Criminal InJustice Kos: Getting Past the Prison

Criminal InJustice Kos every Wednesday at 6 pm CST

GETTING PAST THE PRISON
by soothsayer99

Each week, as the mission statement notes, Criminal InJustice Kos explores, " the myths of "crime", "criminals", and criminal justice and the intersection of race/ethnicity/class/gender/sexuality/age/disability in policing and punishment', and advocate "action towards reducing inequity in the US criminal justice system."

There is no shortage of topics that can and have been covered here, and their exposition leads always to this conclusion: the U.S. criminal justice system is foundationally raced, classed and gendered; it is a perpetrator of systemic and structural violence that demonizes and dehumanizes select "others" who are reduced to nothing but their crimes. The prison industrial complex in particular is a profit-driven criminal enterprise unto itself that is beyond mere reform.

It must be abolished.

To speak of abolition --of the prison and of our flawed justice system -- seems fantastical, outrageous, extreme..

It seems impossible in a world where we are endlessly regaled with a parade of fear-inducing media accounts of crime, criminals, law and order, and the routinization of the prison as the only option.

Of course, the prison is but one choice of many -- and both the most costly and ineffective.

Tonight we explore those alternatives to incarceration...