- But what about “violent predators”?
This is the question we get most often. “What about serial killers? What about murderers? What about rapists and abusers? How do we keep society safe from predators without locking them up?”
It is a serious question that any abolitionist needs to seriously address. Abolitionism is not about impunity, letting abusers and those who do violence continue without accountability. But we believe prisons are the wrong way to produce safety and accountability.
Why?
Let’s be clear: there are separate questions bound up in the question above. We can start with this one:
What about people who have committed “violent crimes”?
First: violence is contextual. Even horrific, inexplicable, and unjustifiable acts of violence are almost always motivated. Violence occurs within a particular context in response to particular stresses and situations. People who have committed violence, even murder, in particular situations (in the context of a robbery, in the context of gang conflict etc.) are not dangerous in every situation. This is one reason why abolitionists focus on the systemic and social causes of violence: violence arises when people are in particular situations (often affected by systemic causes such as poverty or disinvestment in their communities). It’s not an immutable trait of certain people.
Rather than rely on prisons to lock people up, we can work to transform the underlying situations that led such people to violence. You see this in the work that Homeboy Industries is doing to prevent gang violence, and in targeted violence-prevention programs like Operation Ceasefire. By removing people from the situations that led them to commit violent crimes, we can help them avoid further violence. By putting resources into investment in communities, violence prevention and transformative justice to change the situations that lead to violence, we can have a greater effect on “safety” than simply by locking up people for being “dangerous.”
Even in the case of sexual assault, programs like Circles of Support and Accountability have demonstrated that by providing material and social support, as well as social accountability, to those at risk of re-offending, we can help them avoid committing further harm, while other restorative-justice responses to sexual assault emphasize prevention via education and community support as a key part of a restorative response. By changing the context and addressing the situations that lead to violence, we can prevent violence and promote safety.
Intimate-partner violence and abuse is an area that requires particular attention. Transformative justice interventions for intimate-partner violence or domestic abuse (such as those discussed at Transform Harm or in the extensive Creative Interventions Toolkit) are responses that grew from the needs of survivors of abuse. In cases of such interpersonal violence, especially because it is supported by gendered, racial, and other social hierarchies in our society, the reality is that the current system of policing and prisons rarely meets the needs of survivors. Transformative justice responses have arisen out of that reality, and focus on prevention, on real consequences (not punishment, but clear boundaries and consequences such as removal of power or removing access to certain spaces) to keep survivors safe, along with pathways for accountability for those who have done harm. Transformative justice responses also work to change the systemic inequalities that drive such violence and abuse, in order to prevent harm.
Related to the reality that violence arises in particular contexts is that prisons further victimize victims of violence. Saying “murderers are dangerous, so we need prisons to put them in” ignores, for example, that many women imprisoned for murder were incarcerated for defending themselves from abusive partners or fighting back against them (the organization Survived and Punished does important work on this topic). Many women who have been in abusive relationships are incarcerated because of crimes committed by their abusive partners—either because they helped their partners, out of fear, or, in the case of child abuse, because they are accused of “failing to protect” their children from their abusive partners. (This creates a double-bind for mothers in abusive relationships: if they fight back against the abuse, they risk prison for violence used in their own defense or defense of their children; if they don’t fight back, they risk prison for failing to protect their children. This is one of many ways the current system fails survivors of abuse.)
People, especially people of color, who are victims of police brutality are often charged with crimes and imprisoned for “resisting,” “interfering with,” or even “assaulting” the police. Prisons only exist to protect those who are deemed “worthy” of safety from violence, usually along racial, gender, and class lines. And what constitutes a “violent crime” or makes someone a “violent predator” is defined along those lines too.
What this means is that in most cases, even violence is best addressed by preventative and compassionate means, not prison. So the question about “murderers and rapists” is really: What do we do with the few remaining totally unrepentant people who intend to go commit more grievous harm if they’re free?
The first thing to recognize is that the number of such people is very small. Of the 2.1 million people in prisons and jails in the US, how many are true serial predators who cannot be deterred by boundaries or consequences (such as removal from positions of power or certain spaces where they intend to cause harm) short of total imprisonment? Let’s get everyone else out in the meantime, rather than hold up our work towards abolition on account of these few. What is the moral cost of the harm we do to millions of people for the sake of deterring violence by a few individuals?
The second thing is to understand that if a few people need to be detained to prevent them from committing imminent harm (not some far-off future harm, but planned and immediate harm), abolitionists would not oppose the use of force to prevent that harm. Prison abolition does not mean one cannot use force to restrain someone from harming another!
It’s important to note, though, that such use of force needs to be focused on imminent harm and to continue to respect the dignity of even the most “predatory” person — if such individuals are considered disposable or beyond redemption, we will reproduce the abuses of “preventive detention” that we already see in the unconstitutional indefinite civil commitment of those convicted of certain sexual offenses. Preventive restraint is about engaging with people to prevent them from committing immediate planned violence, not disposing of them by banishing them to some form of detention and ignoring them. One way of thinking of it is that an abolitionist way of preventing imminent harm is more like taking keys away from a drunk friend than it is like a prison. Restraint occurs in relationship. A question to ask yourself is: if the person threatening serious/imminent violence were the person you loved the most, how would you act? Our goal is to restrain people from violence in part by developing relationships of support and accountability that will discourage violence, and any more coercive necessary restraint to stop imminent harm must occur within that context.
Again, an important caveat here is that this sort of restraint is a communal responsibility. This is not a call, or a requirement, for survivors of harm to remain in relationship with their abusers or those who have harmed them, or to have any contact with them at all. Keeping survivors safe and supporting their healing is always an abolitionist priority. Instead, the responsibility is on the community as a whole to provide restraint in supportive relationships to ensure further harm isn’t done, while also ensuring safe spaces of support and healing for survivors. To take on this communal responsibility also means recognizing, of course, that those who have done harm and survivors of harm are not separate groups of people: cycles of violence mean that they often overlap. The complexity of the issue is why there isn’t a single issue to the question of restraint. There isn’t a single alternative, like a prison, that will be the right way to prevent harm in every situation or by every person determined to avoid accountability. Instead, responses of encouraging and incentivizing taking accountability, prevention, and boundaries and restraint where necessary will vary as we work together to ensure safety.
This kind of targeted, compassionate, preventive restraint is not what “prisons” exist to provide. One reason to abolish, rather than reform, prisons is that the retributive impulse behind their existence—the desire to make them punitive places—will always get in the way of any other purpose they have. Prisons are intended to be cruel, and prisons are intended to banish people, exiling them from society.
Even the most predatory acts are motivated in the psyche of the offender, and no “predator” is beyond empathy, compassion, and the possibility of redemption. Psychiatrist James Gilligan has written about how the most extreme acts of violence are motivated by profound shame—and how, when that is understood, even the most extreme killers can perhaps find healing. As followers of the God who “does not desire that any should perish” (2 Peter 3:9), we cannot simply banish those we consider “incurable” to prisons.
Abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba has also addressed this question in this excellent graphic format. She rejects the definitions of “safety” and “justice” that underlie the carceral state.
The reality is that designing a “prison” based solely on restraint within relationship, with no emphasis on exclusion or retribution, is just as much of a “utopian dream” as opponents claim abolition is. The history of prisons shows that the way social power works in and around them leads to greater retribution and to greater exclusion. If we are going to imagine a “utopian prison” for the sake of safety which doesn’t fall into any of the harmful patterns of current prisons — a prison which is completely unlike any prison that has ever existed — why not instead imagine forms of relationship and safety that aren’t prisons? Abolition is intended to unsettle us, and one aspect of our cultural thinking worth unsettling is the idea that restraint must take the form of exclusion of certain individuals. What would it look instead to imagine restraint based on compassionate communal relationship rather than walls?
We don’t have a complete answer to the question of what to do about violence because there isn’t a single answer. Instead of looking for one solution where we can dispose of “violent people,” we recognize that preventing violence requires ongoing communal work and a variety of strategies, to address and prevent harm at the personal and systemic levels. We look for solutions in particular situations, supporting one another in our communities as we build new alternatives.
- How do you address Romans 13:1-6, and the role of the state as ordained by God to punish criminals?
Christian defenses of the prison often rely on Romans 13:1-6, a call for Christians to obey secular laws, and especially upon verse 4: “[The authority] is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.” The first thing to do is read this passage in the context of the final verses of the previous chapter, which encourage Christians to avoid taking vengeance, but instead to live peaceably even when wronged and “leave room for the wrath of God” (12:19). In this context, the description of governing authorities as “instituted by God” (13:1) is intended to be a promise that God has not forgotten the cries for justice of victims of violence and oppression. God will do justice for them in some way—either eschatologically when all is made right in the coming reign of God, or through the imperfect institutions and authorities of the state. The injunction to avoid resisting authority (13:1), in the context of vengeance, means: don’t give in to the desire for vigilante justice. Don’t seek vengeance for your pain yourselves. Don’t break the law to return violence for violence. Instead, trust in God to work through what exists, the state, to bring some kind of justice upon evildoers (13:4); turn your own efforts to fulfilling the law of God by loving one another (13:8); and remember that the final, better justice of God is near (13:12).
Abolition does not mean impunity. It does not mean letting those who have done harm get away with continuing to do harm. The wrath of God against violence and harm is just! For injustice to be overcome, God’s judgment against the world must be revealed. But we also believe that the fullest expression of God’s judgment was revealed on the cross (compare to John 12:31, where Jesus says “Now is the judgment of this world…and when I am lifted up I will draw all people to myself”), where the “powers” of punishment and retribution were overcome. So to “leave room for the wrath of God,” now in the light of the cross, actually means to give up our enemies and oppressors to God’s mercy shown forth through Christ’s death and resurrection.
Romans 13:1-6 is a promise to victims of violence that they are not forgotten by God, and that God is committed to bringing about justice, even if imperfectly through institutions that exist. But it does not thereby mean that the institutions of this fallen world—including the prison—are in line with God’s true justice. God works through the authorities that exist even though every authority is also captive to the powers of sin and death—but for us who live in the power of God’s coming reign, we can participate in a better, truer justice than that provided by the authorities of the world. God can work through the prisons—but prisons are nonetheless instantiations of the power of death. What we desire is to stand against the prisons as powers of death and to proclaim God’s true and unalloyed justice, the restorative justice of the coming kingdom of God.
- Doesn’t abolishing prisons mean letting serious crimes go unpunished?
Punishment is not the same as accountability. We believe in a culture of accountability rather than a culture of impunity. We want everyone who has done harm to be held accountable for that harm, and to work to make it right.
But punishment is the intentional infliction of suffering in retribution for harm done. We believe that the cross and resurrection of Jesus demonstrate that there is no longer any need for retribution. The human need for vengeance and retribution was interrupted by Christ’s death and resurrection. By his death, there is no more punishment, just as by his resurrection, there is no more death. Atonement theologies vary, but various theologies offer an understanding of the cross as somehow proclaiming an end to retribution. This is the reality we proclaim and live into when we support prison abolition.
And if there is no more punishment, then justice can instead be entirely restorative, aimed at true accountability and reconciliation. The fear of punishment discourages those who have done harm from taking responsibility for the harm they have done—but true accountability encourages (and requires) the taking of responsibility, while responding with empathy to those who have done harm. A great resource about what accountability-without-punishment can look like, in practice, is TransformHarm.org. You can also check out our Accountability Toolkit aimed specifically at developing a culture of accountability in Christian communities.
- How do I get involved?
- Learn: Check out our Resources page for lots of further reading, including lists of books and online articles to read. Learning more about the system is liberating and radicalizing!
- Share: Consider sharing our materials, including our 4-week bible study with your congregation or another group. Or invite Hannah to come speak to your congregation. Personal testimony is an effective way to encourage people to be open to abolitionist ideas.
- Write: Writing to prisoners is one of the most effective actions you can do, to establish friendships, work against the isolation and dehumanization of incarceration, and deepen your solidarity with those who suffer. You can write to prisoners through Black and Pink or the Death Row Support Project, among other organizations. Or contact us and we will help put you in touch with a pen pal.
- Visit: If you can, visit someone in prison. Look for a local prison ministry, a chaplaincy, or another volunteer program in your local jail or prison. Visit those you may know who are incarcerated. There is no substitute for visiting the prisoner, because in prisons is where we encounter Jesus himself.
- Join: Encourage your congregation or faith community to look into joining our network of churches.
- Can I buy products to show my support?
Yes! We offer t-shirts, tote bags, mugs, and more via Teespring. Products are sold as close to production cost as possible but any profits will go to support our work.