Transcript | Ep. 94: How to Abolish Police Like a Feminist

Caroline: Heads up listeners - today’s episode contains discussions about sexual and gender-based violence

[Stinger]

Maya: I think that when people say abolition, the people who've been doing abolitionist organizing for many years and coined the term and develop the principle of abolition are actually talking about eliminating prisons, eliminating policing and growing a different kind of society where those things are not necessary and not perceived to be necessary for safety. Because right now, they're - they're not keeping us safe.

[Theme music]

Caroline: Cristen, in early June, you, me, and seemingly everyone in our social media feeds started talking about two big, bold ideas that most of us had never even thought about before. And they are: defunding the police and abolishing prisons.

Cristen: Those two ideas are intertwined, but not synonymous. So, defunding the police means diverting funds away from law enforcement and reinvesting them into public services like mental healthcare, education and social work. Abolishing prisons — which we’re focusing on today — means what it sounds like — eliminating the prison system altogether.

Caroline: Yeah, and Cristen, our unladylike wheels really got turning when we noticed how all these brand new conversations about policing and prisons have also stoked old fears about who’ll protect women. Like, without police, who’ll keep us safe from rapists and predators? And without prison, how can the Harvey Weinsteins of the world ever be held accountable?

Cristen: Today’s guest, prison abolitionist Maya Schenwar, gets asked these kinds of questions a lot…

Maya: You know, you want to say like, OK. But what about rapists? What do we do with people who have actually caused tremendous violence? And if you don't believe that this is a justice system, if you don't believe that it holds people accountable and doesn't actually change the structures that led to that violence at all, then you can't embrace it for anybody. So it's not about being easy on people. It's not about like, oh, We just have to be nice to rapists. Like, no, it's not about that. It's about the fact that the system doesn't actually do justice.

Cristen: Maya is the editor-in-chief of the social justice news site Truthout, co-author of the new book, Prison By Any Other Name, and she’s spent the past 15 years organizing, writing and speaking out about prison abolition.

Caroline: And because these big abolitionist ideas are new to a lot of us, we’re gonna take this episode and the next to reconsider what justice for sexual and gender-based violence looks like beyond calling the cops and putting people behind bars.

Cristen: So today, Maya is going to share her very personal inspiration behind her prison politics, explain to us why policing and prisons don’t make women safer and connect the dots between feminism and abolition.

[Stinger]

Maya: So for me, actually, feminism and prison abolition have always been very deeply connected. Just to be clear, I was a feminist way before I’d ever heard of prison abolition. I was one of those middle schoolers with reproductive rights stickers on my bedroom wall.

Caroline: When Maya first started reporting on mass incarceration and prison conditions in the early 2000s, a feminist mentor opened her eyes to the abuse female inmates face in particular. But she wasn’t fully thinking in terms of abolition yet. Then, her activism hit home.

Cristen: In 2005, her teenage sister was arrested at school for drug possession and wound up in juvenile jail. This is what folks mean when they talk about the “school-to-prison pipeline.” It describes how public school punishment funnels kids into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. When Maya’s sister got out of juvenile jail …

Maya: She kind of had this outlook on life that was just completely depleted. She felt like, you know, you're in this institution where you're reduced to a number and you're told this is your life. Like she always talks about how she was told by guards repeatedly, “Oh, I'm going to see you back here,” and enduring these jokes about how, “You're going to graduate to adult prison,” like that's that's your future.

Caroline: It did become her future. Maya’s sister became addicted to heroin pretty soon after her release from juvenile detention, and over the next 15 years, she cycled in and out of jails and prisons. Every time, it was drug-related.

Maya: So, for example, she would get out of jail or get out of prison, and then she would be placed in mandatory treatment and told you have to abide by these conditions. You have to be completely abstinent from drugs and alcohol. You have to obey this curfew. You have to not associate with certain people. All of these conditions that very often people are given when they're on probation or mandatory treatment. And she would inevitably not be able to do that because part of the nature of addiction is actually relapsing, you know. And then she would be shuttled right back into jail, right back into prison or some other oppressive institutions.

Cristen: Our current system of locking up addicts often pushes their loved ones into a catch-22 of either bailing them out and potentially enabling more drug use, or letting them languish in prison to detox.

Maya: Even once I started identifying as a prison abolitionist, to be honest, I would have these moments of wishing that she would be incarcerated because I didn't want her to harm herself and to die. And I think that this is a belief that's fueled by this system, obviously, and by what we're told, like the reason that we need drug laws, all of these things is this idea of safety. But, of course, that's not actually how it works. And I can talk about this more later if you want to go into it, but she - she actually died in - in February. And she was in a mandatory drug treatment center on on a drug court program which which mandates you to follow certain rules, to be abstinent from drugs, and she left the treatment center and 24 hours later, she had overdosed. And so when I think about these coercive systems, jail, prison, other institutions that lock you up or do the equivalent of locking you up, I see them as deadly. And now I'm just at the point where talking and thinking and writing about these systems for me is about people's survival. Like I want people to understand, because I know how it feels to to look to these institutions for safety. And I want people to understand that unfortunately, we don't have a large monolithic institution in this country that just gives us safety, you know, and we need to find different ways to create that for ourselves. And yeah, these institutions are deadly. And I - I firmly believe that they played a large role in killing my sister.

Caroline: Maya, I'm so sorry about your sister.

Maya: Thank you.

Caroline: I'm really sorry.

Maya: I appreciate that.

Cristen: In Prison By Any Other Name, Maya and her co-author, Victoria Law, define prison abolition as “the belief that prisons — in all their manifestations — cannot be reformed to become more humane or to meet people’s needs.”

Caroline: Instead, the entire system must be ended and replaced with support systems that genuinely meet people’s needs, as well as strategies that effectively address and reduce harm and violence.

Cristen: How do you see the relationship between feminist and abolitionist movements kind of at large and also just for you personally?

Maya: For me, they're very intertwined, too. And of course, part of this comes back to the fact that my personal connection to imprisonment was so tied up with my sister and watching that system enact violence against her. For me, that was that was a really important aha moment in just realizing its role as a violent institution and also like a kind of an agent of patriarchy.

Cristen: Maya argues that violence against women is baked into the prison system.

Maya: And when people talk about the idea that prison protects people against gender based violence, I say, well, look at who's in prison, look at who is being criminalized. Very often in women's prisons you're looking at women and non-binary people who are overwhelmingly people of color, who are survivors, who have survived violence and very often are in prison as a result of that violence, in some way, whether it has to do with economics and poverty, whether it has to do with actually defending themselves against that violence, whether it has to do with doing things in the service of some abusive partner.

Caroline: Once they’re inside prison, the violence continues. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly 25,000 allegations of sexual victimization were reported across all federal and state prisons, jails and other adult correctional facilities in 2015. And that includes inmates of all genders.

Cristen: But trans women of color are particularly vulnerable to police profiling and harassment on the outside, as well as inmate and prison guard abuse on the inside. A California study found that transgender inmates are 13 times more likely to be sexually assaulted in prisons than cisgender inmates ... AND more often than not, trans women are housed in men's prisons.

Caroline: Maya’s abolitionist mentor, Mariame Kaba, put it starkly when she said: “Often what we’re doing when we sentence people to prison is sentencing them to judicial rape because we know that when they get into prison there is a high, high likelihood they will be assaulted and raped no matter what it is that they did before they went in there.”

Maya: So, of course, we - we've heard that there are rapes by prison guards at this very high rate and that women’s bodies are subjected to all kinds of horrific violence. But also this violence is sanctioned. So strip searches, cavity searches, that's just part of daily life.

Cristen: And since cisgender men make up more than 90% of America’s prison population, women on the outside — and black women especially — bear the caregiving and financial brunt of mass incarceration.

Maya: It's generally like women on the outside who are sending them money, needing to fill in the gaps if those men were the primary income providers in their household. They're the ones who are visiting, who are sending them commissary, who are needing to take all the phone calls and pay for all the phone calls. And many women go into debt as a result. And sometimes when I talk about the impact of prisons on women, people say, “OK, but you have to acknowledge that most people who are incarcerated are men.” And that's just not the whole story. The ways in which everyone's incarceration comes back to impact women and how prison, the institution of prison itself impacts women, that’s also important to note.

Caroline: We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, Maya mythbusts the idea that prisons keep us safe. Plus, we look at the roots of the abolition movement and how law-and-order feminism has stood in its way.

Cristen: Stick around.

[Midroll ad 1]

Maya: People would say, “Wait, did you say abolition, like in the - like abolishing prison, making prison go away? That makes no sense.”

Cristen: We’re back with Truthout editor-in-chief Maya Schenwar. Recently, Maya's been making a lot of sense to a lot more people, compared to 2014 when she published her first book, Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better.

Maya: Even people who were even a little bit sympathetic to the idea that prison was not an institution that was helping people often said it was a dream. You know, like, “OK, well, maybe there is a vision of a society way, way, far, way down the line where prisons would not be necessary. But we're never gonna see that in our lifetime.”

Caroline: These days, abolition is getting taken seriously in a way Maya never thought she’d witness.

Cristen: Why now? Because Black Lives Matter. On May 30, in the wake of George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis, the movement officially called for a national defunding of police and community investment "to ensure Black people not only survive, but thrive."

Maya: It's allowing these conversations to be had publicly about the fact that prison and policing are not doing the things they profess to do. In the past, often conversations that are very mainstream have stopped short of of this question of like, wait, what is policing actually doing for us? What is prison actually doing for a still larger us, like all of society? And there has been more mainstream recognition of the roots of policing in prisons and how they're grounded in white supremacy and how they're grounded in slavery.

Caroline: American prisons have been called out as inhumane and racist for well over a century. In 1901, for instance, a Black prison reformer named Frances Joseph told The New York Sun newspaper: “There is just as much suffering among the whites as among black prisoners, but the only difference is that the negro is arrested upon the most flimsy pretext, while there are many loopholes of escape for whites.” And Frances was right: From 1850 to 1940, immigrants and people of color made up half of the US prison population.

Cristen: So, it wasn't surprising to learn that the concept of prison abolition isn’t new, either. It was a fairly common political debate in the late 60s and early 70s. By then, President Johnson’s War on Poverty, followed by President Nixon’s “law-and-order” crackdown, pushed America into its modern era of mass incarceration. Harsher policing and sentencing guidelines were already starting to overwhelm the existing prison system, and prisoner uprisings and hunger strikes attracted international attention to the brutality happening behind bars.

Caroline: Today’s abolition movement is a continuation of that activism and part of the much broader Black Lives Matter reckoning with law enforcement at large.

Maya: In a sense, it happened quickly, of course, over the past couple of months people rising up and saying not only that black lives matter, this crucial message, not only that we need to stop police violence, but that we need to call into question the violence of policing. Abolition has taken center stage in the news. But I think one thing we need to look at when we take all that in is the fact that the groundwork has been laid for decades.

Caroline: One of the most prominent people laying that groundwork way back was Angela Davis. She’d been a UCLA philosophy professor until her involvement with the Communist Party and Black Panthers got her fired in 1969.

Cristen: Prisoner rights and abolition became the central focus of her activism after Davis spent 18 months in prison on charges she was ultimately acquitted of in 1972.

Caroline: Davis argues that not only is prison racist, classist and detrimental to inmates’ mental health but also that it creates MORE of the same problems it’s supposed to fix, like violent crime, poverty and addiction. Statistics suggest she’s right. According to the Sentencing Project, between 1972 — the year she got out of jail — and 2009, the prison population mushroomed 700 PERCENT. And more than 80% of prisoners are rearrested within a decade after their initial release.

Cristen: Meanwhile, the prison abolition movement mobilized even more in the 80s and 90s in response to the War on Drugs and its dramatic escalation of prison terms for non-violent offenses. Even though violent crime rates have been dropping since the 90s, mass incarceration continued. But old-school activists like Angela Davis, Ruth Gilmore and their abolitionist organization Critical Resistance continued, too.

Caroline: Since the early 2000s, a new generation of abolitionists — led by Black, Indigenous and other women of color — have risen up to counteract the tough-on-crime feminist approach to ending sexual violence — one that disproportionately punishes poor communities of color. Rather than more arrests and prison time, they argue, invest in the economic and social support systems that address the roots of domestic violence and sexual abuse.

Cristen: And Caroline, that idea of addressing sexual violence through abolishing the entire prison system honestly sounded too radical the first time I heard it. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that as a feminist, it's not radical. It's intersectional.

Caroline: Absolutely.

Maya: Like, no matter what issue you're working on, there's something for you there in terms of abolition. So abolition is environmental justice, abolition is reproductive justice. Abolition is health, justice and healing justice. You know all of those things because abolition is a vision for a different society in which instead of pouring our resources into policing, we're pouring it in to, a vision for a society that that works for everyone.

Caroline: We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, Maya grapples with smashing the patriarchy without prisons.

Cristen: Don’t go anywhere!

[Midroll ad 2]

Maya: There's been so many movements based around carceral feminism. You know, if we look at a lot of the movement for that that purports to support survivors of gender based violence, it has to do with incarcerating abusers.

Caroline: We’re back with feminist abolitionist Maya Schenwar.

Maya: And so one of the things that I've had to grapple with is, OK, like what does this system do to men who are most of the people who are incarcerated? And how does that how - what is the impact of that in terms of how I'm understanding my my own feminism and my desire for a world where patriarchal violence doesn't exist and patriarchy doesn't exist?

Cristen: That term “carceral feminism,” that Maya just used, means relying on criminal punishment to stop sexual and gender-based violence.

Caroline: A prime example of this is the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA. It passed in 1994 as part of the infamously pro-prison-time Omnibus Crime Bill, signed into law by President Clinton.

Cristen: Yeah Caroline, we’ve hailed VAWA before on Unladylike because it provides federal funding for rape kits and sexual assault nurse examiners. But two main things it also accomplished was adding 100,000 police officers across the country and incentivize mandatory arrests for domestic violence. To the feminists who helped write the legislation with the one-n-only Joe Biden, mandatory arrests accomplished that ongoing goal of getting domestic violence taken seriously by law enforcement.

Caroline: However, mandatory arrests have meant that victims sometimes get locked up as well if police can't determine who initiated an incident. Survivors also have no say in their partners’ prosecution or punishment, aside from serving as a witness to the state. And it's unclear whether more arrests and prosecutions have resulted in less domestic violence.

Caroline: How do you address gender based violence without prison?

Maya: So I think, first of all, we have to recognize that prison doesn't address gender-based violence. So, for example, when we look at sexual violence, less than one percent of acts of sexual violence are punished with felony charges. Meanwhile, survivors who report their rapes have to go through the traumatic process of telling their stories again and again, telling them publicly, knowing that they're probably not going to get any kind of accountability that they're looking for. And also There's no evidence to tell us that those people who've raped somebody are going to be reformed by prison. Prison is an institution of sexual violence in which people are raped at high rates and also sexually assaulted as part of the system. OK, how do we respond to harm in ways that are going to make it less likely that that person will do that kind of harm in the future and address what happened to survivors and actually respond to what they're saying that they need.

Caroline: One way that grassroots abolitionist groups respond is through transformative justice and community accountability.

Cristen: The transformative justice model resonates with the people-centered abolitionist vision. Organizer Mia Mingus defines it as “a political framework for responding to violence, harm and abuse…without creating more violence.” And you enforce transformative justice through community accountability.

Caroline: Under a system of community accountability, a group of folks — this could be families, church members, neighborhoods — come together to safely and supportively address a member’s abusive behavior and develop sustainable strategies for them to accept responsibility, learn and transform. In cases of sexual harassment or violence, the survivors are centered throughout the process, which often lasts months or years.

Cristen: So, this entire approach of community accountability feels so strikingly different to a lot of the big conversations that have happened in the wake of MeToo, which have centered, it seems like a lot more on, “Well, how bad really was it? What what is what is rape? What is harassment? You know, can we even flirt with each other anymore?” And I - just hearing you talk about that. I just. I think about like all of - how those conversations might be different had we been — and I say we as feminists — been taking a less carceral approach.

Maya: Yeah. I think that sometimes this this concept of rooting out specific men, like saying, oh, we're going to identify all the bad ones and like start afresh, makes it seem as if patriarchy has somehow only infiltrated, like, specific bad men. We just need to get all those bad men out of it and men we'll be OK. And sometimes this takes a really harmful forms, even outside of prisons and policing, as we usually think of them. So, for example, I think there are — at least in 2018 there were — around 900,000 people on sex offender registries. And there is no evidence that those registries actually prevent sexual violence. Zero. They're just punitive. It restricts your housing to the extent that in some cities there are only like a few addresses where someone on the registry can live. There are all kinds of jobs that you can't have. One pen pal I had who was a woman her kids taken away and was not even able to see them because she was on the sex offender registry in relation to something that had nothing to do with children. So. So it's a super punitive thing, but people are very hesitant to say, let's get rid of it, because our understanding of sexual violence just in the mainstream is, oh, the answer is just pure punishment, not even looking at whether that is actually going to prevent or address sexual violence at all.

Cristen: Locking up the rapists or abolishing prison isn’t a binary choice, either. Advocates and experts have also been creating punishment alternatives called restorative justice. Like transformative justice, it’s survivor-centered and community-oriented. But it’s a more formalized process that can involve the state and the legal system that allows offenders to take accountability for their actions and offer survivors restitution without opening up the whole criminal punishment can of worms (which we’ll get into next episode…)

Caroline: Do you see the path ahead? How do we get from our current prison industrial complex and system of policing … to abolition?

Maya: So I think a lot of it is happening. I think that the organizing efforts that are currently underway are moving us in that direction. And that call to reimagine is really, really powerful because it's not just saying, OK like, police are really bad. We have to get rid of them. Which is true. But it's also saying like, OK, what kind of society do we want to live in? And so people are talking about things like health care. They're talking about like what? What is our real response to mental health crises? You know, like how could we think about those crises in a way that did not involve sending in police or sending in other agents acting like police. And so it's bringing up those questions. And I think those are the kind of questions that we need to be engaging with and acting on if we're actually going to move in the direction of abolition. But, you know, it's happening. It's happening all around us. And the cool thing about abolition being such a big vision, like Ruth Wilson Gilmore talks about it as like everything needing to change… You know, abolition is calling us to change one thing, and that's everything because it is saying, OK, this is about creating a society we want to live in, where we actually get to live and thrive, where everyone has a home, where everyone has access to quality education. Like, how do we do that? That's those are the questions that are it's bringing up right now. And that sounds like it makes what we have to do so much bigger. But to me, it makes it like so much more exciting and also makes it so much more so much more of a draw for many, many more people.

Cristen: Maya, your excitement is contagious.

Maya: Oh, good.

Caroline: OK unladies … what’s your feminist take on prison abolition? Are you new to the idea like we are? Let us know! You can email us at hello@unladylike.co, find us on social @unladylikemedia or join our private facebook group and jump into the thread for this episode.

Cristen: Maya’s new book Prison By Any Other Name is out now, and you find links to order it on her website mayaschenwar.com. In the meantime, if you want to get Extra Unladylike and binge some delightful bonus episodes on Mrs. America, Flo Jo and more, head over to patreon.com/unladylikemedia.

Caroline: Nora Ritchie is the senior producer of Unladylike. Gianna Palmer is our story editor. Shruti Marathe transcribes our tape. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzin. Mixing is by Andi Kristins. Sound design and additional music is by Casey Holford. Executive producers are Chris Bannon, Daisy Rosario and Unladylike Media.

Cristen: This podcast was created by your hosts, Cristen Conger

Caroline: And Caroline Ervin of Unladylike Media.

Cristen: Next week…

Alissa Ackerman: You know, people sitting in a prison cell or being on the public registry, they don't get a lot of time to think about the impact of their behavior. But when they are sitting face to face with a survivor who is very intimately explaining both the short and long term impacts of sexual harm, they have to face themselves. And that's really, really hard to do.

Caroline: We’re talking with criminal justice professor Alissa Ackerman about restorative justice. Her model is an alternative to carceral feminism//calling the cops when it comes to addressing gender-based violence.

Cristen: You won’t want to miss this episode! Make sure you’re subscribed to Unladylike. Find us in stitcher, spotify, apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Caroline: And remember, got a problem?

Cristen: Get unladylike.