Why I Am an Abolitionist

by Alexander Valentine

Impossible, Unrealistic, You are wasting our time …Few topics result in more eye-rolling and sighs than Prison Abolition. There just doesn’t appear that there is anything practical to the idea, and certainly not anything that can be used for effective organizational fundraising. As a position, it is just a high-minded notion that ignores reality. So, many would say.

However, there is a reason that a person must take this supposedly unreasonable position, and it has nothing to do with budgets, criminal justice, or racial anything. There is one simple reason. Domestic Violence cannot be tolerated. It cannot be accepted as a part of our society in any way. Not in any form.

Domestic violence is usually defined with seven dimensions:

Physical abuse

Verbal Abuse

Emotional Abuse

Financial Abuse

Sexual Abuse

Social Abuse

Spiritual Abuse

It is the use of fear, domination, and infliction of harm to foreclose a victim’s identity, compel behavior, and make them accept their place as one deserving of abuse. This is not acceptable in any relationship; intimate, parental, social, or any other society. There is no place in society where these methods can be allowed to be okay – there can be no exception to the rule because they deserve it. In this, it is an ethical principle that is either held or not.

I am an Abolitionist because the penal system as it stands employs the seven dimensions of domestic violence in its operations to achieve stated goals. The larger arguments over prison aside, prison cannot be this. Where the attitudes that underlie domestic violence are allowed, the notion of its tolerance starts to become normalized; slowly, subtly, steadily.

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Physical

Physical abuse in prison is well documented and the source of centuries of lawsuits. That it occurs is not in dispute. Those who are responsible for preventing physical abuse by staff often say that it will get better or never happen again. How many battered women have heard those same promises? Though different, the mindset behind both is the same. They both adopt the idea that there is an acceptable level of abuse, and that excesses can be excused with apologies.

Verbal

Verbal abuse is the common experience of every incarcerated person. For those that would say, “What do you expect? It’s prison,” that goes to the heart of the issue. Prison as it is operated relies on a mindset where it is acceptable to bully and humiliate people to gain their obedience. Both verbal and physical abuse come from those who hold authority and by extension serve as role models for prisoners. The acceptability of this behavior is reinforced in those who suffer it. This is the same basis by which domestic violence is perpetuated from one generation to the next.

Emotional

Emotional abuse is seen in every dehumanizing experience. There are countless examples, but where this became unavoidably clear was one particular incident where I was being yelled at for giving a man who had no food several Top Ramens. While I was used to ignoring attitudes like that, the guard said he had the right to deny anyone food, and that I had no right to give an inmate anything because we were state property. It also stood out because he spent some time trying to get me to say that Dino – a human being – was state property first. This is the same mindset as abusers who see their victims as their property.

Financial

Financial abuse is largely seen in control and limited or financial self-sufficiency. Trust accounts are realistically unavoidable, wages are 16 cents an hour, and only higher in less than 10% of assignments. Engaging in a profession is prohibited except with the direct permission of the warden, and there is real resentment that we can only be charged a 35% mark-up on canteen prices. At most prisoners’ wages, a jar of coffee and two bars of soap will wipe them out for the month. All wages go into the trust account and are subject to confiscation at any time.

Sexual

Sexual abuse occurs. Rather than focus on the dramatic prison rapes, there are the daily humiliations; stripping out, bending over and coughing every time a prisoner returns from work. Personally, I have as little reservation about being seen naked as an adult film worker, and that is not unique. There is also the constant reminder that, “Yes is not allowed,” and that shirts need to be worn at all times because we offend female staff otherwise. This reinforces the belief that there is an excuse to be violated in the name of security by a dominating authority figure, and that we are creatures who are sexually offensive by our existence. This normalizes sexual abuse for those of us who suffer it; but worse, it normalizes it for those staff who inflict it.

Social

Social abuse can be directly seen in the ongoing stigmatization and ridiculous stereotyping applied to anyone in prison. Here the response of But, you committed a crime! Often grows loud and often said with the same vitriol as But she keeps going back to him. There are no valid excuses for social abuse, any more than there are excuses for cyberbullying or doxing. Find an excuse for the behavior in any area, and the doors reopen to excuse it in all the rest.

Spiritual

Spiritual abuse comes in the form of prolonged sensory deprivation, the perpetual awareness of futility, and an environment that robs the individual of their sense of accomplishment. Year after year, prisoners are farmed and herded. Too often, outside organizations are solely concerned with obtaining more funding. They obscure personal initiative where it undermines their ability to claim to be the cause of positive change. Institutions are bureaucracies which, by their nature, discourage individualism and initiative. In both cases, failure is the fault of the prisoner, including our lack of gratitude for our imprisonment, which results in a condition of spiritual poverty. We experience the continual oppressive reality that nothing we want matters.

The primary mechanism of prison and its operational methods is to break and keep the broken spirits of the people who are held within an order to make them more obedient. How many survivors of domestic violence say the same thing of their experiences?

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Prison operates on the same reasoning and practices as does domestic violence. Prison as it is implemented causes its staff members to consciously or unconsciously take this mindset with them each day when they  leave, and permanently when they retire. This mindset not only tolerates but endorses the use of the core dimensions of domestic violence as normal behavior. Worse, it does so in a codified, systematic manner that reduces the responsibility that any one person could easily recognize. But often, staff do eventually realize it. Correctional officers have the highest suicide rates after retirement of any profession. I can be called a self-serving lying inmate, but that does not change the fundamental reality their tragedies demonstrate. They kill themselves because this is true; they are the proof that what moves the prison system is the same mindset that brings violent abuse down on women, children and the elderly.

It is not okay. It is not tolerated. It must stop. Domestic violence cannot be left room to breathe and grow in the dark. It cannot be endorsed. While I have many ideas of what could come next, the one thing of which I am sure is: the means of prison must be ended. For that reason, I am an abolitionist.