Repair Care as a Casualty of Domestic Warfare
Stephanie Delise Jones and Damien M. Sojoyner
During the question-and-answer section of lectures, workshops, and symposia pertaining to the study and work against the carceral state, there inevitably will be a question posed by audience members—How do you change the system? The question is usually posed by someone who is eager to learn and even more eager to contribute their energy and time to creating meaningful change. Yet, there is a cognitive block that occurs as the impetus of the question derives from two interconnected thoughts—first, as commonly discussed or taught within and through schools, popular media, and other sites of general information consumption, the carceral state appears to be a huge monolith that is omniscient in scope. It is seemingly everywhere and nowhere at the same time. At this stage of thought, the notion of dismantling the carceral state is akin to flying to another planet; it is a lofty goal, but one that seems far-fetched.
Second, once the intent of the carceral state becomes apparent—as not an instrument to provide well-being and safety, but rather was designed to suppress movement building and liberatory possibilities—there is instant recognition that it must be destroyed. Yet, there is tension between the second thought and the first. How do you destroy something that is everywhere and seemingly so ingrained within the fabric of everyday life? How do you wrestle with the notion that the systems we are invested in also permeate violence and harm?
This tension is critical to understanding the role and function of reform in relationship to the carceral state at a macro level and the criminal justice system at a very specific structural site. At a very surface level, reform provides a pathway to the dismantling of the carceral state in a manner that is palatable (and often necessary) within the context of social relationships and modes of production (such as jobs and schools). Very simply, reform is a change in the system, yet not the grand solution. This reality is apparent to organizers and activists who framed reform not as a static entity but as a dynamic intervention that is relational to its point of origin. Reform within this context is not inherently “good” or “bad,” but its application—in terms of mitigation of violence—is contingent upon overall goals and ideological underpinnings from which reform develops.
How then can we understand care in the context of carcerality and state control? To answer this question, we first must interrogate how care functions at different levels. On the one hand we may think of caring for people by making society more equitable, distributing social services to marginalized populations, and focusing on the longevity of policies that support self-determination. However, in opposition to such forms of care is the state’s insistence to maintain control through mechanisms of punishment using the rhetoric of care and safety. These two goals for care are at odds, both materially and ideologically. In this way, the carceral state is a political apparatus that employs care as a shield/facade/proxy for domestic warfare. Ironically, central to such deployment is the destruction of community based collective efforts to produce and maintain care. At the intersection of acts of domestic warfare, on one hand, and the preservation and maintenance of communal being, on the other, reform becomes a key site of contestation.
Using this framework allows us to focus on the actions of enforcement by the state and the ideologies that support moving away from communal ways of seeing care. Angela Davis famously thinks through the prison itself as a kind of reform.1 Davis argues prisons are a reformed technology—compared to the public acts of violence they replaced—which provided a way for the state to dispose of those deemed to cause disorder. This is part and parcel of the contradictions of reformism. Davis reminds us that prisons did not signal a move away from violence, but rather provided both a site and rationale for a punitive state to punish disorder. The prison itself is the act of violence imposed on citizens as part of a larger social logic of punishment and state power to ensure citizens and noncitizens stay aligned with state processes. Thus, the prison is one site of carcerality, but the way we inscribe punishment and define crime enables the state to enact a parallel pattern outside prison walls. At the same time, the industries of punishment are entangled within institutions promoting the alignment with the nation-state as part of its nationalistic ideals. Hence, the carceral state is not a poorly design system in need of reform, but a structural site for the distribution of punishment. The tension between how communities conceptualize safety and care is at odds with carceral mechanisms that exist to destabilize communal care practices.
Reform Set in Motion
During the 2014 election cycle in the state of California, a curious item was on the ballot. In California, residents are presented with a set of “propositions” to vote upon that vary in scope and have covered a wide range of changes to the Constitution—from property taxation to matters of affirmative action. During this particular election cycle, one of the most highly discussed items on the ballot was Proposition 47: The Safe Neighborhoods and Safe School Act. Hailed as one of the most important pieces of criminal justice reform in the history of the state, it was a model piece of legislation that other states were expected to follow and there was much hype and fanfare around the initiative. With support ranging from progressive nonprofit organizations and major figures within the Democratic Party, and an all-star cast of celebrity endorsers, Proposition 47 was well on its way. Summing up the commonsense ethos of the initiative, hip-hop musician and entrepreneur Jay-Z told a frenzied, packed crowd at the ninety-thousand-seat Rose Bowl that California needed to pass Proposition 47 to “build more schools, less prisons.” Jay-Z’s statement was reflective of the supportive rhetoric from a coalition of entertainers, influencers, and social justice advocates that echoed across social media and traditional media platforms.
Understanding the difference between how communities define the investments in their schools and how the state uses punishment to define the needs of these campuses highlights the antagonistic relationship between how state intuitions profess to enforce care and how communities see care. While packaged as a reform that would (a) change the dynamic between schools and prisons in the state of California and (b) release people who were in prison for certain low-level offenses, the reality was much more complicated and much less rosy. One of the first organizations to flag the overstated rhetoric of Proposition 47 was Citizens for a United Budget (CURB). A coalition of organizations that sought for the dismantling of the carceral apparatus in California, CURB took the proverbial fine-tooth comb through the proposition and found a very problematic dynamic between schools and prisons. The transference of financial resources from prisons to schools as promised in the campaign platform for Proposition 47 was said to be a windfall that greatly improved the quality of schools in the state. In fact, when divided up among school districts and schools, there was not enough money to hire teachers, but there was enough money to hire safety officers on campuses. Added to the fact that the bill stated resources must be focused on school safety, it was quite clear where the money was headed. This type of subversion participates in the many practices used by the state to produce various forms of punishment and violence, while degrading the tools that address the needs of a community.
The state of California had been under a federal mandate to reduce the size of its prison population. Doctors who attended to those locked up under state supervision found they had a public health crisis on their hands with outbreaks of highly communicable viruses proliferating throughout the network of California prisons.2 Armed with the information gathered by doctors, activist organizations and family members of prisoners took to the proverbial streets. Once they revealed the extent of the problem—and under intense pressure from a broad coalition of civil liberties groups, community organizations, and health professionals—the federal government ordered the state to reduce its prison population. Given the moniker of “realignment,” the state tasked the Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC) to oversee the vast project of deescalating the prison population. However, as CURB found out, given that the overwhelming majority of the thirteen BSCC members were law enforcement officials—specifically high-ranking officials with the sheriffs, probation, parole, and criminal court systems—most realignment projects were essentially a shell game where resources within the state were transferred from one branch of the carceral apparatus (in this case prisons) to another (such as jails or juvenile detention facilities). The carceral state persisted, under the guise of care; it was merely reorganized to be more palatable to the Californian voting public. Under Proposition 47, 65 percent of the funds generated by the initiative would be under the control of the BSCC, which ensured the longevity of the shell game and ensured that the people would be ensnared within the clutches of state supervision. Thus, while hailed as a major victory and a critical reform in the building of a just world, the reality is that Proposition 47 worked to reproduce many of the structural harms that intensified the connections between schools and prisons while adding to measures that make communities less safe, thus negating the care work so many struggled to build. Such a reform disrupted care networks as an act of domestic warfare, which reified the state as the final arbiter for care and safety.
When advocates describe criminal justice reform, the discourse is shaped through a familiar set of ideas that presume the criminal justice system is something that needs to be—and can be—reformed. However, we need to question: What is “criminal justice”? And how do we see justice imposed onto people we deem to be criminals? As we describe the ideas of “justice,” we can associate criminal acts with systems that respond with methods that either isolate people from the rest of society or rehabilitate them so they can become “productive” members of that society—which are disrupted through mechanisms of punishment. Simultaneously, we must also turn to theoretical and philosophical questions about how a state is meant to respond to citizens and noncitizens who violate the ideas and norms dictating participation in society. These questions help interrogate both the mechanisms of punishment used by the state to dispose of people and the ideological basis for how to reform the state in a way that addresses domestic warfare.
The advocates of criminal justice reform produce critiques that advance both theoretical and practical iterations of the same problem. On the theoretical side reside lofty questions of the state, its processes, and its roles. For example: How is the state meant to perform its role? Who is allowed to be in conversations with the state in defining “crime” and the state’s performance of punishment? How should the state delineate its response to crimes as they impact people? On the practical side, laws and policies attempt to mitigate discrepant outcomes that result from the criminal justice system dictating its own reform. Such laws and policies are primarily situated in the ways that this system exerts control over gendered and racialized bodies. We also see policies geared toward fixing problems as part of the discrepancies. This cluster of initiatives stem from a single premise: Changing laws and policies that produce discrepant outcomes generates room for a different result. Yet, lingering behind this syllogism are ignored epistemological questions pointing toward deeper relationships to the state. How do we align ourselves with the state? How does that alignment narrate and determine who is meant to benefit from the state? How are benefits meant to be disseminated? Do benefits have to be taken from one group in order to be given to another? When we conceptualize these nationalist ideas, what kinds of power do individuals give to the state that is meant to work through society by way of its industries and institutions that have the power to extract from certain groups, both those marked as citizens and noncitizens? If the state is responsible for defining care, what does it have to enforce those strategies?
Both the ideas and their contradictions for criminal justice reform are founded on something is broken that needs to be isolated and discovered to stop the dysfunction of the criminal justice system. This foundation distracts us from complicating ideas about justice—in this, we start from a narrowly defined and definitive view of what “justice” looks like. This narrowly defined view of justice does two things: It deceptively appears to be formulated around an agreement about what “justice” is, and it restricts the starting place for conversation with and about how justice is supposed to be performed.
The term “reform” includes a nexus of liberal ideals across a spectrum of political formations that themselves produce agendas for dysfunction and unfair outcomes. In other words, there is a line of reform tactics that are centered around policy formations aligned to fix a system that reform advocates deem to be dysfunctional through critique. This critique is based on the consistency of the outcomes brought about through the social logics of punishment. To avoid the deeper issue of how the criminal justice system is created to deal with policies and laws that support nationalist ideas of order, such critiques ignore how the state is meant to organize society based on social logics of order. Closing our minds to these fundamental phenomena redirects us to the superficial determination that the criminal justice system is broken. We distract ourselves from the self-perpetuating project of the nation-state, and thus the state’s power to organize and penalize disorder.
In both the practical and philosophical questions we have about criminal justice reform, if we start from the premise that this otherwise beneficial system is marred with dysfunction, then we start to attack the system itself to mitigate unsatisfactory outcomes through piecemeal changes to laws and policy. However, if we look at the purpose of the criminal justice system—rather than individuals or institutions within the system who enact a social logic that supports punishment—we must admit that it is not dysfunction that should be our target. Rather the full scope and mechanisms within domestic warfare that detracts from what communities conceptualize as care and safety. These disruptions of care networks through disposing bodies from communities cannot coexist.
Rachel Herzing, cofounder of the prison abolitionist organization Critical Resistance, works, thinks, and writes about the role of reform within the movement to dismantle the carceral state. According to Herzing,
Back in the early 2000s, Critical Resistance started using a framework that a lot of people are using now . . . We started saying that the distinction between abolitionists and reformers (or people who either have abolition as their end goal or reform as their end goal) is that . . . reformers tend to see the system as broken—something that can be fixed with some tweaks or some changes. Whereas abolitionists think that the system works really well. They think that the [prison-industrial complex] is completely efficient in containing, controlling, killing, and disappearing the people that it is meant to. . . . So rather than improving a killing machine, an abolitionist goal would be to try and figure out how to take incremental steps . . . and make it so the system cannot continue—so it ceases to exist—rather than improving its efficiency. Whereas reformers, with criminal justice reform being their end goal, believe there is something worth improving there. . . . You can take an incremental step that steals some of the PIC’s power, makes it more difficult to function in the future, or decreases its legitimacy in the eyes of the people.3
Herzing’s insights provide a model to understand the tensions that exist within contemporary movements to dismantle the carceral state.
Utilizing the opening salvo as an anecdote, the push to reduce the size of the prison population in the state of California was initiated by a coalition of doctors, organizers, and family members of loved ones who were locked in cages. The reduction in numbers of people incarcerated in the state of California was understood as an incremental step—a reform—that would be pieced together with other steps to dismantle the carceral state. Proposition 47 on the other hand, is representative of a logic that understands the carceral state as something that is redeemable. Proposition 47 might also be an intentional misdirection of organizing energy and the mislabeling of a victory for the redistribution of carceral state power to other carceral state structures. From either vantage point, Proposition 47 ceded power back to the carceral state only reproducing violence and harm.
Reform tactics centering policy formations that address dysfunctionalities throughout the criminal justice system must involve a critique of the social logics of punishment wielded as tactics of domestic warfare. Reforms are an inevitable development in the continued struggle against the carceral state, but the reproduction of violence and the maintenance of structures that give life to carcerality is not. It is imperative to make that distinction clear and move forward in a manner that has liberation as the end goal. This is the condition for communities to envision and cultivate strategies to maintain care.
Notes
1. Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003).
2. W. J. Newman and C. L. Scott, “Brown v. Plata: Prison Overcrowding in California,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online 40, no. 4 (2012): 547–52; L. Salins and S. Simpson, Efforts to Fix a Broken System: Brown V. Plata and the Prison Overcrowding Epidemic (2012); Loy. U. Chi. LJ, 44, 1153.
3. Rachel Herzing, “Black Liberation and the Abolition of the Prison Industrial Complex: An Interview with Rachel Herzing,” Propter Nos 1, no. 1 (2016).