Benutzer Diskussion:Woozle/Against Penitentiaries

Older abolitionist principles

• "The maintenance of an abolition implies that there is constantly more to abolish, that one looks ahead towards a new and still more long-term objective of abolition, that one constantly moves in a wider circle to new fields for abolition" .

Thomas Mathiesen, The Politics of Abolition, pp. 211-12

• "Even a Better Homes and Gardens bedroom, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for 20 years, is an intolerable prison".

M. Sharon Smolick, Prolog, Instead of Prisons, 1976.

(great stuff; good for next version)

New abolitionist literature

Davids Scott (ed.) Why prisons?, Cambridge 2015 The book features original essays by, e.g. De Giorgi, Wacquant, Michelle Brown, Joe Sim u.a. and a foreword by Thomas Mathiesen ("Can we stem the tide"), in which he suggests a number of sociologically informed strategies "to lower or at least significantly slow down the increase in numbers of prisoners per capita in a society" (XX). A surprisingly modest proposal for the Grand Abolitionist. All the moire interesting are his suggestions: "foster confidence in others", "the police should be largely unarmed...police officers should be visible and polite rather than driving around in closed cars", "there are aspects of togetherness that should be fostered", "This involves a limitation on controlled city life, and an expansion of a social city life" (XXI). Part V of the book (Abolitionist Alternatives) includes the following three contribution:

• Erica Meiners, Professor of education and gender and women's studies at Northeastern Illinois University, writes about "Schooling the carceral state: challenging the school-to-prison-pipeline". She believes that "it is not enough to take down prisons" (277). She advocates "building other sustainable frameworks for public safety and engaging the question of why prisons have been naturalized as responses to harm in our communities" (276). Prisons "cannot be eliminated unless new institutions and resources are made available to those communities that provide, in large part, the human beings that make up the prison population" (277).

• Julia C. Oparah is professor and chair of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She is maybe better known as Julia Sudbury (with a number of abolitionist publiations, in Social Justice and elsewhare). Here she deals with the Topic "Why no prisons?". She reports about the new Abolitionist movement in the USA (Critical Resistance), which holds annual metings since 1998. CR's analysis of the political economy of prisons was shaped by Linda Evans and Angela Y. Davis. "One of the most effective strategies used by Critical Resistance to win Support for the Abolition rather than reform of prisons is to Point to a continuity between slavery and contemporary incarceration" (283). But aren't there some people who really need to be locked up? CR's answers and strategies are to be found in "The Abolitionist Toolkit"(2012) [1]). Oparah (298) shares the activists' belief in a three step strategy of prison abolition: STOP (moratorium), SHRINK (decarceration), BUILD (alternative way to built security and address harm).

• David Scott, is Senior lecturer of criminology at Liverpool John Moores University. First of all, he makes an argument to distinguish prisons "from other sites of state detention (and other social institutions)". "Pain and the allocation of blame are the very reasons why prisons exist (Christie 1981)"(302). Scott has created the term "abolitionist compass" (in Malloch & Munro, eds. Crime, Critique and Utopia. London , 2013), a normative framework "to assist our navigation away from deeply entrenched social inequalities and the problems associated with the criminal process" 313). His "abolitionist real utopia" (315) requires "at least nine interlinked strategic objectives:

1. acknowledgment that social inequalities and penal Responses are intimately linked

2. escape from the punitive trap (e.g. "a crime and punishment armistice between the main political parties")

3. generate knowledge from below and fostering moral responsibility

4. creation of an alternative public space

5. humanising aliens and Monsters

6. radical reduction of economic and social inequalities

7. radical reduction of prison populations ((Knopp 1976, Mathiesen 1986: "attrition model")

8. promotion of radical alternatives, not derived from the criminal justice process (alternatives must be "in place of rather than additions to to existing criminal processes"(321).

9. building grass roots activism ans abolitionist praxis.

Author's summary: "An 'abolitionist real utopia' requires immediate direct policy interventions alongside the fostering of community-based social movements that can join forces in struggles for freedom and recognition of human dignity for all. Anti-prison activists and theorists must continue to aspire to live in, and fight for, a world without prisons alongside advocating nonpunitive interventions rooted in immanent possibilities that can start to roll back the penal colonisation of the life world" (323 f).

There is another pertinent article in this volume:

• Mark Brown, teaches criminology at Melbourne. Behind the title "The iron cage of prison studies" hides a fundamental critique of traditional prison studies. Three chapter:

- a theoretical rationale to extend the prison's normative frame to a wider study of detention and confinement

- varieties of imprisonment (e.g. "post-sentence detention"; "immigration detention"; "international zones" (at Airports and other embarkation points)

- theorisation: toward a post-penal account of confinement "albeit perhaps with the prison at ist centre" (164).

- Author's resumee: the "Need to find a theoretical Framework that caan both conceive the airport international Zone to the domestic prison, while at the same timeexplaining the role of that local prison as a Kind of ideal type of the confinement milieu, providing important Inspiration and guide to form while at the same time being not quite suitable for the diversity of confining Impulses abounding in the contemporary world" (169)

Neue Struktur

Beim Versuch, die Struktur zu bearbeiten bin ich auf folgende Probleme gestoßen

• Wir wollen die Abschaffung der Strafgefängnisse.
• Dann sollen wir dies auch deutich machen und uns darauf beschänken
• Das tun wir nicht, wenn wir ausführlich und mitten drin "Security Prisons", "Punishment without Prisons" oder gar "Beyond Punishment and Prisons" thematisieren.
• In dem Abschnitt "The Meaning of Abolition" steht schon jetzt, was Abolition in unserem Kontext nicht ist. Das sollte ergänzt werden (insbesondere um Ausführungen zu "Punishment without prisons").
• Ganz am Ende würde ein kurzer Ausblick genügen auf gefängnisähnliche Institutionen, über deren Abschaffung man auch nachdenken kann (UHaft, Sicherungsverwahrung; Abschiebungshaft; Forensik etc.)
• und auf Restorative Justice
• Titel: "No Prisons?","Against Prisons?" oder "Against Punishment Prisons", "Against Prisons-for-Punishment", "Gegen Strafanstalten". Letztlich vielleicht doch am ehesten: "Against Penitentiaries"