[Gary Cziko 930813.2130 UTC]
Rick Marken (930813.1130) asked:
Was there anything in particular in Pepinsky's ASCII that you
were interested in?
I find lots of it interesting, as well as Bill Power's reactions.
Obviously you didn't, but that's OK.
But since you have remarked a number of times on the net that you don't see
tougher law enforcement and prison sentences as solutions to the crime
problem, maybe you will find the following of interest from Pepinsky and a
colleague.
I was surprised to find that there is a large group of individuals (among
them Pepinsky) pushing for penal abolition. He had just attended such a
meeting in Costa Rica before I met him. Sounds crazy, doesn't it, that a
society could function without prisons. But the notion of behavior
controlling perception also sounds crazy at first, as well.
By the way, can't you keep this %@&$% net running?
I do the best I can. But it's hard being BOTH CSGnet God and
Vice-President of the CSG (sometimes I get downright dizzy thinking about
all the power I have now accumulated).--Gary
···
==============================================================
[from MacLean & Pepinsky]
Here, to show you what's in the volume, is the preface to:
WE WHO WOULD TAKE NO PRISONERS:
Selections from the Fifth International Conference
on Penal Abolition, Bloomington, Indiana, USA, May 22-25, 1991
edited by Brian D. MacLean and Harold E. Pepinsky
Last call for advance orders at US/Can$12.95 (128 pp. paperback, reg.
price $14.95), to The Collective Press; Box 46108, Station G; Vancouver,
B.C. V6R 4C5 CANADA. The book is at the printer and orders should be in
the mail within about three weeks. Brian has made a few final changes in
the twice-edited and revised text below Hal sent him last. The preface
gives you an idea of whether you will find anything of personal interest
in the text, and allows those who might use the book in class this fall
(or spring to you in the South) to plan for it. All proceeds from the
book go directly to a trust fund established by Ruth Morris for penal
abolition conferences, primarily to support participation by ex-prisoners
and others who otherwise could not afford to join us. Brian and Hal
calculate that advance orders have already paid the expense of the first
printing, thanks.
PREFACE
We are among the pacifists of criminal justice. International Conferences
on Penal Abolition (ICOPA) are not an organization; all we do is pass the
conference from one set of hands to another. ICOPA conferences are a
channel through which those who dare to explore options to punishing
criminals extend their awareness of one another. When there seems so
little place for our views in public opinion as media portrayed, in the
texts we teach from, or in our scholarly journals, ICOPA helps to provide
that space. Every ICOPA extends the personal knowledge of its
participants. The knowledge they impart (as, for example, through this
volume) is that penal abolition is a pervasive, active, innovative force
inside prison and out, worldwide.
ICOPA V was held in Bloomington, Indiana. The first of these biennial
conferences to be held in the United States _ May 22-25, 1991, ICOPA V was
sponsored by the Department of Criminal Justice at Indiana University. A
total of 150 registered participants were hosted from as far east as St.
Petersburg; as far south as San Jose, Costa Rica; as far west as the
eastern Pacific rim; and a large contingent of steadfast Native and
Canadian abolitionists attended from the north. As many as half of our
participants were subsidized by individual private donations to help focus
our attention on the criminal justice plight of peoples of color. These
included a delegation from the National Interreligious Task Force on
Criminal Justice, and a group of native North Americans _ elder, Art
Solomon; spiritual advisers, OohwahNah Chasing Bear, and Lennie Foster;
and a number of ex-prisoners actively supporting sisters and brothers in
prison, notably in the struggle to worship in their traditional ways
inside prison walls. Art opened and OohwahNah closed the conference with
their prayers.
Previous ICOPA conferences have been held in Toronto, Amsterdam,
Montreal, and Kazimierz Dolny, Poland. Two years after ICOPA V, ICOPA VI,
hosted by Deputy Director, Elias Carranza, and his United Nations Latin
American Institute for Crime Prevention and Treatment of Criminality, was
held at the Justice Building in San Jose, Costa Rica, June 2-5. There
were 200 participants, largely an imaginative and active new-to-us group
of Latin Americans. We were also joined by a substantial group from New
Zealand committed to organizing ICOPA conferences in that region. Elias
Carranza plans to publish papers from ICOPA VI (contact him c/o ILANUD,
Apartado 10071-1000, San Jose, COSTA RICA for information).
ICOPA VII will be held late May 1995 in Barcelona, Spain (contact Teresa
Sanchez Concheiro, Abogada, Barcelona, SPAIN C/Aragon 321.4*). This
location was chosen by consensus in San Jose as has become customary at
the closing town meeting of each ICOPA.
ICOPA has also become a channel for introducing our movement to new
audiences. This volume is such an effort.
Chapter 1 introduces penal abolition as it is seen by those who are
interested in talking with penal abolitionists but aren't ready to be
ones. Jim Thomas has been involved in prison research and reform since
1980; Sharon Boehlefeld is a journalist; they collaborated on this book
review while she was finishing her M.A. in the sociology department at
Northern Illinois University where Jim teaches. The book they review is
the major publication inspired by ICOPA III in Montreal in 1987. Willem
de Haan was active in the first three ICOPAs.
At every conference as in this volume, the most avowed abolitionists
among us welcome dialogue with skeptics who are not willing to give up on
the idea that we need prisons to be safe. We accept responsibility for
trying to translate our faith in restorative justice into terms
theoretically and practically acceptable to skeptics. But we who would
take no prisoners have long since learned that the acceptability of
abolitionism rests on a ground of discourse beyond the categories into
which skeptics would stereotype us and deny the wholeness of what we say.
Is Fay Honey Knopp in chapter 4 merely a social critic/sociologist? She
calls herself a Quaker feminist abolitionist. Her spiritual commitment
drives her practical quest to invent and evaluate alternatives to prison;
her approach--offering programmatic options to victims and offenders in
sexual violence cases--is eminently worldly and honestly inquisitive. Is
Mathiesen THE progenitor of contemporary abolitionism, or is he not
drawing on established traditions of thought and action (for example, he
credits Mao Zedong for inspiring him to think of abolitionism as an
unfinished revolution) and reflecting a broad course of evolution in
abolitionism as Ari Hirvonen characterizes him in chapter 7? And when
abolitionists speak with or to outsiders, as de Haan does in the book
Thomas and Boehlefeld review, we all struggle as Willem does to find the
magic word or concept that will be definitive for our readers. That
definition of who we are remains elusive, and inherently ambiguous because
of the individuality we abolitionists allow ourselves to express what the
term means and what we are doing about it.
Chapter 1 represents the sympathetic dialogue we abolitionists seek with
skeptics because, as Ari Hirvonen makes clear, there is strong consensus
among us that dialogue has a restorative power of its own to create
understanding of abolitionism precisely because we refuse to dictate terms
on which we discuss the subject with anyone. We recognize the truth in
the opening sentence of chapter 1: "Few people take prison abolitionists
seriously..." We face the reality that while we remain committed to
extending our network of inquiry into the potential for penal abolition,
we have no self-contained body of knowledge to represent fully in one
volume. Hal Pepinsky began the editorial process for the selections that
follow by boiling down about fifteen hours of transcripts from ICOPA V
sessions and approximately twenty papers into a manuscript. Brian
MacLean, who was not at ICOPA V, then took on the practical task of
selecting about half that material to create an affordable volume that we
could publish without another two-to-three-year delay. We have given up
any pretense of reporting on the conference as a whole. Many people who
have made major contributions at ICOPA V itself, let alone in and around
ICOPA conferences over the years, are not named in this volume including
Bob Thomas and Boehlefeld's and Frank Dunbaugh's opening and closing
histories of the ICOPA conferences. This volume should neither be treated
as a Who's Who of ICOPA V nor of the penal abolition movement. Rather, we
editors agree that this snapshot indicates both the depth and breadth of
ICOPA V. This volume especially taps the depth of concern for the urgent
tragedy of the US death penalty, and for the ubiquity of racism, a process
in which people of color are mistreated _ most revealingly in a quest to
wipe out the Native worship of an abolitionist Creator. As well, we aim
to convey the breadth of the cultural and occupational lives of penal
abolitionists. Academic overviews and reflections are provided; African
prisoner revolution is discussed; the importance of Native spiritual
support for abolitionism, both for people inside and outside prison, is
examined; ways to help heal the wounds of sexual violence are explored;
and legal change, political lobbying, and education receive attention. At
the same time, the chapters are but slices of the lives of their authors,
all of whom cross roles as theorists, educators, and activists somehow
working in penal-law trenches. The lives of abolitionists seem to
preclude occupational and intellectual specialization.
Chapter 2 provides some remarks made by opponents of the death penalty in
the host country. The United States is the only country in the world
which has returned to the death penalty. This decision was not made on
grounds of national emergency, but simply because judges changed their
minds and said 'you can do it if you want to.' The US government fails to
ratify the UN convention on the rights of children because they do not
want to prevent states from executing offenders under eighteen. Execution
is the only US criminal justice policy condemned as a human rights
violation in itself by Amnesty International a major international human
rights organization with whom Clare Regan(chapter 2) works.
Death penalty lawyers are as highly organized and mobilized as any public
interest law group in the United States. By appealing to the consciences
of lower-level trial and appellate judges, they have placed many serious
objections to the death penalty before the courts. Now even when these
lawyers introduce new evidence available subsequent to trial that clearly
exonerates the death-row prisoner, the courts claim that the prisoner must
die because 'it's too late, there are no excuses.' Thus the only reason
to tolerate the death penalty is because we do not allow ourselves to
accept any excuses for flimsy evidence. For example, as Clare Regan
describes him, the only thing that death-row prisoner Willie Darden has in
common with a murderer is that he was a Black man in the neighborhood.
Delbert Tibbs of the National Interreligious Task Force and the National
Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Bob Gross of the National
Coalition, and Clare attempt to force the US public to confront the
reality of capital punishment. We must progress beyond the mindless
susceptibility and the political exploitation of accepting the courts
logic of 'no excuses' for stopping the death-penalty machine.
In chapter 3, former prisoners speak to us. Actually, they are still
prisoners as they make clear. We will not have learned to (re)habilitate
prisoners until we can accept the prisoners who return to us. Some
prisoners are easily identified by their tattoos, with others it may take
a job application to make you aware of what they remain _ an
'ex-offender,' likely to recidivate, in a class apart from the rest. One
of the few 'legitimate' avenues to supporting oneself available in the
community to ex-prisoners is working in support of sisters and brothers
who remain locked away. That is the path taken by ex-prisoners Tony
Nieto, a Mescalero Apache; Lionel White Bird, a Plains Cree Indian; and
African US citizen, Achebe Lateef.
Whatever corrupts our relations outside corrupts most absolutely in
prisons, where, as Tony Nieto tells us, authorities refuse to accept
evidence that a prisoner has been murdered. (It happens regularly, just
ask the prisoners.) In the same way that our awareness of the realities
of Willie Darden and Delbert Tibbs reinforces our opposition to the death
penalty, our awareness of what prisoners know of prison conditions, and of
the frustration and suppression of many attempts to give voice to
prisoners, reinforces our opposition to imprisonment. What imprisonment
does to the keepers, frightens us as well.
In chapter 4, Fay Honey Knopp discusses one of the earliest texts in
abolitionism _ her 1976 book Instead of Prisons. As Ari Hirvonen
indicates in chapter 7, radical feminism has come to occupy a major
position in abolitionist thinking. In this context, a key premise of
radical feminism is that domination itself is the source of social misery
and injustice. The empowerment of people adversely affected by human
conflict is the only way to promote healing from that conflict without
compounding violence and its attendant pain. For over fifty years, Honey
Knopp has worked to prevent and redress sexual violence, perhaps today the
most politically sensitive and explosive areas of popular concerns with
'criminality.' She at once explains what we might do instead of punishing
our most repulsive offenders, and offers a more encompassing vision of
what abolitionist justice entails. She represents a large group of
abolitionists who place a high priority on confronting violence against
women and children; nonetheless, they reject punishing offenders as
impractical and immoral. Negative popular images of feminism often
portray feminists as demanding criminal justice solutions to the social
problem of gender inequity. Such 'solutions' might range from the
execution of rapists and abusers to their lengthy incarceration. In
addition to dispelling such myths, this chapter illustrates how feminist
thinking not only informs our abolitionist stance, but is central to it.
Chapter 5 exemplifies the many legal devices might be used to get people
off the prison track, and to avoid labeling each other 'criminal.' It
also illustrates that the design and evaluation of distinct legal
alternatives to treating conflicts as 'crimes' has been a particular focus
among long-standing European ICOPA participants. Implicit in Slump and
Emmen's report of the dading project is the influence of two Dutch law
professors _ Herman Bianchi and Louk Hulsman _ who, at ICOPA I, made our
capacity to put disputes into legal categories other than 'criminal' a
core theme of ICOPA discussion. At ICOPA V thistradition was placed
against one more prominent in North America _ an interfaith
religiousmovement to find ways to substitute 'Restorative Justice' for
criminal justice. Notable in that movement are the Canadian and US
Mennonite-inspired Victim Offender Reconciliation Programs (VORPs).
Different VORPs across North America and Europe channel disputes away from
all stages of criminal justice processing from pre-trial to
post-imprisonment. The North American variant on decriminalization of
disputes is more extra-legal than the dading variety, but the two
approaches share the decriminalization objective.
Chapter 6 got into this manuscript by mistake and was kept by choice.
Steve Russell is an enrolled Cherokee and member of the board of the Texas
Indian Bar Association, and in contrast to ex-prisoners Nieto and White
Bird, a judge in the Texas capital, Austin. When Steve sent Hal Pepinsky
a copy of his paper shortly after the conference, Hal confused him for
another Texan judicial participant at ICOPA V who had opened up to the
idea of abolition. By the time we discovered this mistake, we had already
decided that Steve's essay nicely represents another ICOPA reality _
criminal justice workers can be abolitionists too. The essay also
illustrates the unity underlying various abolitionist traditions. Russell
acknowledges that his sense of justice is guided by his Cherokee spiritual
heritage. Yet, that sense of (in)justice finds expression in the white
European thought of Michel Foucault. The power to criminalize rests in
the power to surreptitiously surveille, judge, and condemn people _ to
know what is best for an 'offender' because, in the process, we have
discovered something significant about the offender not known or
understood by him/her. Such is the premise of domination _ the keeper
knows better than the kept what justice demands of them both. North
American Native persons do not believe in having presidents and judges
because they do not believe that clandestine observation and judgment
facilitates any better of an understanding of someone than the
understanding that person has of her/himself. In order to establish trust
in the wake of conflict, conflicting parties must recognize that they
share knowledge of one another; violence inherently means having to accept
the world on the terms of someone whose terms are unquestionable.
In chapter 7, Finnish legal theorist, Ari Hirvonen, represents those of
us who try to place ourselves in broader social and academic movements,
and who try to express what underlying concern might be moving us
together. He also represents a benefit which comes from having
participants for whom the conference language is a second language
(English through ICOPA V, Spanish and English simultaneously in ICOPA VI
and VII). In using a second language, one's attention is drawn to
ambiguities or connotations of words which native speakers take for
granted. As the abolitionist writer self-consciously struggles to control
use of the second language, so the writer becomes conscious of how
language is central to what we espouse and practice. Hirvonen traces the
abolitionist movement through the three phases of moralism, ideologism,
and undecidability. By drawing on the work of contemporary postmodern
writers, he attempts to deconstruct the narratives, or texts, of these
three stages. This exercise in deconstruction will help to make the
reader aware of the source of one's own ideas in the texts of 'others.'
This being the case, how can a discourse of abolition be free from a
discourse of repression and control? The irony identified by Hirvonen is
that what appears to be an alternative discourse to repression is based in
that very discourse. The discourse of the 'other' unwittingly employed by
abolitionists is, ironically, the very discourse they seek to abolish.
Thus the discourse of abolition, one which by definition is a discourse of
negation, reinforces the discourse and practice it seeks to negate. For
Hirvonen, the only way out of this impasse is for abolitionists to embark
on a 'politics of undecidability.'
In chapter 8, US civil rights litigator, Frank Dunbaugh of Annapolis,
Maryland, begins with a summary of successive ICOPA conferences as he has
known them since helping organize ICOPA I. He winds up in essentially the
same position as Ari and Steve, quoting the wife of a prison warden more
than half a century ago:
We obey the law, but we need respect very little of it. We must not
worship any of it. It is not God. It has no sanctity _ Let the law
repent its blasphemous claims _ let it throw away its pretentious
crown, and get into overalls like anyother servant and do its job
for the community _
Frank leads us to the practical challenge we keep facing as
abolitionists: to listen most to those the system grants the least
authority to be heard in the matter of what to do about a 'crime.' At the
apex of the voiceless are outspoken people whose victimization is
compounded by the color of their skin and by their transformation into a
prisoner identity. Above all else, it is a drive to confront our
ignorance about those we condemn which unites us as abolitionists, and
not, as Frank, Ari, and Steve warn us against, asense that we know what
constitutes the crime problem or what is to be done about it. We presume
that the body of knowledge about crime and policing is insufficient to
justify further prison construction. We presume that there is not yet
enough known about penal processing to halt the exploration into ways that
might restore trust among disputants. This volume is but an episode in
that exploration.
We want to give immediate thanks to Judy Kelley and Gina Doglione for
preparing transcripts of ICOPA V sessions and converting papers into text.
More generally, as you can see, we owe thanks for the conference and for
the inspiration and contents of this volume far beyond our capacity to
name you all. We keep discovering new worlds of abolitionists ourselves.
Let us not presume to give credit to all who deserve it. For our readers,
any source in this volume is as good an entr_e to those worlds as routes
we editors and contributors followed into the field of abolition. Know
that penal abolition is there for you to discover as well.
Brian MacLean H al Pepinsky
Department of Criminology C riminal Justice
Kwantlen College I ndiana University
Vancouver, CANADA B loomington, Indiana 47405
V3T 5H8 USA
August, 1993