Contesting Carceral Logic

Towards Abolitionist Futures

Michael J Coyle, Mechthild Nagel, Michael J Coyle, Mechthild Nagel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000404289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Diritto penale

Contesting Carceral Logic provides an innovative and cutting-edge analysis of how carceral logic is embedded within contemporary society, emphasizing international perspectives, the harms and critiques of using carceral logic to respond to human wrongdoing, and exploring penal abolition thought.

With chapters from scholars across many disciplines, people in prison, as well as penal abolition activists, the book explores what a future without carceral logic would look like, as well as how such a future is to be developed. The book is also an exploration of penal abolition thought as it is developing in the twenty-first century. Diverse geographical, cultural, identity and experiential frames inform the book's themes of analysing carceral logic as it harms disparate people in disparate places, creating anti-carceral knowledge, exploring case studies pointing to radical alternatives, and to contesting carceral logic from below. Ultimately, Contesting Carceral Logic provides the reader with an alternative and critical perspective from which to reflect on carceral logic, the punitive state and the criminalizing systems that almost exclusively dominate across the world. Finally, it raises the questions of how we are to build communities as well as transform our response to human wrongdoing in ways that are not defined by racism/ethnocentrism, class war and heteropatriarchy.

Contesting Carceral Logic will be of great interest to not only scholars and activists, but also provides an introduction to key carceral issues and debates for students of penology, criminology, social policy, geography, politics, philosophy, social work and social history programmes in countries all around the world.

PART I

The harms of carceral logic

People and places

1

PRISON PROVOKES PEOPLE INTO BEING MORE AGGRESSIVE, HYPERSEXUALIZED, AND PRONE TO CRIME

Joseph (Dont’e) Williams

The prison system is ineffectual and should be abolished. It should be abolished, from my experience, because it only serves to make people worse. I say this because jail has only led me to become more aggressive, hypersexualized, and more inclined to commit crime.

When I went to prison for the first time it was for burglary. I had left home at 17 and found the world to be more difficult than I imagined. I started stealing primarily for food and clothes which put me on a path which eventually led me to jail.

Once incarcerated I witnessed young men fighting and stabbing each other over telephones, cookies, and dirty looks. I suppose there was violence in the community I lived before I came to jail but at least on the street there were homes I could retreat to for respite. In prison, especially in the “dorms” I was housed in for most of my time there were no breaks from the program. It took a while before I could even use the phone without any difficulties, but I never complained because I saw plenty of people who were not allowed to use the phone at all. In many prisons, in order to overcome such conflicts, one has to impose their will or associate with others from the past.

The same methodology also holds true if one desires not to be robbed or extorted for a variety of things, up to and including sex. Upon my realization of these intimidating facts and my understanding that I was far from the most assertive person, I started to work out furiously and attempted to alter my personality. As a result, I have found that jail has altered the way I treat and speak to everyone that I come in contact with, including my family. I am quicker to take offense to things and act in a way which lets people know that I am not to be taken advantage of, which they often try to do in jail but, far less often in the community.

Another way the prison system has altered the way I interact with the community is by hypersexualizing me. When imprisoned I was stopped from having normal interactions with women for years. I was not allowed to work beside, to have flirtatious with, or even have platonic conversations with women. The face-to-face interactions I did have with females were forced dictatorial relationships, i.e., prison guards or work supervisors. The encounters only served to inspire spite and resentment toward women. The only agreeable reflection of the opposite sex that I had was on television which often projects women in a placated and misleading manner. The years of being force-fed a warped perception of women are coupled with an overwhelming need to overcompensate for years of state sanctioned sexual abuse at the hands of men telling me to get naked, lift my balls, and spread my cheeks. Although, I understand that these searches are designed to curb the flow of contraband within a prison and that not all of the men enjoyed looking at me naked, there is no amount of explanation able to alleviate the pain these experiences cause. For this reason, many men, including myself, have attempted to scrub horrific and unexplainable memories from our minds with an exaggerated number of sexual conquests.

The prison system has also helped to make me and many like me more prone to commit crime after our release. This heightened criminality, although conceived elsewhere, was incubated and brought to terms within the cold corridors of the penal system. When I entered prison, I entered as a young man who had committed a few crimes but, once there, I found that was not descriptive enough. I was labeled by my charge and thrust into its correlating category. “What are you in for?” I quickly learned was not an innocent question, but an opportunity to introduce myself and an introduction of how I would be treated by others. I was put around people who had already accepted their labels and schooled by these people on how to “better” do my class of crime. Once released I would try to live a normal life, but I quickly discovered that convicts were not the only ones who label me by my conviction. I was often denied opportunities and offered skepticism when trying to advance. Although difficult, I always manage to find employment and some semblance of regularity. Life however, is irregular and obstacles at times present themselves. When these obstacles did arrive, I would remember or, be reminded of my history. I would never make the best decisions or even experiment with a different type of crime because, I had been told time and time again that I was a burglar. I sometimes would try to ask for help when I found myself in precarious positions. I was not however, exactly sure what my problem was so, my questions were always lacking. Consequently, also lacking were the answers I received. It was not until being incarcerated for a third time that I decided to investigate the reasons I kept committing crimes and coming back to jail even though, I did not want to. Following my investigation, I discovered that the reasons were routed within the prison system itself. While the prison has been advertised as the solution to all our society’s problems, it actually emotionally and psychologically provokes people into being more aggressive, hypersexualized, and prone to commit more crime. The prison system is therefore ineffective and should be abolished.

2

IF I WEREN’T WHITE I’D BE DEAD

Gabriella

I was arrested and went through severe opioid withdrawal during three days in jail. It was one of the most traumatic experiences in my life, as I was kept in handcuffs behind my back (despite the fact that my costochondritis illness meant that my breathing was severely compromised and the pain was OFF ANY CHART KNOWN TO HUMANKIND) and ankle shackles (that were too tight to go around my extremely swollen ankles such that they cut deep gashes in each Achilles tendon – and I’m immuno-compromised due to my steroid medications) for most of that time. It took two days before they took me to the hospital, and then another to finally see a judge. I was arrested for trying to steal toothpaste and fragrance-free soap and deodorant at a Whole Foods Market. And this maltreatment was WITH my white privilege. Without my white privilege I too would have ended up dead on Rikers Island. They never took me to Rikers, and they waived my bail, and they gave me such a sweetheart deal that left me with NO criminal record. If I weren’t white, I would NOT have gotten those benefits and I’d be dead.

It took me six months to heal, physically, from the experience, and I’ll never FULLY HEAL psychologically. I still suffer terribly from olfactory hallucinations. When I get upset, I smell the jailhouse smell, even food smells like the jail to me at times, and then I am unable to eat anything at all. I have been judged very harshly by several people who were once close to me; extremely painful losses. I’m telling you because I know that truth-telling helps me eliminate shame, and because it is a very powerful illustration of white privilege. Too many people think white privilege means not getting arrested, but white privilege means SURVIVING getting arrested! I feel guilt and shame about the privileges I experience that Black and Brown people do not. I do think that gender-conforming privilege is something I don’t get, and though it’s impossible to estimate accurately, I do believe that some of my maltreatment was from gender non-conformity-related bigotry. But still. I know firsthand why so many people die in jail!

3

READER

Emanuel “Eoz”

Like every day, he walks a walk, gets views, experiences fragrances aromas and accepting that not everything is pink, he also feels the putrid smell of a city that he ignores and (they) ignore.

With barriers in all kinds of places, between prejudices and past condemnations of error, between blacks and whites, between walls and bars, between a yes and a no, even so,

he has his mind, a book and an imaginary escape. Fantastic and cautious for some.

That escape begins on an empty sheet, curious to find answers to his routine.

Assimilating, it was something that appealed to him.

Starting with the prolog, settling into discomfort, he continues another journey, in which, moving away from all the saddening surroundings, he reads smiles, and feels them his, reads landscapes, and sits out there, reads feelings, and makes them his.

This not so nice looking book, with not so many sheets, and earth color, makes him understand that the essential is not the superficiality, and with that new knowledge he is ready to apply it to the interactions with his surroundings, to involve all in what he sees and to avoid rejecting arguments different from his own.

“Not everything is pink”, he said, and then, smiling and closing for today that book already written, he added “that the grey of others does not ruin your color”.

And with the light off, looking at the ceiling and ready to continue navigating in imagined sheets, he says goodbye to the day with a sigh that follows the feeling of the hours lived with open eyes.

Awake, and once already sanitized, he carries out his work, carrying the wall that society – unfortunately – made him build, angry faced, not forgetting where he temporarily lives, he lets out little laughs to his loved ones and shares some other words while looking for his early release, he only hopes for physical freedom, and if it doesn’t come today, he knows what he has.

Another temporary escape in his confinement.

4

CARCERAL OTHER AND SEVERING OF PEOPLE, PLACE AND LAND

Redefining the politics of abolition through an anti-colonial framework

Vicki Chartrand and Niko Rougier

Introduction

You can’t apologize, for genocide

To the ones who are dead inside

Your sincerity is a joke, – We’re hungry homeless in jail and broke

(Turcotte, Forthcoming, Original Savages Part III)

The carceral logic and techniques that proliferate our social world are an endemic feature of modernity. Emerging with modern colonial logic of the 17th and 18th centuries, the carceral was developed as a denaturalizing¹ apparatus that severed connections of people, place and land. From a trajectory of reserves, residential schools, child welfare, inner city poverty traps, youth detention and prisons in the land now known as Canada, the carceral continues to remove people from their lands, culture, communities, supports, families and homes. In the 21st century, modern colonialism’s dispossession, segregation and assimilation practices continue to haunt the nation-state.

In this chapter, we think through the carceral apparatus as it is tied to a colonial logic of dispossession and denaturalization, used to sever connections and the implications this has for Indigenous people in Canadian prisons today. Given this, we also consider alternative or inclusive justices advanced within the politics of an anti-colonial abolition. First, we establish the links between colonialism and the carceral by tracing settler colonial and carceral logic and practices in the land now known as Canada. Second, using a situated political knowledge from various incarcerated Indigenous men across Canada, including the author Niko Rougier, we highlight the ongoing colonizing practices of the carceral. Finally, we consider alternative justices as embedded in abolitionist politics and argue that, given the centrality of colonialism in current carceral arrangements, abolition must be grounded in anti-colonial approaches that center Indigenous knowledge and ways of being. Overall, by exposing the pervasive and fluid character of colonialism, we seek to challenge a habituated and normalized colonial violence and offer different possibilities for thinking outside of carceral controls. In this way, we not only want to illuminate the colonizing tendencies of carceral systems, but rethink the perpetual machinery invested in the carceral other.

As part of an anti-colonial approach, this work is the result of deep collaborations that privilege Indigenous experience and wisdom. First, this chapter is based on both authors’ testimony at the Public Inquiry Commission on relation between Indigenous Peoples and certain public services in Quebec: listening reconciliation and progress, Val d’Or QC, 9 April 2018. The inquiry was established in response to media accounts of sexualized police violence against Indigenous women in Val d’Or, Quebec.² Second, this work is built on the situated knowledge of incarceration of one of the authors, Niko Rougier, an Abenaki artist who has been incarcerated for more than 26 years, in addition to being subject to many other facets of the carceral apparatus, including child apprehension, foster care and adoption. Finally, this work also draws from six other incarcerated Indigenous writers who, through an initiative with the Centre for Justice Exchange,³ submitted parliamentary briefs to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security’s 2018 study on Indigenous people in the correctional system (see McKay, 2018).⁴ The public testimonies of the two authors and the parliamentary briefs reflect a means to mobilize and politicize a situated knowledge and shape public and political discussion. By drawing from these sources, the authors do not seek to simply consult or ‘give voice’, but to locate penal and carceral knowledge with the expertise of Indigenous people in prison and mobilize change.

Through such a situated approach, this work is cultivated in and advances Indigenous knowledge and ways of being. This is particularly significant given that the prison is a carceral space that has long been used as a way to destroy the culture, traditions and knowledge of the original inhabitants. As we further discuss below, given this history and activity of the carceral, grounding knowledge and action in Indigenous tradition and knowledge is an important framework for developing alternative justices such as those advanced in abolitionist struggles. This is not only important for those in prison or for Indigenous self-determination, but for all of us as we struggle against carceral tropes and technologies that continue to shape our modes of thinking and ways of being. I’m not your carceral other.

Colonial modernity

The formation of the world today has deep and widespread roots in a European colonial logic. Emerging with modernity, European colonization pervaded more than three quarters of the world’s land mass by the mid-20th century (Loomba, 1998, p. 15). Foundational to this modern form of colonialism was not only the extraction of goods and resources, but a restructuring of economies, governance and cultures advanced through the logic of imperialism, racism and heteropatriarchy (Quijano, 2005). With these advances of modernity, colonial logic instituted and naturalized these interlocking structures of patriarchal, white supremist and imperial dominance, to which a criminalizing system of justice has long been tied (Saleh-Hanna, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: penal abolitionism as a challenge to carceral logic
• Part I The harms of carceral logic
• Part II Creating anti-carceral knowledge
• Part III Case studies pointing to radical alternatives
• Part IV Resisting carceral logic
• Index