{"id":318893,"date":"2021-09-20T15:15:02","date_gmt":"2021-09-20T15:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/radiofree.asia\/?guid=63b2aa7c70ab8af085d3cd3c66a7a7b7"},"modified":"2021-09-20T15:15:02","modified_gmt":"2021-09-20T15:15:02","slug":"bipartisan-reforms-often-expand-prisons-and-police-we-need-abolition-instead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/09\/20\/bipartisan-reforms-often-expand-prisons-and-police-we-need-abolition-instead\/","title":{"rendered":"Bipartisan Reforms Often Expand Prisons and Police. We Need Abolition Instead."},"content":{"rendered":"\"Police<\/a>

As the concept of \u201cmass incarceration\u201d entered the U.S. mainstream over the last decade or so, diverse networks of advocates, funders and politicians have criticized the country\u2019s overwhelming reliance on police and prisons as a response to a vast array of social problems. A critical consensus that mass incarceration is bad has given rise to a criminal justice reform coalition that is almost as bipartisan as the push for expanding police and prisons has been in previous decades.<\/p>\n

Yet, as Kay Whitlock and Nancy A. Heitzeg argue in their new book Carceral Con: The Deceptive Terrain of Criminal Justice Reform <\/em><\/a>(UC Press, 2021), this reform coalition has actually extended the carceral apparatus of surveillance, policing, incarceration and punitive social control. Carceral Con <\/em>examines several domains where money and politics blunt meaningful transformation: policing, pretrial reform, sentencing and diversion efforts, and incarceration and reentry. Instead of backing the bipartisan reform agenda, Whitlock and Heitzeg advocate abolitionist alternatives.<\/p>\n

This interview, conducted via email with both authors, illuminates why they wrote the book and how we can best move forward — beyond reform and toward abolition.<\/p>\n

Dan Berger: You both are longtime activists and analysts of the carceral state. Why write a book critical of reform efforts? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Kay Whitlock and Nancy A. Heitzeg:<\/strong> We wrote this book to help people question and look beyond public relations talking points in order to understand how and why most reforms do the opposite of what most people hope. In fact, most reform agendas expand rather than shrink systems of policing, surveillance and carceral control.<\/p>\n

Many want to believe that reforms will reduce police violence, end mass incarceration and eradicate the inequality that pervades the criminal legal system. But when you look at collective impacts, reforms don\u2019t do any of those things.<\/p>\n

Almost any reform can be made to sound great. But policing, prosecution, and carceral policies arise and evolve within a larger social, economic, political, and ecological context, which is racial capitalism. We analyze reforms and their impacts within that context and the structural raced, classed, gendered and ableist violence and inequality racial capitalism requires. That\u2019s key to understanding who gets criminalized and who doesn\u2019t. It\u2019s key to understanding how the criminal legal system itself both distills and reinforces mass hardship, violence, and, in Ruth Wilson Gilmore\u2019s trenchant phrase, \u201cgroup-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.\u201d<\/p>\n

We often hear that \u201cpartisan gridlock\u201d prevents meaningful transformation. Instead, your book argues that bipartisanship does. How so? <\/strong><\/p>\n

The so-called \u201cbipartisan reform consensus,\u201d is a series of brokered agreements by elite public and private interests that appear to be responsive to growing public opposition to police violence, mass incarceration and the harms they produce. In reality, these reforms often do end runs around protests and uprisings that challenge the structural violence and inequality of the system. They serve to legitimize rather than challenge racial capitalism, endlessly funneling more resources into policing and punishment along the way. <\/p>\n

Carceral Con<\/em> encourages readers to interrogate the very purpose of the criminal legal system within this context of racial capitalism. If, as abolitionists contend, the system is functioning as it is designed to, then \u201creform\u201d will almost always find ways to reinforce the norm.<\/p>\n

Even the title of your book takes a strong position against this bipartisan reform partnerships and coalitions. Who is being conned and what makes criminal justice reform such a \u201cdeceptive terrain\u201d? <\/strong><\/p>\n

The heart of the con is this: Bipartisan reform agendas often co-opt the ideas and language of abolitionist and progressive struggles for racial, gender, disability and environmental justice, harnessing them to approaches that deliver more carceral expansion under the guise of what James Kilgore calls \u201ccarceral humanism<\/a>.\u201d Some people do benefit from some reforms, including sentencing changes. But even sentencing reforms sometimes reclassify certain offenses more harshly. And overall impacts don\u2019t reduce structural inequality.<\/p>\n

The con is present in the multiple layers of implied promises that emphasize managerial and procedural reforms. Anyone who believes that these reforms help to create more racial and economic justice is being conned. And the con is present in suggesting to people that getting rid of private prisons<\/a> or ending the war on some <\/em>drugs or modifying procedures for addressing so-called \u201cnon-serious, non-violent, non-sexual\u201d offenses will lessen structural inequality and create more justice.<\/p>\n