Prison abolition in the time of Covid
Abolition is a long-term goal, but the immediacy of Covid-19 demands a short-term compromise.
Recognizing the intrinsic worth of individuals is a cost/benefit exercise to Texas politicians, a truth driven home during calamities. Political calculations are always utilitarian, more so when the choices are falsely couched as between a legal application of the state’s apparatus of punishment or the granting of mercy.
I am an abolitionist. Let’s not quibble on definitions, but an abolitionist’s foundations are based on duty, not on consequences. Human worth is not negotiable. The value of individuals is not based on their age, gender, wealth, ethnicity, occupation, or what they can perhaps contribute to the greater good. People are not disposable, despite what they have done or have been convicted of doing. Every criminal justice policy change must rest on those truths and reflect the long-term goal of eradicating incarceration-based punishment for everyone and replacing it with community-based accountability.
Covid-19 has presented hard choices to abolitionists. The dangers of the virus are not assumed equally. Certain age groups are inarguably more vulnerable, as are those with identifiable medical conditions. Arguing for an unconditional release from confinement has long been our tenet, but with the virus cutting deadly swaths among certain segments of the confined population it seems almost pedantic to insist that those most likely to die not be given precedence.
In a way, I have been living in a theoretical bubble. This country is not anywhere close to opening cages or to implementing meaningful alternatives to incarceration. While the defund-the-police movement has gained traction, even that simple declaration has enormous opposition in mainstream politics, with national figures twisting themselves into rhetorical knots in attempts to distance themselves from “defund” and its most basic meaning — to take money away from law enforcement and give it to community-based programs.
With cages and cops not anywhere near eradication, most abolitionists have been able to propose and refine theory without the need to advance actual policy. The immediate nature of the pandemic has stripped away that cover. The mortality rate of caged humans who contract the virus is more than twice the rate of other Americans. The simple precautions that would reduce transmission and infection are almost impossible to implement in prisons and jails, and the substandard health care provided incarcerated individuals almost guarantees those already at-risk face highly increased chances of dying if they contract the virus. This leaves release as the only humane option, and that brings us back to utility — politicians will not consider any type of “early” release for anyone who has been convicted of a violent crime, or who has only completed a small fraction of their sentence, or who fits into any category that could be used by a future political opponent as a bludgeon.
So our most valuable allies — the family members who have loved ones in prison and who want us to push for their release — are impatient with my continued insistence that any policy aimed at reducing caged populations be all inclusive: I will not agree that any individual is more worthy of mercy than any other. And that grates, because I begin to see I’ve been wrong.
Policy is messy. It’s not pure. Theory is fine, but if I am not willing to bend, to understand that small steps are sometimes necessary to alleviate a small piece of the pain that exists in the world, the larger pain may never be lanced.
Freeing them all means freeing one first. And if in that freedom, the cascade is begun, I’m OK with that.
Jorge Antonio Renaud is the SW Region Director for Policy and Advocacy at LatinoJustice PRLDEF, formerly incarcerated in Texas, and working to implement a world where neither police nor cages are accepted.
