Don’t worry. We’ll still have prisons. They’ll just be reserved for people who point guns at Black Lives Matter rioters breaking into their homes or drivers who pass over a BLM mural in the road.
Despite virtually universal opposition, black nationalists are going all-in on getting rid of the police.
Leading the way is Colin Kaepernick. His Medium essay is big on the arm-waving about racism, but like most examples of the genre, short on explaining what he wants to do and what would replace it. There’s just two paragraphs that touch on what this post-police criminal utopia would look like.
Demands to defund the police and prisons are one of the ways to first realize the goals of investing in people and divesting from punishment and, in time, progress to the complete abolition of the carceral state, including police and policing.
To be clear, the abolition of these institutions is not the absence of accountability but rather the establishment of transformative and restorative processes that are not rooted in punitive practices. By abolishing policing and prisons, not only can we eliminate white supremacist establishments, but we can create space for budgets to be reinvested directly into communities to address mental health needs, homelessness and houselessness, access to education, and job creation as well as community-based methods of accountability.
This makes perfect sense if you believe that criminals are just depraved on account of being deprived. And that’s the central BLM argument.
Pour more money into welfare and everything will be fine.
But what happens to criminals who don’t stop?
Every time you see, “to be clear”, you know it’s not being clear and it’s a denial. Take, “to be clear, the abolition of these institutions is not the absence of accountability”.
What kind of accountability will there be? “Transformative and restorative processes.”
If this sounds like gibberish, let me dig up my article from last month about what transformative and restorative justice looks like.
Malcolm London was a co-chair of BYP100, and a successful community organizer, who had been arrested for assaulting a police officer, and was then released by Chicago Democrats.
His victim, “Kyra”, another Chicago activist, was working as a sexual assault educator on campus. According to Kyra, he “told me sexual violence prevention was something he was really passionate about”.
And then he sexually assaulted her.
BYP100 quickly announced that it had been “made aware of a sexual assault allegation involving a BYP100 leader” and that it was launching “a transformative and restorative justice process, rooted in compassion, accountability and a belief that no one is disposable.”
At the end of the 15 month “restorative justice” process, everyone involved decided to make public statements to show how this alternative to prisons and police could work in the real world.
Malcolm’s statement hailed the “engaging” bi-weekly conversations that allowed him to discuss his toxic masculinity problem and occasionally cry.
Then Malcolm was accused of rape. Again.
“After a year and a half long accountability process, Malcolm made the choice to continue raping Black women,” Kyra complained in a follow-up statement last month. “The process had many goals, but the main hope was that at the very least Malcolm wouldn’t rape anyone else.”
That’s “Restorative” justice.
It means sociopathic criminals run wild and their victims have no recourse. It means therapy sessions for muggers, rapists, and killers.
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