Prison by Any Other Name The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms

a comprehensive but surface-level overview of the various factions of the widening prison complex. it got super repetitive though

3.5 stars “What are the dangers of perfecting a system that was designed to target marginalized people? Reforms that supposedly improve the current system run the risk of entrenching dangerous, violent, racist, classist, ableist, oppressive institutions—making them even harder to uproot. When captivity is perceived as kinder and gentler, it becomes more acceptable and less of an urgent priority to confront, even though it continues to destroy countless lives.” “For most of us, there is no rehabilitation; that idea assumes you were on a ‘right’ path to begin with, and you got off of it,” Sanchez says. “For most of us, we need ‘habilitation.’” Habilitation would mean better housing, health care, mental health care, childcare, jobs, educational opportunities—all resources that are, in many senses, the opposite of house arrest and monitoring.” “Lawmakers and advocates set noble goals—goals of sending the populations of prisons and jails to somewhere better, somewhere kinder, Somewhere Else. The list of Somewhere Elses grows longer—it incorporates treatments, rehabilitations, sites of “recovery.” Meanwhile, the cycle of segregation and confinement continues to turn, capturing more and more human beings along its way.” “The cloud of carceral citizenship hangs over the whole range of court-mandated alternatives to incarceration, always reminding us that an “alternative” is fundamentally different from freedom.” “LeeAnn’s situation raises the issue, again, of whether real therapy can be mandated: whether forcing someone to “get help” is any kind of help at all. If it is not, should the criminal legal system, a system built on force, even pretend to provide help? Or would real care—the kind of care that leads to healing and transformation—necessitate a complete break from any system of coercion?” “Mandated psychiatric treatment often assumes a goal of suppressing or eliminating those different ways of being in the world. Yet the overall goal of mental health treatment must not be to end mental and psychological difference. Of course, it’s important to provide options for support and healing for those who seek them. But that’s a very different phenomenon from mandating that people with certain mental health differences undergo elimination-oriented treatment.” “The idea of “running the show” may seem daunting. Mass carceral systems reinforce the notion that we can’t take care of ourselves and each other—that we need an authoritative system of control and punishment looming over our communities to be safe and secure. State punishment systems, and their all-powerful authority, may cause us to doubt our own ability to address our problems. In reality, however, we all have internal resources (and, if we work together with our communities, external resources) that we can bring to bear in times of crisis. People have been solving all kinds of problems for millennia without the prison industrial complex.”