Part III: What Is Penal Abolition?

Ray Morris

Part III: What Is Penal Abolition?

Chapter I: Wrong Criminals, Wrong Goal

Ruth Morris

I used to say that there was nothing wrong with our criminal justice system except that it was an expensive, unjust, immoral failure. Then I would document how true each of those 4 indictments are:

*Prison is many times more costly than the most expensive community alternatives, and about 50 times as costly as the simpler ones like bail supervision, restitution, and victim offender reconciliation. Prison cells cost $70 to $200 a day in Canada, plus the enormous cost of building these cages for people. Bail supervision and related community alternatives cost about $ 3 to $5 a day!

*Our revenge system is unjust. Its racism is legendary, with incarceration rates 5 to 50 times higher for indigenous persons and persons of colour, around the western world, even though anonymous user rates show drug use similar among the races, and anonymous reporting shows offending against the law is almost universal among us all. Less talked about is the EXTREME CLASSISM of the system: as John Clarke documented on Thursday, and John McMurtry on Friday, prisons are warehouses for poor people, in lieu of housing and jobs.

*A system based on deterrence - hurting one person to influence another -- is based on the Nazi principle of intimidation: if someone damages the Nazi war machine, shoot any 50 villagers to deter them. Deterrence is immoral, whether you use machine guns or prisons.

In addition to this, the majority of the people we define as "offenders" have been shunted from inadequate homes to worse institutions, and have had few of the basic human rights of all children met, as defined by UN standards. This does not give them the right to break into homes and harass us, but neither does it make it right for us to grind them through an endless cycle of revenge, from poverty to police harassment, to offences, to courts, to prisons, and back again. We need to set limits on unacceptable behaviour without wallowing in blaming and revenge.

*Failure. If there is one thing conservative government commissions and radical critics agree on, it is that prisons have been one of the greatest failures of all times. They don't rehabilitate, they don't deter, and they increase public danger by embittering prisoners and training them in the networks and skills of criminal trades. Recidivism rates of 40-85% testify to their failure in achieving their stated purposes, and their success in achieving their latent purpose: maintaining employment in the justice system, and ensuring that their fodder keeps grinding through it year after year, with no escape.

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All the above is still true. But today I have moved on to what I consider a more sophisticated critique. I believe the fundamental problem with our "criminal justice system" is twofold:

*Wrong criminals,

*Wrong goal!

In short both our target group and our way of dealing with them is fault

y - how messed up can we be? No wonder I have moved from being the child calling loudly, "The Emperor has no clothes" to an unwilling prophet exclaiming, "The whole court is stark, staring naked!" Prophetic roles have ever been unpopular, not only with those who stoned the prophets, but with the prophets themselves who were called to speak prophetically. Jonah had to be swallowed by the whale before he accepted the job, and Moses kept telling God to try somebody else, anybody else, before he reluctantly agreed to take on the job.

Wrong People

It's a large task to take on both of these faults at once. Let's begin with the wrong people:

*Both Ford and General Motors knowingly and willfully produced tens of thousands of cars which they knew would incinerate their occupants. The cost of making the cars safe would have been $11 per car, but they coldly calculated the dollar costs, and concluded it was cheaper to burn up some customers and fight in court the few families who dared

to sue.

*Reed Paper Company in Ontario is one of many who have polluted streams and destroyed native and other environments, causing severe mercury disease in humans and animals alike, and massive unemployment. They continued this long after they were ordered to desist.

*The World Health Organization states that pesticides kill 20,000 people a year in the third world. North American companies export all kinds of products to the third world which are banned for safety and health reasons in North America, including many drugs, foods, and even baby pacifiers.

*Nestle's may be the world's greatest criminal. Year after year they promote baby formula in the third world, urging mothers to wean their babies to formula so costly that the babies slowly starve to death on the watered down formula: a million babies a year for 20 years is three times the toll of the holocaust! But these babies are African and Asian, so we hear little about it.

Those at ICOPA IX for the orientation to corporate crime heard far more about corporate crime than I have either the knowledge or the time to document. But the brutal saga of corporate crime is far deeper and worse than even this morning's brief introduction could possibly convey.

In fact, the issue goes far beyond technical crime to moral wrong. John McMurtry says it eloquently in all his books. "A gold plated toilet in a private jet is worth 1000 times a village well in a poor village in India, because only demand counts, not need. If one does not have money, one has no value. There is nothing to be gained from such beings in the market, only trouble from their attempts to go on living in some way: by demands for welfare, scrounging in garbage, panhandling, or other impecunious efforts to survive. therefore the poor are pronounced bad. Poverty is the one sin market theory cannot forgive."

Summing up, every expert on corporate crime I have read agrees on these amazing truths:

*Corporations control lawmaking and law enforcement so that many of their most destructive practices are not illegal, or if illegal, never enforced.

*Even so, corporations kill 30 persons for every homicide in North America. They do this through unsafe and unhealthy workplaces, unsafe and unhealthy environments, and unsafe and unhealthy consumer products.

*Corporations steal $10 for every dollar stolen by conventional criminals.

Most people hearing these statements nod thoughtfully. Many of us have suspected the existence of corporate crime, simply because its impact on our reality is so obvious all around us. But the brave new world portrayed by the corporate controlled media shuts out this reality so much that the official picture we have pressed upon us in the daily media does not include it. So on one level, the overwhelming reality of corporate crime clicks with us. But on another level, we just can't take it in, at least not quickly. As one radio interviewer kept saying whenever I talked about corporate crime, "Yes, but let's get back to real crime now." It takes a lot of time, and it took a big effort even for me to realize that corporate crime is the most real, the most pervasive, the most destructive crime of all.

So we do have the wrong criminals, if we are to define anyone as criminals, in the dock. And how can you make any sense of any system of justice if you keep pursuing the wrong folks? Not that all street crime is trivial. But the obsessive focus on it is mostly a distraction from the need to look at where the greatest social harm comes from: corporations which promote unemployment, poverty, the growing gap between rich and poor, the positive value of greed, and the justification of any act at all in the name of profit.

Wrong Goal

It is hard enough to get across this huge point to an audience in a short talk. But usually I can get them far enough to be really mad at corporations. Right away, they want to punish those big, bad corporate bosses. At least it is a change from the corporate media's obsession with punishing big, bad union bosses, but it is just as much off track. Because as Hal Pepinsky and Louk Hulsman also point out, we are a penaholic society, and addiction to penality/ revenge is at least as destructive as addiction to any other mindbending substance.

Revenge chains us to the past, to the object of our hatred.

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Revenge perpetuates the cycle of violence and pain.

Revenge holds us captive, unable to move beyond grief to healing.

Revenge does nothing whatever about true healing.

Yet we continue to base our entire criminal justice system on revenge. Retributive justice is rooted in revenge. It cares little for healing of victims, offenders, community. Restorative justice rejects revenge, but it does little structural analysis, and it accepts society's definition that by some strange coincidence, almost all criminals are poor and marginalized young men of colour. Only transformative justice rejects both the wrong target and the wrong goal. Transformative justice takes every crime as an opportunity to include the criminal, the victim, and the affected community in social transformation. It rejects the wrong behaviour, but includes the person engaged in it. It has the seeds of prophetic social transformation, but it begins with individuals meeting individuals in community.

The title of this conference is A Call to Transformative Justice: New Questions, New Answers. We believe we have to move beyond retributive justice, and even beyond restorative justice. Let's quit playing the game, which is reinforcing racial and class barriers. Abolition which merely stamps marginalized persons guilty in nicer print, and torments them more gently is no abolition at all. It's painting a lovely picture over a dungheap: the underlying smell of classism and racism still stinks. It's trying to plant flower bulbs in salt mines.

Our whole retributive justice system is a kind of social lobotomy. It not only tries to lobotomize the so-called "criminals" into the vegetable like state of those who have had a physical lobotomy, cutting off brain connections. It also lobotomizes our communities, cutting off vital connections between people. Communities only thrive on valuing and including diversity, as Louk has helped me to understand more deeply with every passing year. Instead of lobotomizing ourselves with retributive justice, or soothing ourselves with restorative justice, we must have the courage to follow the challenge of social transformation. Rich and poor, black and white, indigenous and Euro-American, all of us have a part in a transformed, inclusive society. We can create that beloved community by asking deeper questions, questions which can lead us to more profound answers.

ICOPA IX is proud to integrate the issues of penal abolition and the struggle against corporate rule. Both causes are one, for only as we seek social transformation can we all win together; and we will win a world large enough to include diversity of every kind, and strong enough to embrace transformative processes that include and respect all.

Ray Morris