To learn more on prison abolition, I recommend Abolition Journal and Prison Culture as great resources.
Tiny population of sex offenders? Hmmm not really!
Compared to the rest of the population yeah. There’s not nearly as many rapists and pedophiles in prison as there are people with addiction problems and people that are homeless/impoverished. I WISH prisons were filled with violent people but they’re simply not.
I meant that in the world there is not a tiny population of sex offenders like the op is implying, there is a massive population of sex offenders/rapists/pedophiles and they all need to either be in prison or dead, as currently rapists are never held accountable for their crimes.
Hmmm, I apologize if what I said was insensitive. This issue is incredibly difficult to discuss when faced with the trauma of sexual violence, and I want to acknowledge that. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I’ve understood sexual violence, especially against women and non-normative genders, as a function of heteropatriarchy. And while this is rampant (not a small number, as you point out), prison culture is usually hyper-patriarchal and reinforces sexual violence. This sexual violence is often prisoner on prisoner, but it is also frequently the cager violating the caged. This in mind, it is unclear to me how imprisoning offenders helps us dismantle heteropatriarchy. Rather, it reinforces it. I think also we should be careful not to see prison abolition as the total rejection of community mandated restraint where it becomes necessary in the interim of developing processes of restorative justice. It becomes necessary for us to scrutinize the idea of accountability as always punishment. If we are not intentional in how we frame this conversation “What about serial killers” rapidly becomes “What about sex offenders.” As far as capital punishment is concerned, I draw a very distinctive line between communities electing to use it after restorative alternatives fail and the state wielding it as another form of repression.
We don’t have to have prisons to have a way to remove dangerous people from the community, like we can do something focused either on community safety, or rehabilitation without the frankly inefficient penal element.
Like quarantine for dangerous infectious diseases is a thing we do, it’s not a punishment, it’s just a measure to protect people, same with the solution for serial killers.
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 