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INSTEAD OF PRISONS: A HANDBOOK FOR ABOLITIONISTS
CONTENTS
Search this book:
Top of Form 1
Bottom of Form 1
Preface
Acknowledgements
Prolog
The power of words
Nine perspectives for prison abolitionists
1. Time to begin
Voices of abolition • Advocates of swift and massive change • Constitutionalists • Advocates of moratorium • Peace advocates • Developing an ideology • Economic wsocial justice • Who decides? • Who benefits? • Concern for all victims • Reconciliation rather than punishment • Abolition strategies • Power and prison change
2. Demythologizing our views of prison
Crime: Myths & realities • A society of criminals? • Who gets defined as "criminal?" • Crime wave statistics & public fear • Myth of the criminal type • What causes crime? • The culture of violence • Patriarchy and violence • Official violence • Guns • Organized crime • Drugs • Criminal law & social change • The myth of protection • The few who get caught • The few society fears • Prisons & a safer society • The myth of deterrence • Difficulty in wading deterrence • Theories of deterrence • Problems with special deterrence • Problems with general deterrence • The myth of rehabilitation • A lesson for abolitionists • "Rehabilitation" = punishment & control • The cage • Indeterminacy & the treatment model • Behavior modification • The "game" • Hard days for rehabilitation • Three directions & our response • The myth that punishment works • Prison punishment: Cruel and illegal • Escalatory nature of punishment • Justifications of punishment • Learning punishment: There's no place like home • Prisoners & childhood abuse • New directions • Nonpunitive alternatives: Reconciliation • The myth that prisons are worth the cost • Economic origins • Tracking the dollar • Prison prospects • Costly decisions • Prison life is unconstitutional
3. Diminishing/dismantling the prison system
Value of creating a model • The attrition model • Moratorium • Decarcerate • Excarcerate • Restraint of "the few" • Building the caring community
4. Moratorium on prison/jail construction
Public education • Arguments in favor of prison construction • Moratorium responses • Developing a strategy for local moratorium • Researching a moratorium campaign • What do we need to know about the prison establishment? • Where do we find the information we need? • Sources • Funding prison/jail construction • How do we use the data collected? • What every prison changer should know about LEAA • The Federal Bureau of Prisons: A growth industry
5. Decarcerate
Strategies for decarceration • Decarcerating a juvenile prison system • Abolitionist proposals • Interim strategies • Modes of decarceration • Abolishing indeterminate sentences & parole • Indeterminate sentences unjust • Voices against indeterminacy • Maine's new law • The struggle in California • An interim sentencing proposal • An interim parole proposal • Prisoners view parole • Sentence review process • Relieve prison overcrowding • Restitution to victims • The Minnesota Restitution Center • Parole contracts
6. Excarcerate
Moving away from incarceration• Paradox of interim strategies • Modes of excarceration• Decriminalization • Why decriminalize? • Undercriminalization • Decriminalizing prostitution • Decriminalizing homosexuality • Decriminalizing public intoxication • Decriminalizing marijuana • Abolition of bail & pretrial detention • Constitutionality • Who pays? • Who benefits? • Is bail necessary? • Costs to hostages • Costs to the taxpayer • Release on recognizance • Pretrial diversion • Abolishing bail • Interim strategies • Community dispute and mediation centers • Mediation & arbitration • The moot model • Kinds of conflicts /crimes • Abolitionist criteria • Community Assistance Project • Restitution • Outside the system • Within the system • Victim Offender Reconciliation Program • Fines • Suspended Sentences • Probation • Alternative sentencing • Alternative sentencing thru law • Current status of sentencing • Interim strategies
7. Restraint of the few
The politics of dangerousness • "Dangerousness" and predictability • Counteracting belief in predictability • Research challenging overprediction • Shifting the emphasis • Prison: More dangerous than prisoners
8. New responses to crimes with victims
Crimes against women and children • Rape: Myth and realities • The victimization of women • Patriarchy • Sex-role socialization . • Wife assault • Rape & the criminal (in)justice systems • Placing the victim on trial • Rape law reform • Compensation • Restitution • Racist use of the rape charge • Repeating the cycle of violence • Empowering the victims of rape • Rape crisis centers • An empowerment model: BAWAR • Washington, D. C. Rape Crisis Center .• Women Organized Against Rape • Rape Relief • Innovative action projects • Men Against Rape • New responses to the sexually violent • Breaking the cycle of violence • Alternative House • Prisoner self help: PAR • Sex Offenders Anonymous • Sexuality re-education: BEAD • Treatment program for Sex Offenders • New responses to sexual abuse of children • Myths of sexual abuse of children • Child victimization study • Can a child consent? • Training in fear and silence • Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Program • Recommendations for action • Street crime • Media manipulators • Street crime & its victims • New responses to street crimes • Crime & the Minority Community Conference • CLASP
9. Empowerment
Empowering the community • Services needed • Community solutions • The House of Umoja • Delancey Street Foundation • Empowering prisoners • Qualities of a prisoner ally • Folsom prison strike manifesto • A bill of rights for prisoners • Prisoners' Union • Prisoners' voting rights • A prisoner voting rights project • Empowering the movement • Researching the prison power structure • Prisons as industry: Jobs • Research methodology • Your right to public information • Educating the public • Research/action as organizing
Epilog
Recommended readings/resources
Instead of Prisons Table of Contents > Preface
PREFACE
Many prison reformists yearn for the end of imprisonment but find themselves confronted by questions which seem difficult to answer:
What do we do about those who pose "a danger" to society? Don't we have to solve that problem before we can advocate the abolition of prisons?
Is it possible to work for short term prison reforms without being coopted?
If we devote our energies to abolition, are we not abandoning prisoners to intolerable conditions?
How can we work for needed prison reforms which require structural change within the society, before a new social order comes about?
As some of these important questions are addressed, we will discover that many reforms can be achieved in an abolition context. The primary issue for abolitionists is not always one of reform over/against abolition. There are "surface reforms" which legitimize or strengthen the prison system, and there are "abolishing-type reforms" which gradually diminish its power and function. Realizing the differences requires some radical shifts in our perceptions, lest we fall into the trap which has plagued earlier generations. Our goal is to replace prison, not improve it.
Many criticisms of abolition arise from confusion about time sequences. Prisons are a present reality; abolition is a long range goal. How do we hasten the demise of prisons while creating an alternative which is consistent with our ideals?
We perceive the abolition of prisons as a long range goal, which, like justice, is an ever continuing struggle. Tho voices for abolition have been raised over the centuries, until today no cohesive movement for abolition of prisons has emerged. We have observed how countless revolutions have emptied the prisons, only to fill them up again with a different class of prisoner. Our goal, on the other hand, is to eliminate the keeper, not merely to switch the roles of keepers and kept.
As Americans of varying backgrounds and ages, we are required to re-evaluate: (1) our society and its relationship to those it labels "criminal;" (2) our personal values and attitudes about prisoners and the prison system; (3) our commitment to wider social change. It is important that we learn to conceptualize how a series of abolition-type reforms, partial abolitions of the system, and particular alternatives can lead toward the elimination of prisons. Abolitionists advocate maximum amounts of caring for all people (including the victims of crime) and minimum intervention in the lives of all people, including lawbreakers. In the minds of some, this may pose a paradox, but not for us, because we examine the underlying causes of crime and seek new responses to build a safer community. The abolitionist ideology is based on economic and social justice for all, concern for all victims, and reconciliation within a caring community.
This handbook is written for those who feel it is time to say "no" to prisons, for those open to the notion that the only way to reform the prison system is to dismantle it, for those who seek a strategy to get us from here to there.
Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists was also written for ourselves: a small group of the already convinced-who have gathered together to clarify and record the insights gleaned from our prison experiences. "We" are ex-prisoners, prison changers, prison visitors, families of prisoners, prison teachers-all allies to those in cages. This handbook speaks for us as "abolitionists."
Dissatisfaction with the present prison system is widespread. Thruout the country innovative projects are being tried. While nearly all of these efforts are open to criticism, we view them hopefully, as steps toward abolition. We describe and evaluate as many of these projects as space allows, in the belief that they suggest many ways in which work can be started right now toward the abolition of prisons.
A successful movement to abolish prisons will grow thru the joining of those who have experienced the system from "inside" the walls with those on the "outside" who are willing to undertake the leap from palliative reform to abolition.
This handbook endeavors to provide a wide range of concepts, strategies, and practical education-action tools. It is of equal importance that we establish perspectives to guide us in defining caring community, while moving away from the era of mega-prisons into confrontation with many more subtle instruments of control and coercion.
You will find a list of resources and recommended readings for abolitionists, as well as a scattering of "Abolition Papers" which can be reproduced for wider distribution. PREAP will continue to issue these occasional papers as the abolition movement progresses.
This handbook was designed for training abolitionists. It is divided into sections according to concepts to be understood and strategies to be developed. There is some deliberate repetition for the purpose of reinforcement. A manual for organizing abolition workshops based on concepts in this handbook is included in the list of resources. We envision these workshops as a medium for bringing together persons who are seriously committed to the goal of diminishing and eliminating the role of prisons in our society.
The ensuing pages provide information and material to facilitate that process. It is a beginning. May our shared experience complete the succeeding chapters.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Task force: Robert Brown, Scott Christianson, Lynn Cobden, Fay Honey Knopp, Janet Lugo, Virginia Mackey, Vincent McGee and Sharon Smolick
Workshop consultant: Susanne Gowan
Typists and proof readers: Lynn Cobden, Robbie Dubroff, Wendy Hedin, Burton Knopp, Brett Raphael, Edith Sillman, Sharon Smolick and Isabelle Yolen
Special acknowledgements: This handbook was funded by the New York State Council of Churches' Task Force for a Safer Society. We are particularly grateful for the encouragement and support of convenor Virginia Mackey, and Jon Regier, executive director of the New York State Council of Churches, and the Task Force's commitment to the development of the handbook. Special thanks to American Friends Service Committee for their grant in support of data gathering and research; the Westport Public Library for their special services; Mary Ann Largen for her contributions to the chapter on the crime of rape and our everlasting gratitude to the many prisoners who shared their concepts and information with their allies at PREAP.
Heartfelt thanks to all who furnished graphics, especially Tracy Sugarman, drawings for the cover and 82. Lowell Naeve, drawings from Phantasies of a Prisoner (Denver, Alan Swallow, 1958), frontispiece, 65, 115. James Grashow, woodcut, 19. Warren Levicoff, photo (all rights reserved), 85. Peg Averill, drawings, 139, 142, 149, 153, 155, 161. Chas. Du Rain, Georgeville Community Features, drawing, (all rights reserved), 74. Mark Morris, photos, 15, 33, 104, 105, 136, 166. Joseph Grant of Penal Digest International for photos, 40, 102; drawing, 133. Liberation News Service drawings, 21, 23, 30, 44, 51, 69, 88, 91, 98, 151; photos 25, 94. American Foundation, photos, 37, 48, 77, 113, 128. Fortune Society, photos, 27, 55, 81. NEPA News, drawings, 93. Prisoners' Union, photos, 78, 176; drawing, 135. Clergy and Laity Concerned, drawing by Buu Chi, 99. NORML, photo, 108. PSO Newsletter, drawing, 119. VORP, photo 122. Friends Journal, drawing, 130. Black Scholar, drawing, 188. CLASP, photo, 165. Majority Report, drawing, 148. The National Observer, drawing, 46. Gale Research Company, drawings, 42, 43. Skeptic Magazine, drawing, (© 1974 Forum for Contemporary History, Inc., all rights reserved), 34. Auburn prison, photo, 17. St. Louis Post Dispatch, drawing by Bill Steele, 87. Women Against Rape, drawing by Valerie Klaetke in Stop Rape, 147. Guardian, drawing, 174. Trenton State Prisoners' News, drawing, 57.