Punishment and Crime
Week 3
Reminder: Meetings are on Tuesdays 7:30-9pm
Black Lives Matter surfaced prison abolition as a serious movement, but why should we abolish prisons? Doesn’t the state have a duty of care to protect the people from violent citizens? Our first piece this week comes from a very cool 20th century anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman! It asks us not only to question prisons place in society, but also where crime comes from. The second piece questions how we view crime as a society.
I’ve created PDFs of all pieces for easier reading :) https://carlinmack.com/blog/cardinal/week-3/pdfs
Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure
Emma Goldman, 1917, 10 pages
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1917/prisons.htm
Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety
From “Carceral Capitalism”, Jackie Wang, 2018, 5 pages
This isn’t exactly about prisons but I think it provides an interesting perspective on crime. Up to “White Space” if you are reading on the website.
https://www.liesjournal.net/volume1-10-againstinnocence.html
Optional — Prison Reform or Prison Abolition?
From “Are Prisons Obsolete?”, Angela Davis, 2003, 8 pages
The OG herself, Angela Davis introduces you to why prisons should be abolished. She basically defined the movement and is an icon. She was a black panther and a communist and became a lecturer at UCLA. She was imprisoned but later freed after hundreds of groups around the world campaigned for her freedom. Chapter 1 if you are reading the on the website below. If you want to understand what we can replace prisons with, I recommend Chapter 6.
Thinking Points
- Is the concept of prison inherently bad?
- What comes to mind when you about “re-education camps”? What do you think about them? What about prisons that are focused on rehabilitation?
- People commonly refer to their bodies as a “flesh prison”, thoughts on this framing?
