Committing to Abolishing Prisons
The struggle for socialism and the struggle for prison abolition are interlocking, mutual imperatives. Both are frequently dismissed as impossible, and both are often silenced and undermined by reformism. Socialism and prison abolition require freeing our imaginations and constructing new and practical alternatives to deeply entrenched systems. Prisons and police are the brute force by which capitalism is able to maintain its control over the people when its persuasive power fails. They allow for the appearance of “justice” in a system that is completely unjust.
Prisons prop up the capitalist state. They confine people living in poverty, people of color, queer people, people with mental illness, and people who earn a living in black markets. They effectively disappear large swaths of the population — people who do not conform to or somehow challenge the capitalist paradigm. The capitalist state relies on the premise that all people must work, yet it fails to provide employment that will meet people’s basic needs. Prisons hide this fundamental market failure by warehousing people behind bars and making them unemployable due to their criminal records. Capitalism is unfit to provide a sufficient social safety net, and uses prisons and police to conceal profound inadequacies in social and mental health services. The welfare state is thus collapsed into and overtaken by systems of punishment and control, with predictably inhumane results.
Prisons isolate us from each other and create separate classes of people who are forever dubbed “criminal” and who can therefore be treated as less than human. Prisons both spring from and reinforce our fear and mistrust of each other and construct a belief that we need people with authority and power to protect us from ourselves. This fear inhibits solidarity and socialist organizing. Prisons create multiple layers of trauma that tear apart communities of color and working class communities, preventing mass mobilization and organizing.
Prisons and policing permit us to view “crime” as individual rather than systemic. We punish people who commit violent acts, without ever seeking out or attempting to address that violence at its roots. The roots of crime can be, in large part, traced back to capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, racism, and other systems of oppressive power and control. Addressing these roots requires fundamental structural change — it requires the end of the capitalist state. Retributive justice obfuscates that truth.
We cannot build socialism without deconstructing the carceral state. Socialism and retributive justice are incompatible with each other because retribution is an expression of power and domination, where socialism requires the cultivation of community and equality. Boston DSA must therefore pursue prison abolition actively in all of its work.
The carceral state permeates every aspect of society, so abolition work must be woven into the fabric of all of our organizing. In Massachusetts, 92,000 people are either locked up or on some kind of criminal justice supervision. Countless more have criminal records. The criminal justice system has disrupted their lives and families, cost them their jobs, limited their employment opportunities, forced them out of their housing, exposed them to toxic environments, denied them appropriate health care, and dehumanized them. We should be asking ourselves how we can include them in all of our work.
We must build coalitions and solidarity with people and organizations who are most heavily impacted by crime and punishment and look for opportunities to engage in and imagine alternatives to retributive justice. We must work on or develop campaigns that strengthen the power of communities and weaken the power of district attorneys, sheriffs, correctional officers, police, and public safety officials.
Refoundation members have been collaborating with other DSA members in beginning this work through the Mass Against HP campaign, developing ideas for mutual aid/direct service campaigns that focus on the carceral state, contacts with Emancipation Initiative and the DA Difference campaign, and a recent initiative to develop a cross-working group collaboration focused on contemplating a socialist response to violence that does not rely on police or prisons. The work we have done so far should be deepened and strengthened.
The Prison Abolition Working Group is developing a project around dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. Through such a project, we can work against a culture of retributive justice while trying to get police out of schools and ensure that rule breaking by working class children and children of color does not continue to be criminalized. A school-to-prison pipeline project operates at the intersection of racial, economic, criminal, and environmental justice and allows us to build ties of trust with communities that are being constantly battered by capitalism and the carceral state.
Because we must be committed to abolitionist organizing, Boston DSA should have a strict policy of non-cooperation and resistance to police power. This necessitates critical examination of reform efforts, legislative proposals and campaigns to ensure that they are not actively or incidentally reinforcing systems of criminalization and control.
Above all, we must recognize that prisons, like capitalism, cannot be fixed — the system is not broken, it is working exactly as it was intended. We must be working towards a mass movement that will replace our current criminal legal system with an alternative system that has yet to be imagined. This is a long term project, and it requires constant vigilance against knee-jerk retributive responses as well as a willingness to open our minds and our hearts to a radically different idea of justice than that which has been ingrained in us.
Read the rest of Boston Refoundation’s 2018 platform here.
