The writer Freddie DeBoer is understandably skeptical of “defund the police” and “abolish prisons.” In a blog post Friday, DeBoer points out that Trump’s indictment once again unmasks the limits of these ideas.
There’s a lot to be skeptical about. “Defund” was a terrible slogan. Like a bad joke, you had to explain it. On top of that, no one could really explain it in a way that would resonate with a normal person concerned about crime.
Since our idiotic media promote the most extreme views, they highlighted a few people who got a little weird and wrote stuff suggesting that humans would stop doing crime if we got rid of police and invested in more after-school programs and social workers or whatever.
Then, the New York Times headlined an Op-Ed, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” and the movement’s image as a call for anarchy and crime was cemented. I think that’s when we lost the soccer moms.
DeBoer, I think quite humorously, chides lefties who cling to these ideas, noting that incidents like the Trump indictment show the need for a “constabulary force”:
Trump has been indicted. There is joy in the land. And, once again, people who chanted “defund the police” a few years ago discover uses for the police after all.
There are, no doubt, those who will immediately insist that this comparison is faulty and that it’s totally possible to be a radical police and prison abolitionist and support this prosecution and the prosecution and imprisonment of various white-collar criminals…. And there’s also no doubt that these arguments would fall apart under absolutely minimal pushback and questioning. They always do. I published this piece awhile back. The challenge stands: I am waiting for someone to tell me what the radical left approach to law and order adds up to, these days, other than an injunction against ever calling the cops for anything and people screaming on Twitter that it’s fine if you smoke meth in a crowded elevator. No one has taken me up on the offer to explain how any of this works. Because none of it works, and it’s not clear if it was ever intended to work as an actionable set of proposals. It’s all pose, all fashion. Three years after “defund the police” became a ubiquitous slogan in left spaces, nobody knows what it means, nobody feels any pressure to figure that out, but everyone is still sure that if you expect any enforcement of basic order at all, you’re a fascist. Not ideal.
I’m down for the challenge! Before I get into it, this is not about current political reality but a vision of what abolish and defund could look like. Communism is not exactly around the corner either, but FdB identities as Marxist anyway. So here’s what I would do if I were to take power in a benign dictatorship (kidding!) and impose “defund” and “abolish” in the real world.
Prisons
In a sense, prisons in the U.S. have already been abolished. We don’t have jails and prisons: we have torture factories where people are starved, beaten, fed foul slop unfit for rats, and put in solitary for decades, which the UN defines as torture. A nation that treats political dissidents this way—say, for the sake of argument, Russia—is disparaged as Stalinist.
There aren’t many political prisoners in the US (except for the Jan 6 protesters. Kidding, gawd!) but that’s an arbitrary line. You don’t have to do too much logic-twisting to conclude that putting a teenager in a torture factory for many years, decades, or life, is the ultimate abuse of power, e.g. it’s political, and as reflective of our sick priorities and ideologies as Alexei Navalny’s solitary confinement.
Norway has prisons instead of torture factories. The deterrence factor is the deprivation of freedom. There’s no reason to add torture to the mix. We’re so used to our torture factories that even liberals might scoff at “luxury” prisons. But freedom is, like health and love, the most important thing. I’ve read accounts by and interviewed Gulag survivors and they talk about the beatings, and the awful food, and the torture, but they also just recount the feeling of losing their freedom and not knowing when they would get it back. A pharmacist named Liliana Pirinchieva was ripped from her young daughter and spent years in a Gulag after she criticized the Bulgarian regime in the 1940s. “Why does one realize that freedom is the most valuable good only when they lose it?” she wondered, in her memoir, writing about her experience at age 78.
When you talk to inmates in the US, yes, they complain about conditions but you can really feel their hearts breaking because they can’t do things free people can do, such as raise their children.
Anyway, I probably didn’t need 1,000 words to say that a gilded cage is still a cage. Star Trek already did that.
A “luxury prison” is still a prison. Losing your freedom is a terrifying prospect, even if you get yoga classes when you’re in there, as Norway prisons famously provide.
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