#anticarceral

[livingdeathdiary]

We aren't meant to live like this.

I mean, in my case specifically no one is meant to live

In 1 room for years

Without sunlight

Without fresh air

Without movement

Without socialization

Without freedom

For me this is unavoidable. Solitary confinement is the price of life with this disease.

But there are so many other people, living lives that no one should have to live. Not because their bodies force them but because our society does.

We are meant to have access to nature. To belong to the world and to our communities. To be apart of something bigger.

Please, if you are free, help end severe ME. But also help fight for the freedom of everyone facing criminal, medical, or psychiatric incarceration.

#abolition #solarpunk

[neuroticboyfriend]

/gen question, what do we do when somebody is actually, genuinely, a threat to the lives of others? I'm figuring out anti-psych and anti-incarceration views, but I haven't seen anybody answer this :0

i dont know tbh, unfortunately i havent reached that part of antipsych/carceral stuff yet. i'd like to learn though. if anyone has any resources or thoughts feel free to share <3

[brujacopal]

the psychotic drowns where the mystic swims. my head ducked under water today, but i swim. i swim.

[trans-axolotl]

content note: discussion of suicide.

this next monday will be the six year anniversary of losing one of my friends to suicide.

when he died, my high school barely mentioned his death, even though for other students who died by things like car crashes or illness, there were so many public expressions of grief. they believed that having any memorials for a student who died by suicide would encourage other people to die the same way. in their rush to erase the circumstances of his death, they erased the memory of his life.

there are so many things i am angry at that high school about in terms of how they treated mental health (mandatory reporting and collaborating with cops, their refusal to recognize the ways in which that system led to peer-to-peer crisis support, their refusal to recognize the ways that trying to keep each other alive through trial and error was scary and exhausting, carceral disciplinary policies, etc etc etc). but i think one of the things i am still angriest about is the way they enforced shame around his death. it felt like they were retroactively blaming him for the constellation of circumstances that made suicide an option in his life. it felt like they were blaming those of us who missed him and cared about him and wanted to grieve him. it made those of us still there who were actively suicidal feel even more scared about the reaction if we did reach out for help from one of those mythical safe adults.

as an adult now involved in psych abolition/mad liberation work, it makes me so fucking mad to see the ways in which he was discarded by people in authority positions. and the older i get, the more options i have found in my life for making sense of the world and finding healing and community and support which were never available to him because he died when he was 16 and the only things offered to him were a carceral psychiatric system that blamed him for his own fucking death. it feels so incredibly unfair.

i miss him and i think i always will; i can't remember his laugh or the sound of his voice or his favorite color any more and that aches. this grief is so heavy and it feels harder in a new way each year, when i become older than he will ever be. sometimes meeting new comrades or seeing new anticarceral suicide support models hurts because i wish so fucking bad that we had that back then. i remember how close we came to losing even more people that year and i know it is simple fucking luck that i'm still here when he's not.

i remember another letter (never sent) that i wrote to a friend while they were in an ICU bed after a suicide attempt when i didn't know if they would live or not. i have spent so much time in the past 10 years begging for anything to keep me and my friends alive, but even in that letter i knew that there is so much fucking violence that is hidden beneath psychiatric logics of cure and safety that promise a "solution" to suicide. I knew that institutionalization, coercion, and shame would not have helped build a life more liveable for him or **** or any of the people i've loved and lost since.

there needs to be more fucking options for care and support that aren't so incredibly cruel to suicidal people. i know so many people doing incredible work in alternatives, peer respite, a million different frameworks for healing and liberation. but it makes me so mad every day i have to live in a world where there are still people restrained, locked up in psych wards, having all autonomy and personhood taken away from them. knowing there are dozens of people every day getting blamed for their deaths the same way he was blamed for his.

i miss him. i cared so fucking much for him. and he died by suicide, and all of those things are true. he has been dead for 6 years and he lived before that and the people who loved him want to remember all of him; our celebrations of his life should not require hiding the way that he died.

Image description: [1000 origami cranes in all different colors and patterns that are tied together in strings of 25]

(these were the 1000 cranes we made to give to his parents, in memorial and recognition of how much he meant to us.)

[loving-n0t-heyting]

"The US mass incarcerates its population just to extract free labour and income!" is partly bothersome bc it is 1) false and b) obviously trying to squeeze a round peg thru the crass socialist square hole of "the state and capitalism are the same and they just want more money" irrespective of the facts but this is also true of eg "they are bombing gaza for natural gas" which grates on me less

I think what really bothers me about it is the way it can basically function as cope for leftists/liberals who want to embrace anticarceralism but cannot actually reconcile themselves to the fact that being a bad person who commits crimes that seriously hurt ppl does not render them into a permanent moral black hole for revenge and suffering. Similarly to deceptions about most prisoners being drug and/or nonviolent offenders. Which is evidently smth a lot of ppl on the left struggle with themselves, which becomes particularly vivid once they are confronted with criminals they are under no or negative pressure to deny "deserve it"

[librarycards]

top 5 anti psychiatry anything/anyone (texts, art work, activists)

So, my favorite antipsych texts, etc. aren't strictly antipsych - they're more often broadly disability liberation / anticarceral / radical autonomy - oriented with distinct acknowledgement of the struggle against psych. violence. That is reflected in this list, which is also by no means exhaustive of all my faves!

Atmospheres of Violence by Eric Stanley and The Terrible We by Cameron Awkward-Rich (I consider these to be spiritual companions!)

Nice Lady Therapists by Rabbi Ruti Regan.

Mel Baggs's blogs, especially Ballastexistenz and Cussin' and Discussin'.

Dave Hingsburger, Burritos and Cherry Pies.

The mostly-defunct tag on here, #survivingpsych - at its most popular, it proved life-saving for me and for others seeking to, well. survive psych.

[sivavakkiyar]

Wait, let’s cut to the chase, right? This site loves ‘let’s lynch someone if they make sound in public in a way we’ve decided is wrong, also we’re very anticarceral’ I mean come on

[noisytenant]

"hot allostatic load" is very much a work worth reading and discussing, and it's shameful how the harrowing experiences described can be found unchanged these 9 years later. it highlights so many intersecting dynamics and consequences of the transmisogyny, ableism, and racism that are perpetuated within ostensibly "inclusive" spaces.

that being said, i feel like it still kind of reifies the victim/aggressor dichotomy and maintains "abuser" as a meaningful ontological class of malicious actors, and i'm skeptical of that part of the argument.

mostly i feel like messaging is mixed; between nominal challenges to the moral hierarchy and innocence/guilt paradigm, there are a number of lines that assert the innocence and good intent of victims, while taking as fact the malice and wanton destruction of aggressors.

lines like "abusers don't spend years disabled by those thoughts [of being sociopathic, crazy, or abusive] because they don't care if they hurt other people" have me raising my eyebrows. i feel that this line of thinking leaps over all of the little social and mental tricks that enable abuse--the minimization of consequences, the willful and selective ignorance of power dynamics, the magical thinking of intent trumping impact.

it has been my experience that a great deal of abusive individuals think they care deeply about hurting others, and do at times ruminate about the morality of their actions, but inevitably fall back on various justifications to maintain their behavior. i worry that the reassurance, essentially, "an abusive person wouldn't worry about being abusive" can terminate necessary reflection and growth.

it is an important part of the healing process to first realize that it wasn't all your fault, and that you are not uniquely evil or irredeemable. but i think it's an important part of being a political actor to challenge framing issues in terms of blame and ontological badness entirely. sometimes you are the one who fucked up, badly, and the question of handling that situation is fundamental to anticarceral politics.

the essay seems to believe in a type of genuinely "bad person", but it offers little in the way of how to identify them and what to do about them. how does one distinguish confused and righteous people from "pathological liars"? how does one distinguish the airing of personal grievances privately and without a major callout from the weaponization of whisper networks and silent ostracization? what punishments would be appropriate for the "bad people" who avoid them through privilege? if someone fucks up, what does it look like for them to actually atone and change things for the better?

i agree with the concluding sentiment that "there is no kind of justice that resembles hundreds of people ganging up on one person, or tangible lifelong damage being inflicted on someone for failing the rituals of purification that have no connection to real life". we should carefully consider what tools and methods we use in a quest for a more just world, because some of them have grave consequences. but this alone feels imprecise when paired with the whole of the article's wobbly stance on victimhood and abuse, and general lack of suggestions for how marginalized people can be heard and believed.

i guess my feeling is that i'd like to view the piece as a snapshot of this kind of abuse and its effects on all levels, but i personally think many of the core arguments are better discussed elsewhere. it just isn't very precise and honed, and i think a sharp argument is required to cut through the muck of cognitive dissonance and self-justification that perpetuate the abuses we're trying to stop.

anyways, that's just my two cents. hope it resonates with others; if you see the article differently, i'd love to hear a different perspective on it too. i worry if i'm misreading somehow, or overly critical due to unexamined bias. but i can't really know if that's the case if i don't share my thoughts with anyone else. so, here i am with my thoughts. Heart

[gatheringbones]

[“Through intense negotiation over the course of several months, organizers hashed out an extensive list of principles, positions, and demands that was subsequently endorsed by sixty-nine progressive and radical organizations. In it, they outlined their reasons for emphasizing community accountability and censure over “criminal justice solutions,” declaring that “the majority of men who rape or batter are not arrested,” those who do get “convicted serve time in prison where violence is constantly reinforced,” and those who serve time are eventually released back into a “society which condones and even fosters violence against women.”

In the final analysis, they argued, the criminal justice system manifests the racial, economic, and gender inequality of society as a whole, making an investment in criminal justice remedies misguided and dangerous. Marshaling examples such as uneven access to quality legal representation and racial disproportionality in capital punishment, the group argued that criminal-justice racism could not be separated from sexual and domestic violence. Rejecting a carceral approach to male violence, the document proclaimed: “We seek to increase women’s mobility and freedom of movement without relying on the criminal justice system to restrict men’s freedom of movement.” Only through genuine “re-education” could men’s violent behavior be transformed.

Despite the group’s centrally stated desire for the march to “take emphasis away from the police and criminal justice systems,” however, when it came to formulating immediate demands on the city, the focus and onus boomeranged back to criminal legal approaches. Calls for sensitivity training of criminal justice officials, crime victim compensation, more police foot patrols, and more women and people of color on the police force sat awkwardly alongside the organizers’ anticarceral stance. The document thus betrays the difficulty activists faced in identifying tangible methods of violence intervention and prevention that did not inadvertently reproduce an ideology that preventing violence against women was principally a matter of crime control.

[…] Implicit in the argument for reeducation was an understanding of rape and battering as fundamentally social problems, rather than the results of individual pathology. During the workshop entitled “Working with Men Committing Violence,” center staff discussed their long-standing relationship with Prisoners Against Rape (PAR), a black prisoner–led organization inside Lorton Reformatory, which was operated by the Washington, D.C., Department of Corrections in nearby Fairfax County, Virginia. William Fuller and Larry Cannon, both self-described former rapists, founded the group in 1973. In an essay published in FAAR News that year, the men declared that their “project was fundamentally concerned with attacking the historical, political, social, and economic ingredients” of a culture of rape that is “ingrained into the masses from the cradle.”

Fuller participated in the workshop by proxy, sending a short essay to be read by his colleagues. In it, he explained that his involvement in prisoner organizing in the early 1970s led him to recognize the “anti-social” nature of the violence he had committed “both in the street and prison.” A “reformed violent and aggressive individual,” Fuller and other members of PAR sought to produce their own model of rehabilitation, based on “liberating and educating counseling” led by people who are “politically conscious of the oppressive practices of our society and how it influences the behavior of its people.” He urged the workshop attendees to recognize the possibilities of men’s expanded participation in antirape organizing, with the caveat that “women be in the majority of any decision-making process.” This view had led him to contact the RCC several years earlier to request collaboration.

Center staff made regular trips to Lorton to participate in a study group with PAR, packing in copies of feminist reading material. Although Ross remembers that her organization was initially ambivalent about working directly with men who had been convicted of rape, unsure whether the prisoners were sincere in their motives or if time spent with PAR would be a misuse of their finite organizational capacity to serve survivors, the RCC-PAR alliance became a point of pride as well as an influential dimension of the center’s activity. Ironically formed inside of, and in spite of, a prison environment, the study group represented the potential of radical political education-based interventions. Discussions with PAR about the prevalence of rape perpetrated by both guards and prisoners inside the men’s facility at Lorton informed the RCC activists’ critique of the prison system as an inherently violent institution that only extends the use of rape as a weapon of domination.”]

emily l. thuma, from all our trials: prisons, policing, and the feminist fight to end violence, 2019

[newvegasdyke]

In college I was on the take back then night event planning committee and one meeting when we were planning the practical details like ordering and setting things up the only man in the group brought in a speaker about anticarceral justice. So she was telling us how it’s harmful to want rapists in prison while we were trying to like order sandwiches and rent folding chairs. Absolutely ridiculous experience looking back but at the time I was just frustrated

[pentimint]

it is critical for Any kind of PIC abolition discussion to of course note that false incarcerations are disgustingly high and that the numbers reveal the inherent bigotries of the culture we live in but your first question to ask yourself is what about the people who Did do what they were accused of. what about the people who were not falsely accused. does your anticarceral theory include them or are you going to use a strainer like some kind of democrat

[ffxiiiapologist]

White people using a veneer of anticarceral/antipunitive theory to badger and shout down people of color talking about ongoing grave events exhibit 35534640535

[myrfing]

suppose i do fundamentally believe that some people are better off dead and that i don’t really have to gaf about people who abuse their power to indulge in harm. maybe i reconcile that with my anticarceral beliefs. and perhaps i will recognize my way of thinking leaves faultlines where I can come to abandon people i need or inflict injust pain as to never soley rely on theeee purity of theory when it comes to judging myself and others, which I believe is not something that can be perpetually contained or scrubbed out of people as long as we have a concept of right and wrong. and I will be able to get up and eat a meal today

[lesbianboyfriend]

Clifton—pardon me; the speaker— is calling on us to help her carry them. Which always implies, or maybe the more accurate word is enacts, the opposite: and won't you let me carry yours? She is inviting us to belong to something beyond ourselves: she is inviting us, invoking us, to belong to one another.

It is the refusal to belong to one another, just look around, that we must survive. Or more accurately, we survive this refusal and its manifestations if we are lucky. Family violence. State violence. Ecological violence. The Book of Light is made in no small part of such sorrows, such devastations. It is in no small part a meditation on the ways we brutalize one another-by one another I mean other people, yes, but I also mean the nonhuman animals, the land, the earth, the ancestors past and future. I will go out on a limb and say each brutality is evidence of our failure to be held by one another. Each brutality evidence of our being alienated from one another, the mechanisms for which alienation are sophisticated and robust and mutable and seductive, sometimes, as hell.

Just look around. We love to imagine a garden and whom we can put out of it. We even dreamed up a God who could show us how. It's what (Ms.) Lucille, in the voice of Lucifer, calls "the excommunication of / that world." We are all susceptible to putting one another out of the garden—we're all susceptible to being awful, I mean—and Clifton shines her sturdy light on that too. Which, good lord, we need. And which is perhaps at least part of why she is as anticarceral a writer as I've ever read.

There is an alternative to excommunication, or our sometimes dogged dis-belonging to one another, as Lucifer through Clifton also says: "to feel the living move in me / and to be unafraid." In addition to sounding something like belonging to one another and being epigenetic to boot—feeling the living move inside of us, and tending to them, and listening to them, and sorrowing them, and celebrating them, and joining what is also, isn't it, a transcendent, collective knowing—these lines also sound to me, if we're able to hear them, or be drawn to them, again, something like joy.

Ross Gay, in the foreword to Lucille Clifton’s The Book of Light

[trans-axolotl]

in psych abolition news for the week:

Wildflower Alliance is having a free event on Monday, January 22rd, 2023 from 2-4pm EST called 988: Is it helping more than Hurting?

"988 has been promoted as our nation’s answer to access issues for crisis support. But, is 988 helping more than hurting? Is geolocation being used and if yes, how and when? How has 988 impacted use of force? Are 988 operators trained properly to talk about issues like self-injury? What information is and isn’t being shared transparently? Join us to learn more about these points and more!"

Jess Stohlmann-Rainey, Emily Wu Truong, and Rob Wipond will be speaking.

I'm really excited about it--you all know how much I hate 988, and the lack of data on it frustrates me so fucking much. So I'm excited to see what work some other anticarceral mental health activists have been doing around 988!

the sign up link is here!

[lunefrog]

lunefrog I am tattooing your post about anticarceral beliefs vs. vengeful nature on my heart. thank you for summing up what is not only a core conflict of mine but also i think is what proves that one really does believe in an anticarceral world

SO REAL!!

i also misread this at first and thought you were getting my post tattooed for real. glad you arent doing that as funny as thatd be