1AC – Violent Abolition
A fag is bashed because his gender presentation is far too femme. A poor
transman can't afford his life-saving hormones. A sex worker is murdered
by their client. A genderqueer persyn is raped because ze just needed to be
"fucked straight". Four black lesbians are sent to prison for daring to
defend themselves against a straight-male attacker.
If civil society is sutured to violence, we demand a queer attack on the
social order.
When borders and walls and cages are erected, we see only one solution:
every nation and border reduced to rubble.
Get with us or get the fuck out of the way.
In short, this world has never been enough for us. We say to it, “we want
everything gone, motherfucker, try to stop us!
We are not interested in the choices of coffins the current system offers.
Let’s give fire to the powder keg. May the wind of freedom blow, may the
tempest of insurrection rage.
This is a crackdown on corporate PrideTM parades, a rejection of the banal
regurgitation of white supremacy liberals reproduce. The panopticon is
omnipresent and punishment has overcoded civil society to restrict queer
possibilities and relations – the prison industrial complex has become a
regime of the control
Stanley, 11 – Ph.D. in History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz, UC President's
Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSD (Edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, Captive Genders: Trans
Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, AK Press)//X
Trans/gender-non-conforming and queer people, along with many others, are born into
webs of surveillance. The gendering scan of other children at an early age (“Are you a
boy or a girl?”) places many in the panopticon long before they enter a prison. For those
who do trespass the gender binary or heteronormativity, physical violence, isolation,
detention, or parental disappointment become some of the first punishments. As has
been well documented, many trans and queer youth are routinely harassed at school and
kicked out of home at young ages, while others leave in hopes of escaping the mental
and physical violence that they experience at schools and in their houses. Many
trans/queer youth learn how to survive in a hostile world. Often the informal economy
becomes the only option for them to make money. Selling drugs, sex work, shoplifting,
and scamming are among the few avenues that might ensure they have something to eat
and a place to sleep at night. Routinely turned away from shelters because of their
gender presentation, abused in residential living situations or foster care, and even
harassed in “gay neighborhoods” (as they are assumed to drive down property values or
scare off business), they are reminded that they are alone. Habitually picked up for truancy,
loitering, or soliciting, many trans/queer people spend their youth shuttling between the
anonymity of the streets and the hyper-surveillance of the juvenile justice system. With
case managers too overloaded to care, or too transphobic to want to care, they slip through the
holes left by others. Picked up—locked up—placed in a home—escape—survive—picked
up again. The cycle builds a cage, and the hope for anything else disappears with the
crushing reality that their identities form the parameters of possibility.10 With few options
and aging-out of what little resources there are for “youth,” many trans/queer adults are in no
better a situation. Employers routinely don’t hire “queeny” gay men, trans women who “cannot
pass,” butches who seem “too hard,” or anyone else who is read to be “bad for business.” Along
with the barriers to employment, most jobs that are open to folks who have been homeless or
incarcerated are minimum-wage and thus provide little more than continuing poverty and
fleeting stability. Back to where they began—on the streets, hustling to make it, now older—they
are often given even longer sentences. While this cycle of poverty and incarceration speaks
to more current experiences, the discursive drives building their motors are nothing new.
Inheriting a long history of being made suspect, trans/queer people, via the medicalization of
trans identities and homosexuality, have been and continue to be institutionalized,
forcibly medicated, sterilized, operated on, shocked, and made into objects of study and
experimentation. Similarly, the historical illegality of gender trespassing and of queerness have
taught many trans/queer folks that their lives will be intimately bound with the legal system.
More recently, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has turned the surveillance technologies inward. One’s
blood and RNA replication became another site of susceptibility that continues to imprison
people through charges of bio-terrorism, under AIDS-phobic laws. Living through these forms
of domination are also moments of devastating resistance where people working
together are building joy , tearing down the walls of normative culture, and opening
space for a more beautiful, more lively, safer place for all. Captive Genders remembers
these radical histories and movements as evidence that our legacies are fiercely imaginative
and that our collective abilities can, and have, offered freedom even in the most destitute
of times.11 In the face of the overwhelming violence of the PIC, abolition—and
specifically a trans/queer abolition—is one example of this vital defiance . An abolitionist
politic does not believe that the prison system is “broken” and in need of reform; indeed,
it is, according to its own logic, working quite well. Abolition necessarily moves us away
from attempting to “fix” the PIC and helps us imagine an entirely different world —one
that is not built upon the historical and contemporary legacies of the racial and gendered
brutality that maintain the power of the PIC. What this means is that abolition is not a
response to the belief that the PIC is so horrible that reform would not be enough.
Although we do believe that the PIC is horrible and that reform is not enough, abolition
radically restages our conversations and our ways of living and understanding as to
undo our reliance on the PIC and its cultural logics. For us, abolition is not simply a
reaction to the PIC but a political commitment that makes the PIC impossible. To this end,
the time of abolition is both yet to come and already here. In other words, while we hold on
to abolition as a politics for doing anti-PIC work, we also acknowledge there are countless ways
that abolition has been and continues to be here now. As a project dedicated to radical
deconstruction, abolition must also include at its center a reworking of gender and
sexuality that displaces both heterosexuality and gender normativity as measures of
worth.12
Anti-blackness is the condition of possibility for conflict to occur –
transphobic violence, class oppression and anti-queerness are conflicts
that play on the stage of anti-blackness
Prisons seize control of resistance – any social movement supporting
incarceration will become squashed.
Gossett, 14 – Lambda Literary Writer Retreat Fellow, black genderqueer and femme
fabulous activist and writer (Che, “We will not rest in peace AIDS activism, black radicalism,
queer and/or trans resistance,” Queer Necropolitics, Edited by Jim Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman,
and Silvia Posocco, Q Routledge)//X
*Uses They Pronouns*
The prison industrial complex is an always already anti-black, violently antiqueer and
anti-transgender enterprise that perpetuates what Saidiya Hartman names the ‘afterlife of
slavery’ (Hartman 2008: 6). It institutionalizes forms of restricted life: following ‘re-entry’,
a formerly incarcerated person loses access to public housing , benefits and federal
educational loans and faces chronic joblessness due to stigma. Incarceration has
been historically employed as a means of maintaining an anti-black and white
supremacist sociopolitical and racial capitalist order from antebellum ‘black codes’ that
criminalized vagrancy (Dru Stanley 125 126) post-‘emancipation’, to more recent attempts
to extinguish the spirit and destroy the momentum of black liberationist movements in
the United States (ranging from surveillance and sabotage of the Revolutionary Action
Movement, to COINTELPRO, to the current renewed targeting of Assata Shakur).
Journalist Shane Bauer (2012) has documented how in California, the mere possession of black
radical literature results in being criminalized as gang related and put in solitary housing units
(SHU) - a form of torture from which exit is uncertain, whose administration is often based on
whether one informs on other incarcerated people (Bauer 2012: 1-4). Prisons thus continue
the logic of COINTELPRO, which aimed to neutralize and eliminate black freedom
movement(s). The prison industrial complex is at once a manifestation of a disciplinary
and of a control society. The prison is one of the central and proliferating oppressive
technologies through which bio- and necropolitical violence and the apparatuses of
surveillance that reinforce it are naturalized. The insidious morphology of the carceral is
such that even as it is dismantled via lobbying for decriminalization and decarceration,
on the one hand, it proliferates via extended modes of surveillance and control —
ankle bracelets, probation and parole — on the other. Carceral violence is maintained in
various penal registers and forms.
Think, no don’t think, Consume. Liquidate. Surveil. Impede. Limit. Deter.
Detain. Regulate. Regurgitate. Restrict. Restraint. The prison is no longer
just brick and mortar, it has infiltrated our minds.
Spade, 11 - Associate Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law (Dean, Morgan
Bassichis, Alexander Lee, “Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything
We’ve Got,” from Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, AK
Press)//X
The government and corporate media used racist, xenophobic, and misogynist fearmongering to distract us from increasing economic disparity and a growing
underclass in the United States and abroad. The War on Drugs in the 1980s and the Bush
Administration’s War on Terror, both of which are ongoing, created internal and external
enemies (“criminals” and “terrorists”) to blame for and distract from the ravages of
racism, capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism. In exchange, these enemies (and anyone
who looked like them) could be targeted with violence and murder . During this time, the
use of prisons, policing, detention, and surveillance skyrocketed as the government
declared formal war against all those who it marks as “criminals” or “terrorists.”
EXAMPLE: In the 1980s, the US government declared a “War on Drugs” and drastically
increased mandatory sentences for violating drug prohibition laws. It also created new
prohibitions for accessing public housing, public benefits, and higher education for people
convicted of drug crimes. The result was the imprisonment of over one million people a
year, the permanent marginalization and disenfranchisement for people convicted, and a
new set of military and foreign policy intervention justifications for the United States to
take brutal action in Latin America. EXAMPLE: Following the September 11, 2001 attacks
on the World Trade Center in New York, politicians manipulated the American public’s
fear and uncertainty to push through a range of new laws and policies justified by a
declared “War on Terror.” New legislation like the PATRIOT Act, the Immigrant Registration
Act, and the Real ID Act, as well as new administrative policies and practices, increased the
surveillance state, reduced even the most basic rights and living standards of
immigrants, and turned local police, schoolteachers, hospital workers, and others into
immigration enforcement officers.
This is a declaration against the liberal reformists who reject abolition;
respect should not be shown to bigots masquerading as revolutionaries.
NO PRISONS ARE SAFE. The PIC has constructed the criminal - ideological
cages have entrapped bodies into an economy based on punishment - our
politics begin with a recall of the prison and the violence it creates –
prisons are a form of nonaccountability and gender role enforcement.
Status quo protection in the names of ‘justice’ and ‘safety’ will never
resolve the violence it induces
Rasheed and Stanley 14 – Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a brooklyn-based conceptual
artist working primarily with photography, installation, and texts. She is Arts Editor for Spook
Magazine and Eric Stanley has a – Ph.D. in History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz, UC
President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSD (“The Carceral State,”
http://thenewinquiry.com/features/the-carceral-state/#more-58702)//X
California gets called “progressive” despite operating one of the world’s largest prison systems.
“Abolition is not simply a reaction to the [prison-industrial complex] but a political
commitment that makes the PIC impossible” writes Eric A. Stanley in the introduction to
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. Nourishing these
possibilities to create a future in which incarceration and policing are not normalized features of
our society has been at the core of Stanley’s academic writing and activist work. A president
postdoctoral fellow in the departments of communication and critical gender studies at the
University of California, San Diego, Stanley works at the intersections of radical trans/queer
politics and prison abolition. Stanley has directed the films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal
Queers (2013) along with Chris Vargas. Stanley talks to the New Inquiry about California’s
incarceration culture and those who resist it, how language shapes our imagining of a postincarceration world and the importance of queering our conversations around the prisonindustrial complex. What is unique about the Californian narrative of incarceration and
policing? How has the history of California been shaped by the prison-industrial complex?
California is in many ways emblematic of our current moment of U.S. empire. Our stage of late
liberalism allows California to proclaim itself both the most “progressive” state while
simultaneously producing among the most brutal carceral practices. We can look to California
and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) as a cautionary tale of
how even well-meaning prison reform almost always produces more violence, rather than
stopping it. To understand how “progressive California” became the way we talk about the
operators of one of the largest prison systems in the world, we could look to the recent
Proposition 47, the “Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act,” for an example. It is championed by
many state prison-reform groups because it claims it will help pull some people out of prisons
and jails through resentencing of what the legislation calls “nonserious nonviolent” inmates. And
it might! At first glance, this seems like something that all of us fighting against the prisonindustrial complex (PIC) could support. We know that decarceration is one strategy in the long
vision that is abolition. However, written into the proposition is a provision that would mandate
all the “savings” from releasing people be placed into a fund that would increase police
presence in schools and mandate harsher truancy discipline. What looks like a victory in our
struggle would actually build up rather than dismantle the PIC. As a response to the infamous
overcrowding of California’s prisons, this is something we know would reimprison 10,000
people, even if 10,000 people are released. Overcrowding is not a malfunction of the prison-industrial complex, it’s how it’s designed. For a more exacting account of California’s carceral
topography, I would defer to Ruthie Gilmore’s amazing book,Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus,
Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. There, Ruthie helps us understand how labor
and land are central to California’s prison growth but often overlooked. While it seems obvious
that capitalism is a big part of the story of imprisonment, Golden Gulag helps push against the
understanding that it is only important at the level of a defendant’s ability to fight charges.
Identifying a structuring logic of the prison-industrial complex, Ruthie suggests her book is about
“class war,” and it is. I am interested in “exacting accounts.” I think about the prison-industrial
complex especially in considering who collects and distributes information about it, and the
specificity required in describing what it is. How does this enumeration, calculation, and
collecting further serve the prison-industrial complex? As example we might look at the National
Crime Victim Survey, a database funneled through the Bureau of Justice, is currently the only
space where national “biased” violence is aggregated. While having some important
information, the database is little more than a misrecognition of the forms of structural
abandonment and direct attack many people face everyday. Some have argued that if the
reporting or vectors could be corrected we would have a more accurate representation of who is
targeted for these kinds of harm. But I want us to undo the argument that more information
or research necessarily produces more liberation. We have elaborate data on
incarceration rates for black people in the U.S., and we know that this research has done
nothing to curtail the reality that the prison-industrial complex functions as
antiblackness. Even if statistics show how the prison-industrial complex is constitutively
anti-trans and anti-black, they don’t halt it. I think you’re right. We’ve always known this
information, but that information by itself is not liberatory. Beyond the information we have about
the functioning of the PIC, I am also interested in the information we have about movements
challenging the PIC. I think it is easy to conflate the myriad of struggles against the PIC and this
conflation can obscure the work of distinct activist organizations. I spent a little over a year with
Critical Resistance, where I learned about the distinction between a prison-reform movement
and a prison-abolition movement. For those who conceptualize prison reform in terms of more
rehabilitation programs or the ending of mandatory minimums, how does your work for prison
abolition differ from prison reform? What’s the difference between asserting that the prison
system is broken versus the assertion that is working as it is designed to function? While
usually suspicious of the work of binary oppositions, I think the distinction between
reform and abolition is vital. When they become confused, we end up with people
arguing that Prop 47 is going to “solve the problem of mass incarceration.” If we say that
the prison system is working as designed, that is, as a set of antiblack, ableist, and gender-normative practices used to constrict, and at times liquidate, people and
communities under the empty signifiers of “justice” and “safety,” then we can more
adequately assess what something like Prop 47 will actually do: Trade a few of the prison
system’s current hostages for an expansion into schools. We often arrive at the idea that
the system is “broken” not because we have such a strong attachment to the state, but because
we have a scarcity of language around the intensity of its violence. One of the ways its common
sense remains entrenched is in our collective inability to articulate the enormity of our current
conditions. Instead we—myself included—most often use language that is readily available,
helping sabotage our own chances of living otherwise. In concrete terms, what does it mean to
continue believing that the prison system is “broken”? If we believe that the prison system is
broken, then we must also believe in its ability to be fixed. Here we can see how the PIC keeps
functioning through the rehearsal of the “broken system” narrative. As Angela Davis and many
others have argued, it is precisely through reform that the prison-industrial complex expands.
We can see the materiality of this expansion through the mandatory increase in police in
schools through Proposition 47. I was born and raised in California and I know this proposition
would affect my old students and family members so let’s talk about Prop 47. It is on the
November 4 ballot. If it is approved by the state’s voters, it would reduce the classification of
most “nonserious and nonviolent property and drug crimes” from a felony to a misdemeanor.
How do you respond to people who say this reform, however small, is better than nothing at all?
In abolitionist work we sometimes talk about nonreformist reforms to think about the
distance between people getting their immediate needs met, or their conditions made
less unlivable, and the political worlds we want. Under our regime of racial capitalism,
perhaps all we can inhabit is a set of shifting contradictions. Given this, one of the
questions we try to continually ask is, “Will this reform be something we have to fight
against in five years?” For me, this is how I determine if the compromise is too dangerous. In
the case of California’s Proposition 47, I’m not convinced it will actually lead to the release of
people and will instead further involve schools as punitive practices. Focusing our efforts only
on, and in the name of “nonviolent and nonserious” incarcerated people can also work to
reaffirm the assumed serious and inescapable violence of those still inside. Are we
willing to always allow the state to decide what constitutes the limits of “violence”?
Under Proposition 47, someone who defrauds an entire community out of their homes may be
considered “nonviolent,” while someone who blocks their own home from being foreclosed could
remain imprisoned as a violent offender. I want to talk more about the abolitionist vision and the
construction of the “violent” and “nonviolent” offenders, as well as accountability. A tiring
critique of prison abolition that can make even a self-identified radical sound like a
mouthpiece for the right is that if we abolish the PIC, we will all be subject to greater
risks of harm. In response to this assertion, it is important to note at least two related
points. First, the most dangerous, violent people in our society are not in prison, but are
running our military, government, prisons, and banks. Secondly, what we have now, even
for people who have caused harm, is a form of nonaccountability where the survivors of
a violation are often harmed again through the desires of a district attorney whose only
interest is conviction rates. Anyone who has been deposed or been through a trial can
attest to this. Abolition is not simply about letting everyone out of prison, as our critics
like to suggest, although that would be an important component. It is forged in the work
of daring to ask what true accountability, justice, and safety might look and feel like and
what are the ways we might build our world now so violence in all its forms is decreased,
rather than something that we only attend to post-infraction. I am interested in how we
move toward abolition. Who are the people challenging the normalization of incarceration? Can
you talk to us about local movements around prison abolition? And beyond California, what
work is being done? I have to first give a shout-out to the Transgender, Gender Variant Intersex
Justice Project based here in San Francisco. TGIJP is an organization by and for formerly
incarcerated trans women of color, held down by Miss Major, Janetta Johnson, and others. I
think what is unique about TGIJP is that unlike some antiprison organizations that tokenize
currently or formerly incarcerated people, they center them in every aspect of their work. TGIJP
is also working hard on re-entry for trans women as abolitionist work. When people are
released, especially those with felonies, the issues that found them in the prison
industrial complex are dramatically compounded. With almost no resources, people get
released into situations that are hyper-policed, and more often than not people get swept
back up in the system. I would also point people toward Californians for a Responsible Budget
(CURP), a statewide coalition of people and organizations fighting jail and prison expansion all
over the state. As you know, there are also chapters of Critical Resistance in Los Angeles and
Oakland that continue to push toward abolition in a culture where compromise is often the most
we can expect. I’m also excited by all the work being done in less formal ways, by collectives of
people like Black and Pink-San Diego, a prison letter-writing group, and Gay Shame, which I
have organized with for the past 12 years. With Gay Shame, we keep trying to show the ways
the prison industrial complex is ever-expanding and how LGBT people are at times complicit in
its proliferation. As the banner at our last action read, we are pro-sex, anti-prison, queers for
abolition. In Captive Genders, you write that this prison abolition work and trans/queer liberation
must be grown together. How are these movements mutually dependent? In the past few
decades, we have seen the mainstream LGBT movement fight hard to become part of the same
systems of domination that have already destroyed so much. Most visibly, this fight toward
inclusion resides in the legalization of gay marriage, military service, and the expansion of hate
crimes legislation on both the state and federal level. When I was writing the introduction to
Captive Genders, I wanted to help (with many others) redirect resources and organizing toward
abolitionist work, and also remember the histories of trans and queer people, particularly lowincome and/or of color, who have always fought against policing and incarceration. In other
words, I wanted to mark both the unique moment of the organizing and analysis that Captive
Genders gathers up, and also the ways we are in a genealogy of struggle that will continue
beyond us. I have also been involved in various abolitionist projects over the past decade that
did not necessarily foreground trans/queer politics. I think in similar ways I wanted to push
trans/queer organizing to center abolition, I wanted to push antiprison organizing to include a
trans/queer analysis that understood the specific ways trans/queer people of color have been
and continue to be targets of the prison industrial complex. Both Nat [Smith] and I began the
project knowing that we wanted it to be an explicitly abolitionist text. As it was the first book that
centered the ways trans/queer people experience the PIC, we wanted to foreground a radical
analysis. We also had a commitment to making space for currently and formerly incarcerated
people while not wanting to rehearse the somewhat false division between theory and practice.
In the introduction to Captive Genders, you write that “among the most volatile points of
contact between state violence and one’s body is the domain of gender.” You’ve also
written about how prisons are gendering institutions as well as queer spaces. How does
this happen simultaneously? What are some examples of this resistance to gender normativity
within prisons? Binary genders (male/female) are not something that pre-exist any
institution (like prisons) but are produced and reproduced in their moment of interaction.
In other words, the imagined stability of only two genders is part of the work of prisons .
Not only are prisons gender segregated, but quotidian practice inside mandates the
group fantasy of gender normativity. This is a bit of a different argument than suggesting that
we only pay attention to the ways prisons treat trans/queer and gender nonconforming people,
although we also need to do that. Yet even against the relentless force of punitive gender
normativity, people still find ways to resist and embody, although perhaps protracted,
gender self-determination in these spaces of suspended death. These usually take the
form of what might look like small moments of resistance, but are the daily material that
allow some people to survive the unsurvivable. For example, I have a friend who was
inside a “women’s prison” and she sewed boxer shorts out of sheets for her butch and
trans masculine friends because they could not legally obtain them as they were not
regulation in “women’s prisons.” People also find ways to do their hair, get or make
cosmetics and other things that help them express whatever gender they are feeling.
Resistance also comes in the ways people inside are in leadership positions of many
“outside” organizations, like Sylvia Rivera Law Project and Justice Now and California
Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP). We know the prison-industrial complex exists
along a continuum, from the ways that people are policed and criminalized, to the point
of trial and incarceration, to the moment of reentry. How does the prison industrial complex
affect the lives of queer/trans folks living outside the physical site of the prison? When people
first started using the term “prison industrial complex” it was an attempt to think about
all the ways the prison as a force exists far beyond its walls. While we want to be vigilant
in our attention to the condition of those inside, we always want to be aware of the
various ways people are policed, criminalized and constricted that may seem less
obvious . Through this expanded understanding of the PIC we must look at psychiatric
imprisonment, public housing, shelters, Native boarding schools, drug treatment and
diversion programs, juvenile facilities, ICE detention centers (and more) as all central to
our work as abolitionists. In an essay called “Near Life, Queer Death,” you address the
privatizing of violence. In thinking about the landscape of Californian incarceration, in ways does
the “privatization [of] the enormity of antiqueer violence” collude with the privatization of the
enormity of mass incarceration and policing in California? I would perhaps think about the
different ways privatization is working in each of these scenes. Much antiprison organizing for
the past 15 to 20 years has centered around critiquing the ways private prisons produce
wealth through the business of captivity. I remember organizing in the 1990s at Cabrillo
Community College in Santa Cruz where I was a student because our cafeteria contracted with
Sodexho Marriott, which then had stakes in CCA, a private prison firm. That work was and
continues to be necessary, but only as a way to open up conversations beyond the privateprisons argument. If we end there, it can seem as if we think prisons run by the state are
“better” and that prisons are only troublesome if they produce surplus value. Again, this
is where an abolitionist analysis becomes necessary to push us through the private prisons
argument and toward a more general critique. In “Near Life, Queer Death,” I was trying to think
about how structural violence (like racist and anti-trans violence) is rewritten as individual
acts against specific people. The legal system is one of the primary ways the systemic is
transformed into the discrete or personal. This happens, in part, through the substitution
of the idea that justice has been done with a conviction by the state. We might look at the
recent attack against Sasha, an agender youth who was riding a bus in Alameda when their
skirt was lit on fire by another 16-year-old. Sasha sustained second and third degree burns in
yet another attack against a gender-nonconforming person. Seeking an easy conviction, the
district attorney decided to charge the defendant as an adult and forced them to take a plea
deal, which could now place them in prison for seven years. Sasha and their family asked the
DA to not charge the person as an adult and also asked for restorative justice for the defendant
and not prison time. Against the desires of the survivor, the DA refused and sought the
conviction by way of a plea. The histories and futures of anti-trans violence become
substituted with the “justice” of another conviction, while all those involved are left as
collateral damage.
If they talk of reform, we talk of destruction.
Politics have become dominated by surveillance - the gaze of the state is
inseparable from the sexual and racial violence it creates. Reform of the
prison is merely an internalization of the disciplinary gaze of the state. We
are not homosexuals we are homoexplosions.
Abolition requires direct conflict with civil society - we cannot dismantle
the prison, we must dismantle the world
Lamble, 11 – Professor at the University of London, Birkbeck College of Law (S.,
TRANSFORMING CARCERAL LOGICS: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial
Complex Through Queer/Trans Analysis and Action,” from Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment
and the Prison Industrial Complex, AK Press)//X
Prison abolition is not a call to suddenly fling open the prison doors without enacting
alternatives. Nor is it an appeal to a utopian ideal. Abolition is a broad-based, practical
vision for building models today that practice how we want to live in the future.
Practicing alternatives requires different starting points , questions, and assumptions
than those underlying the current system. The existing criminal justice model poses two
main questions in the face of social harm: Who did it? How can we punish them? (And
increasingly, how can we make money from it?). Creating safe and healthy communities
requires a different set of questions: Who was harmed? How can we facilitate healing?
How can we prevent such harm in the future?97 Developing alternatives with these latter
goals in mind prioritizes the needs of people who have been harmed and emphasizes more
holistic, prevention-oriented responses to violence. Such frameworks not only re duce the need
for prisons, but also work to strengthen communities by reducing oppression and building
community capacity more broadly. Abolitionist strategies differ from reformist tactics by
working to reduce, rather than strengthen, the power of the prison industrial complex. 98
Prison reforms, however well-intentioned, have tended to extend the life and scope of
prisons. So-called “gender-responsive” prisons are a prime example; reforms intended
to address the needs of women have led to increased punishment and imprisonment of
women, not less. By contrast, abolitionist strategies embrace tactics that undermine the prison
system rather than feed it. There are many different approaches to abolition, some of which are
outlined in the classic “Instead of Prisons Handbook.”99 To highlight a few: Starve the system.
Abolition means starving the prison industrial complex to death—depriving it of financial
resources, human resources, access to fear-mongering, and other sustaining rhetoric.
100 Enacting a moratorium on prison expansion is one key strategy; this means
preventing governments and private companies from building any new prisons, jails, or
immigration detention spaces; prohibiting increases in police and prison budgets; and
boycotting companies that make a profit from imprisonment. Starving the prison system
means fighting new laws that increase prison time or create new criminal offenses (for example,
hate crimes laws and mandatory minimum sentences), and redirecting money and resources
into community-based alternatives. • Stop using cages. Prisons are just one of the many
cages that harm our communities. Racism, colonialism, capitalism, and ableism are other
kinds of cages, which both sustain the prison system and give it force. Dismantling the
prison industrial complex means working to eliminate all cages that foster violence and
oppression. Taking this broad approach is especially important when developing
alternatives, since some strategies (like electronic tagging or surveillance cameras)
simply replace old cages with new ones. Getting people out of cages and preventing
people from being put in those cages—even one person at a time—is a key abolitionist
strategy. • Develop effective alternatives. Dismantling the prison industrial complex is
impossible without developing alternative community protocols for addressing violence and
harm. Creating abolitionist alternatives means encouraging non-punitive responses to harm,
enacting community-based mechanisms of social accountability, and prioritizing prevention.
Such alternatives include restorative/ transformative justice initiatives, community-based
restitution projects, social and economic support networks, affordable housing, community
education projects, youth-led recreational programs, free accessible healthcare services,
empowerment-based mental health, addiction and harm reduction programs, quality
employment opportunities, anti-poverty measures, and support for self-determination
struggles.101 • Practice everyday abolition. Prison abolition is not simply an end goal but
also an everyday practice. Being abolitionist is about changing the ways we interact with
others on an ongoing basis and changing harmful patterns in our daily lives. Abolitionist
practice mean questioning punitive impulses in our intimate relationships, rethinking the
ways that we deal with personal conflicts, and reducing harms that occur in our homes,
workplaces, neighborhoods, and schools. In this way, “living abolition” is part of the
daily practice of creating a world without cages.
This is not a utopia; this is utopia’s antithesis. The prison industrial
complex is striving to ‘perfect’ civil society; we are taking the future
hostage. Liberation can only be found if time is rewound; freedom can only
exist with a reset button. Status quo alternatives are rejected due to the
impossibility of our demands – to this, we respond with a insatiable
demand for destruction
Stanley, 11 – Ph.D. in History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz, UC President's
Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSD (Edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, Captive Genders: Trans
Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, AK Press)//X
This stuff is heavy, we realize. Our communities and our movements are up against
tremendous odds and have inherited a great deal of trauma that we are still struggling to
deal with. A common and reasonable response to these conditions is getting
overwhelmed, feeling defeated, losing hope. In this kind of emotional and political
climate, when activists call for deep change like prison abolition (or, gasp, an LGBT
agenda centered around prison abolition), our demands get called “ impossible ” or
“idealistic” or even “divisive.” As trans people, we’ve been hearing this for ages. After all,
according to our legal system, the media, science, and many of our families and
religions, we shouldn’t exist! Our ways of living and expressing ourselves break such
fundamental rules that systems crash at our feet, close their doors to us, and attempt to
wipe us out. And yet we exist, continuing to build and sustain new ways of looking at
gender, bodies, family, desire, resistance, and happiness that nourish us and challenge
expectations. In an age when thousands of people are murdered annually in the name of
“democracy,” millions of people are locked up to “protect public safety,” and LGBT
organizations march hand in hand with cops in Pride parades, being impossible may just
be the best thing we’ve got going for ourselves: Impossibility may very well be our only
possibility. What would it mean to embrace, rather than shy away from, the impossibility
of our ways of living as well as our political visions? What would it mean to desire a
future that we can’t even imagine but that we are told couldn’t ever exist? We see the
abolition of policing, prisons, jails, and detention not strictly as a narrow answer to
“imprisonment” and the abuses that occur within prisons, but also as a challenge to the
rule of poverty, violence, racism, alienation, and disconnection that we face every day.
Abolition is not just about closing the doors to violent institutions, but also about building up and
recovering institutions and practices and relationships that nurture wholeness, selfdetermination, and transformation. Abolition is not some distant future but something we
create in every moment when we say no to the traps of empire and yes to the
nourishing possibilities dreamed of and practiced by our ancestors and friends. Every
time we insist on accessible and affirming healthcare, safe and quality education, meaningful
and secure employment, loving and healing relationships, and being our full and whole selves,
we are doing abolition. Abolition is about breaking down things that oppress and building
up things that nourish. Abolition is the practice of transformation in the here and now
and the ever after. Maybe wrestling with such a significant demand is the wake-up call
that an increasingly sleepy LGBT movement needs. The true potential of queer and trans
politics cannot be found in attempting to reinforce our tenuous right to exist by undermining
someone else’s. If it is not clear already, we are all in this together. To claim our legacy of
beautiful impossibility is to begin practicing ways of being with one another and making
movement that sustain all life on this planet, without exception . It is to begin speaking
what we have not yet had the words to wish for.
This is not a peaceful sign holding protest, this is a revolt against totality.
Queer Ultraviolence writes that
(Queer Ultraviolence, pg 256) **** Queer Ultraviolence has an open copy right
Some will read "queer" as synonymous with "gay and lesbian" or "LGB1". This reading falls
short. While those who would fit within the constructions of "L", "B" or "T" could fall within the
discursive limits of queer, queer is not a stable area to inhabit. Queer is not merely another
identity that can be tacked onto a list of neat social categories, nor the quantitative sum
of our identities. Rather, it is the qualitative position of opposition to presentations of
stability-an identity that problematizes the manageable limits of identity. Queer is a
territory of tension, defined against the dominant narrative of white- heteromonogamous-patriarchy, but also by an affinity with all who are marginalized, otherized
and oppressed. Queer is the abnormal, the strange, the dangerous. Queer involves our
sexuality and our gender, but so much more. It is our desire and fantasies and more still.
Queer is the cohesion of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world.
Queer is a total rejection of the regime of the Normal. As queers we understand
Normalcy. Normal, is the tyranny of our condition; reproduced in all of our relationships.
Normalcy is violently reiterated in every minute of every day. We understand this
Normalcy as the Totality. The Totality being the interconnection and overlapping of all
oppression and misery. The Totality is the state. It is capitalism. It is civilization and
empire. The totality is fence-post crucifixion. It is rape and murder at the hands of police.
It is "Str8 Acting" and "No Fatties or Femmes". It is Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It is
the brutal lessons taught to those who can't achieve Normal. It is every way we've limited
ourselves or learned to hate our bodies. We understand Normalcy all too well. when we
speak of social war, we do so because purist class analysis is not enough for us. What
does a marxist economic worldview mean to a survivor of bashing? To a sex worker? To
a homeless, teenage runaway? How can class analysis, alone as paradigm for a
revolution, promise liberation to those of us journeying beyond our assigned genders
and sexualities? The Proletariat as revolutionary subject marginalizes all whose lives
don't fit in the model of heterosexual- worker. Lenin and Marx have never fucked the
ways we have. We need something a bit more thorough-something equipped to come
with teeth-gnashing to all the intricacies of our misery. Simply put, we want to make
ruins of domination in all of its varied and interlacing forms. This struggle inhabiting
every social relationship is what we know as social war. It is both the process and the
condition of a conflict with this totality. In the discourse of queer, we are talking about a
space of struggle against this totality—against normalcy. By "queer", we mean "social war".
And when we speak of queer as a conflict with all domination we mean it. deviant, the
constitutional psychopathic inferior, the traitor, the freak, the moral imbecile. We've been
excluded at the border, from labor from familial ties. We've been forced into concentration
camps, into sex slavery, into prisons.