NEW YORK - As streets
fill with protesters calling for an end to racial injustice,
police brutality and the mass incarceration of black men, one
group of activists is raising the question: why not abolish
prisons altogether?
Prison abolition would mean taking the money and resources
used to put millions of people behind bars and using it to make
those bars unnecessary, supporters say.
Nearly 2.3 million people are imprisoned in the United
States and 40% are black, though just 13% of the US population
is black, according to the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative.
Black men are six times more likely to be behind bars than
white men, says the Sentencing Project, a US research group.
It is numbers like this, protesters say, that show the depth
of racial inequality in the US justice system.
Many now support a defunding of the police as they march for
justice after the death of George Floyd, and prison abolition
goes hand in hand with that demand, said James Kilgore, a
researcher and activist who was formerly in prison.
"In the last two weeks, we've seen a huge shift in popular
attitudes toward policing," he told the Thomson Reuters
Foundation.
"If anybody talked about defunding police a month
ago, that just is like madness, and now it's being put on the
agenda of major cities.
"We should be spending money on programs that keep people
out of prisons and provide them with opportunities," said
Kilgore, a fellow at MediaJustice, an Oakland, California-based
nonprofit.
Once a radical idea that only held sway in leftist circles,
the idea of redirecting money away from police and prisons into
community support is now gaining a much wider currency.
The United States has the world's highest incarceration
rate, followed by that of El Salvador and Rwanda, according to
the Sentencing Project.
It found particularly high rates in southern U.S. states.
And as a whole, the country spends more than $80 billion a
year on jails, according to the Marshall Project, a nonprofit
news organization.
Cuts in that funding could instead be spent on programs to
get people off the streets, trained or into work, advocates say,
while opponents argue it would foment disorder and fail to
punish the guilty or protect citizens from danger.
ANGER
Rojas, who uses one name, advocates for prison abolition
after spending 15 years behind bars for a violent crime.
"Prison abolition taught me that if I had therapy for my
anger problems, things would have probably been easier. If there
was support groups around my queerness for my family, if we had
housing," said Rojas, now lead organizer at the Young Women's
Freedom Center, an abolitionist group in California.
"I didn't have therapy... that's for white people. If I had
support, I wouldn't have been in the situation that I was in. I
see it now."
A landmark in prison abolition came in 2003 when university
professor Angela Davis published "Are Prisons Obsolete?"
She said prison did little to stop crime, locked up a
disproportionate number of poor and black people and perpetuated
rather than resolved problems like poverty and homelessness.
Support for her theory has now taken off, advocates say.
"I've never seen this kind of global solidarity around
ending police repression and defunding police," said Jamani
Montague of the abolitionist group Critical Resistance.
"These are new times," Montague told the Thomson Reuters
Foundation.
"It feels like the sprouts of the seeds that so many
abolitionists, scholars and organizers have been planting."
Cities are listening - and already acting.
In the wake of Floyd's death in police custody, the
Minneapolis city council announced plans to phase out the police
department and create a new system for public safety.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said money would be
shifted away from the New York Police Department and into youth
programs and social services.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said he would put $250
million toward youth jobs and health initiatives, and that as
much as $150 million of that would come from the Los Angeles
Police Department.
CRAZY RADICAL LEFT
President Donald Trump has slammed the idea of police
defunding, tweeting that the "Radical Left Democrats have gone
Crazy!,” and many Democrats including presumptive presidential
nominee Joe Biden have called for more measured reform.
Biden said in an interview with CBS Evening News that he
supported making federal aid to police conditional on whether
they met "certain basic standards of decency and honorableness."
Democrats in the U.S. Congress proposed sweeping legislation
this week to combat police violence by allowing victims of
misconduct to sue police for damages, banning chokeholds,
expanding use of body cameras by police and prohibiting
"no-knock" warrants" in drug cases.
Floyd's death in Minneapolis could prove to be a tipping
point for change, said Justin Piché, an associate professor of
criminology at the University of Ottawa.
"The care of George Floyd is certainly reigniting calls for
racial justice," Piché said.
"Something feels different this time," he said. "Whether or
not that actually translates into police defunding and more
gains for prison abolition, that remains to be seen."