WWADWWAD Newsletter - May 13th, 2022 Edition
One opinion of mine I'd impose on people if given a chance is that compassion for fellow humans (as practiced in all moments) is a must.
May 13th, 2022 - Anchorage, AK - Issue 11
I think that it’s important for us to step away from our respective internet enhanced singularities long enough to pointedly practice working together on a few important things for the good of humanity. Given the state of things (humans going hungry, high rates of incarceration, fragile supply chains, boarding school violence exacerbated land debt, failing health care infrastructure, impending climate doom, etc.), I think we need to heed what Buckminster Fuller says when he says “You never change things by fighting the existing reality, to change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
If you ask me, we’re talking about saturated sources of public good, and if we’re talking about saturated sources of public good we’re talking about a dignifying approach to drug use (and all forms of addiction) and a restorative alternative to the prison industrial complex. As I’ve said in previous issues though, I have no illusion about this being a straightforwardly possible feat. In addition to that, I also have no illusions that everyone agrees with me. But in the words that follow, I hope to either convince you or affirm for you of the validity of both of these issues, as framed by both personal experience and research.
If you want to know the reason behind my sense we should throw our political will behind prison abolition, my opinion is based mostly on statistics about how many people are incarcerated, the wealth transfer the prison industrial complex facilitates, and the way research indicates the system itself could be the problem.
In fact, please see the following statistics if you’re not already with me (or if you need a call to action!):
The population of countries in 2020 and 2021 by Worldpopulationreview.com
Source: worldpopulationreview.com
Countries with the largest number of prisoners as of July 2021:
Source: Statista.com 2021 & https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/largest-prison-population-rates-in-the-world.html
A visual of the rate of U.S. incarceration throughout history:
(And for anyone still not convinced this is a attention-demanding phenomenon, I also highly recommend for people interested in wrapping their heads around the situation to read this report entitled “The New Dynamics of Mass Incarceration” by Kang-Brown, Hinds, Heiss, and Lu, this 2018 police data transparency index , and watch this video about the rise of incarceration and its effects. )
Additionally, beyond the reality of scale, there is a theoretical argument to be made against our current very prevalent (and if you ask me very unnecessarily moralizing) risk assessment approach to what is considered criminal conduct as I think is well stated in the below excerpt from a paper entitled “Criminogenic or Criminalized? Testing an Assumption for Expanding Criminogenic Risk Assessment”.
“… The Big Four criminogenic risk factors are informed by theory and evidence that certain personality traits distinguish individuals who engage in delinquent or criminal behaviors from those who do not, such as low constraint, negative emotionality, and cognitive impulsivity (Caspi et al., 1994; Leschied, Chiodo, Nowicki, & Rodger, 2008; Loeber et al., 2012). In addition to these personality characteristics, there is considerable overlap between the Big Four criminogenic risk factors and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 Section II diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder and conduct disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), which have lifetime prevalences of roughly 2% - 5% and 1%, respectively, in the adult general population in the United States (Black & Blum, 2015; Compton, Conway, Stinson, Colliver, & Grant, 2005; Goldstein et al., 2007). Yet, the psychological versus social origins of antisocial constructs are unclear. By definition, antisocial personality and conduct disorder involve violating the rights of others, repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest, and repeatedly failing to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations. Antisocial cognitions involve attitudes, values, beliefs, and rationalizations supportive of crime and cognitive-emotional states of anger, resentment, and defiance. Antisocial constructs are thus necessarily relational: they are beholden to changes in social and legal norms about what constitutes criminal versus legal behavior, and to political-economic conditions that structure educational, employment, and other material circumstances. Indeed, both disorders are structured by social disadvantage: they are more prevalent among those with low income and education levels, among those who report more stressful life events, among those whose parents received welfare when they were children, among people undergoing residential drug treatment, and among people who experience homelessness (Black & Blum, 2015; Horwitz, Widom, McLaughlin, & White, 2001). Furthermore, as predictors of illegal behavior, antisocial constructs are circular—they contain the outcome for which they are risk factors. One would thus expect people with antisocial personality disorder to be overrepresented in jails and prisons, and for this proportion to remain stable over changes in incarceration rates. Before mass incarceration, this seemed to be the case: 80% of incarcerated men and 65% of incarcerated women met proto-DSM-III criteria (the “Feighner criteria”) (Guze, Goodwin, & Crane, 1969). However, more recent estimates suggest the figure has dropped to 35% (Black et al., 2010). The decline in prevalence is attributed to dramatic increases in incarceration rates overall (Black & Blum, 2015; Black et al., 2010). Because the social policy of mass incarceration was not a response to increases in the incidence of criminal behavior (Gilmore, 2007; Wacquant, 2009; Western, 2006), more people without antisocial personality disorder have come into contact with the criminal justice system. In other words, despite the circularity of antisocial constructs, there are clearly powerful risk factors for exposure to the criminal justice system that are not mediated through individual-level propensities at all.”
and
“A more robust understanding of how the criminal justice system increases individuals’ antisocial characteristics would seem to require a shift in theoretical perspective. For this there are numerous intellectual strains, beyond labeling theory, that engage seriously with the wider context in which dynamic systems, processes, and individuals’ encounters with them take on causal significance. For example, scholars have cautioned that in the era of mass incarceration, the therapeutic, rehabilitative origins of criminogenic risk assessment have been “supplanted by a managerialist approach centered on the cost-drive administration of carceral stocks and flows…” (Wacquant, 2009, p. 2). This shift has likely not gone unnoticed by individuals navigating the system. In his in-depth interviews with over 50 residents of a juvenile detention facility and its staff, teachers, and administrators, Reich (2010) shows how the young men there defined success in strategic rather than moral terms —as staying out of the detention facility, but also improving their material conditions, i.e., engaging in crime without getting caught. Reich (2010), drawing on Feeley and Simon’s (1992) foundational analysis, suggests that …this strategic orientation toward prison among young men might be understood as the flip side of a…justice system that has increasingly abandoned any pretense of treatment or punishment, where the impersonal and actuarial management of a criminal population takes precedence over moral and personal responses to criminals, whether rehabilitative or punitive (p. 77). Appreciating the systematic community disinvestment, bleak and racialized educational and employment opportunities, and the erosion of unions and other political and civic organizations, Reich’s framework does not find it surprising that young men involved in criminal behavior would experience their relation to the criminal justice system as ‘a game in which the goal is to profit as much as possible without getting caught’ (Reich, 2010, p. 77) – with more exposure to the system potentially reinforcing this outlook.”
-Source: Criminogenic or Criminalized? Testing an Assumption for Expanding Criminogenic Risk Assessment, Seth J. Prins, Columbia University https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6746587/pdf/nihms-1044243.pdf
Research around current carceral models continues to suggest that the system is in and of itself the problem, that the system does not address the unalienable importance of the human lives it so drastically impacts. I myself worked for some time as a judicial assistant because it was the only livable wage and warm (I live in Alaska hey!) job I could find, and while I had a prison abolitionist mentality going in, I was appalled by the way I didn’t even have to seek out confirmation of how inhumane the system was, it was everywhere around me at all times. I was surrounded by people who grimaced at the extra work they had to do by virtue of the fact that a high amount of people were locked up on any given day (without any sense of nuance about the many inhumane reasons people have their freedom revoked) and who exhibited obstinance against fully dignifying any person charged with a crime as someone who deserved their time and consideration. Another reality of the failing system that I witnessed close up was that even if best case scenario the judge made a humane order, sometimes due to the technical frailty of the court system, a small element of the system (like mention of an address on record or paperwork error) could cause even the best of decisions to not be actionable, and the charged person could have their livelihood dealt with in a very cavalier way by virtue of the dysfunctional bureaucracy. This also occurred quite regularly in areas unrelated to the bureaucratic handling of the judges’ orders but in more infrastructural court process inadequacies which resulted in the impossibility for many people charged with crimes to follow the judge’s orders, a legally punishable offense. It was frankly quite depressing to witness.
It has become increasingly clear to me that approaches to the realities currently mediated by the so called “criminal justice system” that consider human disposability as an acceptable practice in response to harm have limited utility towards reducing it, and in many cases serve just the opposite function. This is not to say I think that anyone should be forced to expose themselves to interaction with people who have harmed them, but that we should seek to build systems which enable the community to come together to support and not exclude the person who claims to have been harmed, the survivor, counterintuitively by supporting the person who caused the harm such that they can take accountability and make better amends in some form (potentially on carefully mediated terms of the survivor). This looks like taking an approach which says something to the effect of “hey we’re not going to partake in the immediate societal banishment of this person who has caused harm, because we see restoration as the end goal and them as worthy of first being dignified with a chance to make amends or commit to honoring the survivor’s preferences for a restored outcome”.
Alternatives to mass incarceration of course must necessarily be paired with strong movements to, as Prins says, “account for structural influences on the risk distributions of crime and exposure to the criminal justice system.” To me this would have us address issues of food, housing, and comprehensive health care access for instance, as part and parcel of an alternative approach.
If you want to know the reason I think we should also rally around the cause of Harm Reduction, my rationale stems predominantly from personal experience.
One of my partner’s greatest inheritances will be a significant amount of generational trauma. This is not because his parents did anything wrong, but because his parents themselves faced a series of psychosocial stressors, from their status as first generation immigrants from a middle eastern country in early 2000s America, to the way that his dad lost a fellow immigrant friend he moved here with to violent crime while his friend was at work, to the fact that his dad himself was born to religious refugees expelled by Stalinist Bulgaria.
Another thing about my partner is that he was dealt the accordingly statistically probable hand of a struggle with addiction to drugs and alcohol, something he is now in recovery from but which has not been the case for the entirety of our relationship.
Trauma is rarely observed clearly by anyone party to it. It is confusing to experience the physiological fallout of having been at times afraid, hurt, or alone (if even just in an emotional sense) early on in one’s life, and is ever so much more confusing to see the effects in the people around us. And trauma’s effects are (as research around things like Adverse Childhood Experience scores, shows) long lasting.
I share this because it was through the experience of being partnered to someone who experienced such an intense run in with alcohol and drug addiction at such a young age (early 20s) that I was able to understand how limited and often counterproductive our resources often are for supporting people through it. In fact, I came to find out my partner was a lucky anomaly where lack of any interaction with the court system is concerned, but in my personal experience with my partner’s pre-recovery state it was nonetheless terribly painful and ridden with stigma, shame, and social strife.
There are a couple things I think we need to modify about our approach to addiction and the other human behavioral consequences of trauma:
We need to draw the line at trauma and vigorously support and attend to the people who have experienced addiction in any form as a result of it, and make therapy accessible to all.
We need to come at addiction with an approach of looking to stop the harm, as opposed to an approach solely concerned with treating the result of it.
We also need to approach the treatment of the results of harm with significantly more compassion, seeing ourselves in addicts, in a grim instance of the fellow human condition.
We need to decide collectively that we will dedicate resources to ensure future generations have secure childhoods.
We need a vision of what a harm reductionist and abolitionist politics would look like
(And I’m sure there are more things we need to do, and I would love submissions of ideas on the topic to share in future issues)
My partner is sober now, but I tell you even just by virtue of proximity to his struggle I have been clued in to the magnitude of how much better we need to care for each other, especially people without enough access or with barriers to obtaining the tangible and less tangible resources needed for survival of the addiction experience.
I’m eager to envision harm reductionist and abolitionist models of organizing in my community. To me this would look like abolition of carceral responses to use of drugs and then working towards decarceration of less clearly blameless harmful acts. This avoidance of directly addressing individual human lived experience by way of locking (sometimes even completely innocent) people up is not serving us as collective humanity.
How can we organize our efforts in our respective communities such that those who are truly in need don’t have to also experience the ostracism which accompanies our current carceral response model? I certainly have some ideas, and all of them involve ensuring our systems look out for the flourishing of every living being.
Peace and expansion,
Bailey
Upcoming Events
(both National/Worldwide
and Local Anchorage)
National/Worldwide/Online:
Virtual Choosing Our Roots Informational Session - May 13th at 6:00PM AKST, for those interested in becoming a host, a volunteer, or community support with Choosing Our Roots , click here to reserve a spot!
Local, AKST Time:
(Long Awaited!! Extremely Exciting!!) Food For Thought Community Free Fridge Launch Party- May 21st 2-5PM, 4119 Mountain View Dr. https://foodforthoughtalaska.com/
Writer’s Block Pride Block Party - June 25th, 12-6PM @ Writer’s Block
A Selection of Upcoming “On This Day” Trivia:
May 14th, 1940 - Emma Goldman passed away on this day 82 years ago
May 17th, 1990 - The WHO deleted homosexuality from its list of mental diseases
May 25th, 1963 - 32 African countries formed a coalition against white rule (The Organization of African Unity)
May 26th, 1972 - The Anti Ballistic Missile treaty was entered into that “limited the number of ground-based anti-ballistic missile systems and sites that each side could have” Source: https://armscontrolcenter.org/fact-sheet-anti-ballistic-missile-treaty/
May 28th, 1961 - Amnesty International was founded
June 1st, 1970 - Newsletter writer’s mom was born
June 3rd, 2013 - Trial against human rights whistleblower Chelsea Manning began
June 4th, 1975 - Russell Brand was born (newsletter writer may or may not celebrate this as a holiday) (when asked for comment said newsletter writer offers the reply “sue me”)
Some Recommendations:
A bit of good news in the form of a collection of hopefulness inspiring “Innovative Solutions to Poverty and Hunger” for if you need it https://borgenproject.org/innovative-solutions-to-poverty-and-hunger/
This thread:
Some substantiation in the form of a podcast episode for my sentiment that human flourishing is a good goal for a society and its organizational structures
Great article on Food For Thought (the organizers of which we can credit for this first ever community fridge as set to be launched May 21st!)