of physical harm to be violent. But what about all the large scale features of our society that are in themselves violent, and in fact are *sources* of violence? 4/ https://twitter.com/MicahHerskind/status/1218752102043996160
. @daniellesered perfectly isolates the problem here—violence is *created*. So if we really want an alternative, we should look at the ways to address the causes of violence, not for alternative ways of punishing each other. 5/
Why don’t we consider the violence of mass poverty, homelessness & hunger as urgently as we think of a very particular subset of harmful things? They ALL lead to premature death. So starting on those *sources* of violence is an “alternative.” 6/ https://twitter.com/MicahHerskind/status/1218752102043996160
SECOND, asking for an alternative gives the illusion that what we have now is working to stop violence, and if we get rid of it, we jeopardize that. The question starts from a presumption that what we have now is (at least in theory) generally fine. 7/
In fact, OUR CURRENT SYSTEM IS NOT DOING ANYTHING TO STOP HARM FROM HAPPENING. This quote from this interview with Mariame Kaba is everything. 8/  https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba
THIRD, I’ve learned from abolitionists, THERE ISN’T ONE ALTERNATIVE. That’s not how it works. First, not everything needs an “alternative”. As @prisonculture recently said, we don’t need alternatives for everything that currently gets a prison sentence.9/ https://twitter.com/MicahHerskind/status/1202732361781260288
Okay, but what about the kinds of harmful things that we genuinely need alternatives for? The answer is *still* not one, discrete system or process that we substitute for prison. 10/
I know it's tempting to start at the end—“what do we do about serial killers and child rapists”—but that implicitly takes abolition as one thing that gets implemented in place of prison, expecting that we’ll have some new system that continues to do *something* *to* people. 11/
Instead, as Angela Davis teaches us, the question is not to find ONE alternative. It’s to build “a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate goal of removing the prison from the…landscapes of our society.” 12/
Instead of one new thing that we implement wholesale, abolition is a movement that accounts for and opposes violence on intersecting axes of oppression, building up *many* alternatives that prevent and respond to harm. 13/
Somehow this isn't hard for people to imagine in the suburbs, where resources, whiteness, well-funded schools, healthy food, good health care, positive social supports, & access to safe spaces allow people to experience something like abolition every day. https://twitter.com/MicahHerskind/status/1220121744561885184
This robust image of interlocking positive social institutions only becomes difficult to imagine when it’s poor (&) Black people who might benefit from these things. 14/
Anyway, the reason you’re not satisfied when you ask “what would you replace it with?” is that there IS NOT ONE THING to replace prisons with. That would be completely antithetical to what abolition proposes, because abolition is specifically not one size fits all. 15/
On this, I want to highlight two incredibly important quotes from Kaba in an interview Beyond Survival, a new and must-read edited volume. (RJ = restorative justice, TJ = transformative justice, PIC = prison industrial complex) 16/
As Kaba says, the goal is to “shift & transform our relationships to allow us to build the condition under which we will no longer need prisons and surveillance and policing.” 17/
Likewise, Kaba talks about the need to build up concrete alternative institutions, with an emphasis on *plural*. It’s not about one-size-fits-all, substitute one system for another. 18/
Working from Kaba, @hannahnpbowman highlights that “no one program will provide a single overarching system to replace...prison & policing. Instead, the alternatives are different ways that different communities are finding, unofficially, to address harm in non-carceral ways.”19/
con't: “What we can do, along with advocating for the end of the prison-industrial complex, is continue to build up alternatives wherever & however they’re possible, understanding that our goal isn’t a united system but a patchwork of programs that meet specific community needs.”
Here’s Hannah’s piece on that. 21/ https://christiansforabolition.org/2019/10/16/the-alternative-to-the-prison-industrial-complex/
So no, I can’t tell you what *the* alternative to prison is, because I don’t want one alternative. We need a complete reordering of society that minimizes harm and provides reparation when harm happens. 22/
Abolition is a process, it’s a verb, it’s a *doing*, such that these things are made unthinkable. It’s the tearing down of death-making systems and the building up of life-giving ones. It’s transformative, and the answers are not all known, because how could they be? 23/
FOURTH, to say the answers aren’t all known—that there isn’t *one* alternative—should not be grounds to discredit it. In fact, if anything should be discredited, it’s the possibility of meaningful reform that seeks to “fix” punishment instead of doing away with it altogether.24/
Many don’t know this, but what we have today was built through a process of reform. The prison itself was a reform meant to replace corporal punishment. It was a ‘fix’, and we’ve had thousands more ‘fixes’ since that have all made things worse. 25/
This brings us back to Davis, who makes the important point that what we have now is the *product* of reform, and look at where that reform has landed us. If we want to end violence, we need to shoot higher than better systems of punishment. 26/
I hear “I’m on 100% on board with reform, because our prisons are horrible and violent, but abolition seems crazy.” But, if what you really want is no violent prisons, your best bet is to work for NO prisons, because “reform” is actually part of what has made things so bad 27/
The prison system has had centuries to harm us. & yet, very few are willing to question why it should exist at all. Rachel Herzing emphasizes that somehow prison's never asked to prove its worth, but those working against it are met with skepticism.28/ https://twitter.com/MicahHerskind/status/1219841363946110976
So if you want to direct your skepticism anywhere, put it toward reform, that thing which has continually allowed the punishment system to morph and expand. Not toward the people who are working to experiment and build up institutions that will drown out punishment. 29/
Sorry, that's a long thread (and I'm so sorry to Danielle Sered and Mariame Kaba who got tagged in so much of it -- I didn't realize that was happening and I'm sorry!!) 30/
If you want more resources, check out http://transformharm.org or something I compiled, https://medium.com/@micahherskind/resource-guide-prisons-policing-and-punishment-effb5e0f6620
And if I have messed something up in this or gotten it wrong, I hope my fellow abolitionists will point it out! Because I'm very much still learning, and this is just my attempt to put down some thoughts to what is a nagging question.
If you made it this far, PLEASE PLEASE take some time to write a letter to those in Mississippi State Prisons. There is an ongoing crisis there, and the goal of the campaign is to send a letter to everyone inside. Info & instructions here: https://mumiconference2019.wixsite.com/mysite
follow up thread responding to the main question i've seen in response to this thread https://twitter.com/MicahHerskind/status/1228784188054286337
