Friday, March 29, 2024 7:50 PM

The Care(ful) Work of Abolishing Prisons www.yesmagazine.org

Our society is hooked on punishment. For the final 50 years, we now have expanded police forces, handed legal guidelines criminalizing poverty, and incarcerated individuals for longer and longer periods of time. People coming back from jail usually discover themselves shut out of housing, higher education, jobs, public benefits, and different alternatives for the remainder of their lives. 

This funding in policing and prisons hasn’t made us protected. According to a 2020 examine revealed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, solely 40% of violent victimizations have been reported to police that yr. As Danielle Sered writes in her 2019 guide Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, “More than half of the people who survive serious violence prefer nothing to everything available to them through law enforcement.” We all should stay in communities the place our primary wants are met, the place the situations that result in violence are minimized fairly than responded to by armed police.

As Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis have taught us, abolition is a project of creation. To finish criminalization, policing, and prisons, we have to construct up life-affirming practices, establishments, and infrastructure that generate care and security. 

We have to construct care infrastructure on a number of ranges: private, interpersonal, and communal. We suppose of these as concentric circles, with the constructed setting—our houses, public areas, colleges, and so forth.—as a container for all of them. What we construct up on the core radiates outward, and that, in flip, radiates again in, shaping new prospects. Each circle shares the identical middle: a brand new set of core values. Unbuilding racist, patriarchal, ableist, and capitalist methods rooted in punishment and management requires beginning with care, accountability, interdependence and connection, and an unshakeable dedication to the concept that nobody is disposable.

An illustrated representation of "a new set of core values" to create how an infrastructure of care appears as a circle with concentric rings: the outer circle is community health, the next inside circle is interpersonal health, followed by individual health.
Illustration by Joe Magee for YES! Media

At the private and interpersonal stage, constructing care infrastructure means creating new capabilities and practices. It’s studying the best way to have restorative conversations, give higher apologies, rebuild belief after it’s damaged, and transfer via battle in constructive methods. It entails therapeutic from trauma in neighborhood with others. One instance of that is how the youth group Detroit Heals Detroit fosters youth-led therapeutic hubs for Detroit teenagers, creating area in colleges for younger individuals to heal trauma via breaking bread, writing, dialog, remedy, and tune. 

It additionally means working with neighbors and colleagues to plan alternate options to calling the police. Examples embody pod-mapping, created by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. Pod-mapping entails mapping our personal networks of care and discussing them with each other. It can equip us to acknowledge the care and connection in our lives (and gaps that may exist) and make plans for activating these networks once we’re susceptible. At the guts of these efforts is an consciousness that relationships, neighborhood, and care hold us protected. 

At the neighborhood stage, we have to construct up native ecosystems of care via transformative and restorative justice networks; worker-owned cooperatives; neighborhood fridges for food-insecure households; unarmed response groups to help individuals with psychological well being wants; housing co-ops, meals co-ops, and farming collectives; neighborhood land trusts; abortion and doula help; and mutual assist. There are many examples of such community-led initiatives cataloged on-line by One Million Experiments

It’s inspiring to consider what’s attainable when efforts like these are knitted collectively on the neighborhood or metropolis stage. On Chicago’s South and West Side, the Just Chicago coalition is making a solidarity economic system panorama of neighborhood land trusts, worker-owned cooperative companies, participatory budgets, and public banks. They goal to interchange racial capitalism and the bodily setting it has produced—shuttered buildings and vacant tons—with a nonexploitative native economic system and protected public areas.

As half of the shifts required for abolition, we have to dismantle and reimagine the bodily world round us with a various vary of life-affirming areas. Architects and builders resembling Designing Justice + Designing Spaces in Oakland are working with neighborhood organizers to create restorative justice facilities, youth areas, specialised housing and schooling initiatives, survivor areas, psychological well being care and well-being facilities, and diversion and re-entry areas. 

In Los Angeles, JusticeLA efficiently blocked the county’s multibillion-dollar jail expansion and are working towards a shift in caring for individuals—fairly than incarcerating them—via backing initiatives resembling Restorative Care Villages that prioritize therapeutic over punishment. 

As all the time, the very best concepts and examples of the place we have to go and the way we get there come from individuals who have borne the brunt of the violence of our present system. The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls is working with ladies and women throughout the nation to advance an affirmative imaginative and prescient of the world we’d like. They’re stopping the construction of prisons as they marketing campaign to finish ladies’s incarceration state by state and construct up co-ops and collectives. 

Groups like Justice 4 Housing in Boston are imagining and planning re-entry housing that enables people to heal from the trauma skilled whereas incarcerated. Their housing coverage facilities on dismantling an archaic public housing system rife with discrimination in opposition to court-involved and previously incarcerated individuals and their households. Justice 4 Housing is pushing native housing authorities to mandate housing vouchers for individuals returning to their neighborhood after incarceration, the primary time a housing advocacy group led by previously incarcerated individuals has led such a marketing campaign. 

We want to make use of interdependent, multidisciplinary approaches to provide you with the life-affirming infrastructure we’d like. And we should combat to align our assets—like public budgets—with this care infrastructure. 

In cities resembling Minneapolis, Seattle, and Durham, North Carolina, organizers have crafted “people’s budgets” that decision for cuts to police departments and for investments in life-affirming establishments that put well being first, prioritize individuals over revenue, fund prevention fairly than punishment, and assist communities thrive. 

Let’s comply with their lead. Let’s construct. 


Amanda Alexander
is a racial justice lawyer, historian, and founding government director of the Detroit Justice Center.
Deanna Van Buren
is an activist, architect, artist, and co-founder and government director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces.

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