The False Promise of Criminal Justice Reform
The Nation, January 5, 2022: The False Promise of Criminal Justice Reform
“The movement to abolish prisons and policing in the United States was not born last spring. But after the uprisings against racist police violence that erupted across the nation in 2020, abolitionist ideas have never been more widespread, whether in the pages of previously dismissive and hostile periodicals or in the average citizen’s social media feed. That a majority of Americans believed that protesters were justified in burning down a Minneapolis police station after the murder of George Floyd offered a striking confirmation of this sea change. More concretely, a 2020 report from Interrupting Criminalization concluded that organizing in almost two dozen cities resulted in the divestment of over $840 million from police departments and a reinvestment of nearly $160 million back into communities, along with a number of victories in removing police from schools, banning military-grade weapons or facial-recognition software, and achieving greater transparency and community control over local police budgets.
“…Unfortunately, as Kay Whitlock and Nancy Heitzeg make clear in their new book, Carceral Con, the ‘misleading and false’ promise of criminal justice reform is nothing new. Reform is not, as some might think, a well-intentioned, compromise-oriented approach to social change. Rather, criminal justice reform must be understood as an industry: a powerful, highly resourced, and bipartisan form of political counterinsurgency meant to stifle, contain, and repress demands for police and prison abolition. By failing to address, or sometimes even to acknowledge, the racialized logic and exploitative system that undergirds American criminal punishment, these reform agendas barely scratch the surface of—and often only help to intensify—the carceral state’s harms.”
Additional reading:
Carceral Con: The Deceptive Terrain of Criminal Justice Reform on bookshop.org
Left Anchor Podcast: Episode 215 - Carceral Con with Kay Whitlock and Nancy A. Heitzeg
Inquest, August 2, 2021: Unraveling Carceral Reach
