By Against the Grain Radio
If the problem is violence against women, is the solution the criminal justice system? Many anti-violence activists look to the police, prisons, and stepped-up criminalization for help and protection. Beth Richie says that's a misguided approach, one that feeds the buildup of the prison nation. Richie describes the contours of the prison nation and the threats it poses to women on the margins.
Beth Richie is a professor of Criminal Justice and Gender and Womens Studies at the University of Illinois, and a leader in the movement to abolish prisons and roll back the prison state.
Colonized people, with a horrific historical connection to both science and medicine in this country, must examine science in service of the state.
The penal system remains a source of diseases that spread among prisoners at rates far exceeding those in the communities from which they came.
The necessary political demand is not that we make better, more humane prisons and jails, but that we abolish prisons and jails altogether.
This is a book about the ideological construction of black women as “non-human” and exploitable for capitalist profit in the making of the New South.
What could possibly be a more effective way to seal borders, discourage protest, and position the United States into perfect alignment for WWIII?
