April 13, 2021 - 7:00am
How did defunding the police and abolishing prisons become the cause du jour of so many liberals? Take the proposed changes to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill a few weeks ago. They prompted a furious response across left media outlets and organising collectives. The UK-based Abolitionist Futures collective hosted several #KilltheBill solidarity events advocating “a future without prisons, police and punishment”. Sisters Uncut (previously in the news for bringing ACAB signs to the vigil of Sarah Everard) released a ‘Feministo’ calling for the end of having “more people in the policing and prison solution — including perpetrators”.
How do they intend to achieve this? Well, their solutions to state policing include ‘more mental health provision’, ‘community crisis teams’, and ‘trauma informed crisis intervention’. The idea that these radicals had essentially re-invented the police is tempting to laugh at, but in truth these provisions would indeed be different to policing as we know it today — it would be based on principles of mutual aid and support, without robust legal restrictions, and therefore perfect for exploitation by private security firms.
Enter ‘Carceral Feminism’, one of those horrendous phrases that have oozed into the public consciousness by way of pop-academia. Carceral feminism encompasses the behaviour of women who rely upon the power of the state to protect themselves. Feminism has become too “prosecutorial and punitive”, invoking the image of the ‘Karen’ — women who manipulate their perceived victimhood to punish others, usually men.
Carceral feminists take a pessimistic — or realistic, depending on your alignment — view of criminality, and tend to advocate for policy on the basis of observable trends rather than ideology. Of course, it is worth stressing that abolitionist feminists are not simply more future-facing than their carceral counterparts. Humanity is either perfectible, or it is not. Biology either matters, or is irrelevant.
It is easy for a privileged few women to forget the brutal reality of sex entirely. The uncomfortable truth is that feminists are reliant on robust policing and imprisonment to protect women and girls. What is the alternative? A trauma-informed social worker will not be able to stop a man beating his wife. A fully-funded, comprehensive therapy programme made mandatory for all UK citizens will not stop a man who wishes to rape a woman.
If we weren’t uniquely vulnerable thanks to our biology, why exactly would we need feminism in the first place? Sexism is not accidental, it is deliberate. It takes only a cursory glance at the independently-run UK-based Femicide Census to see just how dangerous it can be to just exist as a woman today.
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SubscribeThe last three paragraphs raise an important point: at the end, it is only the strong who can defend the weak. If those who are strong but kind have been browbeaten into passivity by a culture that condemns masculinity, then the strong but wicked will do as they please. The rapist or wife beater won’t stop just because you find his behaviour “problematic”.
This exactly.
The whole point of having the State, is to stop the mad and bad people attacking other people.
It is not just for women, men benefit from laws as well.
Unfortunately, the State is becoming psychopathic.
The people of ( wrongly named ) Loveland, Colorado may wish to disband their police as they apprehended a 75 year old woman ( 5′ tall , weighs 8 stone) who suffers from dementia who forgot to pay for items value about £10 ( so not exactly Brink’s-Mat robbery). They attacked her so badly she sustained broken bones and she was kept 6 hours in jail before receiving medical help. We seem to be employing similar people who also’enjoy’ their work.
This all seems to part of some absurd merry-go-round. “Let’s abolish the wheel”, only to find, in hindsight, that the wheel was actually quite useful and actually what they meant, when they called for the cancellation of the wheel, was really just a call for a new driver, one that would steer the wheel in the “correct” direction. All, most, revolutions seem to follow a similar path, fighting perceived injustice, only to then implement injustices of their own, or as the French might have said “chop chop, chop chop”. Orwell, I reckon, had it about right, less an author and more a prophet, a mystic, a visionary of things to come.
That is the problem with revolution – it devours its own children. As someone wisely observed: under capitalism, man oppresses his fellow man; under communism, it’s the other way around.
That’s not wisdom, it’s cynicism. If one is to be serious rather than glib, capitalism is a system of exploitation through the commodification of human being itself. Communism is a system of reduction to the minimum by the dehumanisation of human beings.
Hence we see today that right-liberals as neoliberals reduce the value of the native European kind to that of an interchangeable economic cypher and promptly interchange them with non-native cheap labour.
Meanwhile those on the left of liberalism – no longer communists but neo-Marxists – dehumanise the natives as “haters” and “racists”, deny their ethnicity, kinship and self-preference, and seek to hammer them into the rest of humanity.
You seem to belong to the second pathology.
I labelled the authority to whom you appealed as cynical and glib. The triumph of sound-bitery over serious thinking.
I don’t think left-liberalism as communism is exploitative. Exploitation is reserved for capitalism. It is the lesser of the two evils, but it is still homogenising and reductive. Liberalism – even classical liberalism – is not grounded in human truth, that is the real problem; and while those like yourself who are caught up in it want to find differences by which you might tell yourself you are “better than them”, the fact is you all genuflect before the false god of the self-creating individual.
I don’t think left-liberalism as communism is exploitative.
History shows it to often be homicidal. That’s so much better than a system of voluntary transactions between consenting participants.
Alex, murderous as communism is, it has not tried to gene-kill the European race. But global capitalism is well on the way to achieving that.
One doesn’t appeal to authority to “prove” that ones point is true – that’s not how logic works. But I do sometimes illustrate my case with relevant or pithy quotes, often from experts, and with summaries of relevant data. That is how debate works.
Some people witter on about how pathological they find their opponents’ views or mindsets. That’s rarely helpful – though it may sometimes be rewarded in an echo chamber. Far better to debate the issue than the personality.
The issue, little one, is that you are enculturated in the liberal thought-world, and you think the grand issue is left versus right or whatever. You have no understanding of the age in which you live, indeed, worse, you think it is a mortal sin to reject that age and seek one that gives life to the European race.
Its a desperate shame that you haven’t been able to make a contribution to this debate without generating conveniently assumptive insults.
Its doesn’t contribute to gaining credibility for your position, and is also deeply uninteresting for others to read ….
It is indicative of the collapse of the Western mind, observable for at leat 20 years now, that an idea such as abolishing the police could even be proposed.
Honestly, some of what passes for discourse these days is simply preposterous. It beggars belief that women of all people would want law and order abolished. You can only hope that this nonsense is merely the scum floating on the top of an otherwise deep and clean reservoir of thought. If this is really what lots of people think, we are in deep trouble.
I’m a woman. Neither I or any of my friends think we should abolish the police, although we do think that expanding the definition of ‘woman’ to any bloke who claims to be called Annette, was not their finest contribution to crime prevention.
The odd thing is that it is women ( if the Judge Judy show is correct) who often seem to phone the police for very trivial matters,partly it seems to get others into trouble-I believe the name for them is ‘Karens’
The Leftists/”Progressives”/radical feminists get away with spouting the most abject nonsense.
An often heard lament of late is: “We must reimagine policing and defund the police.”
To which the response should be that these people should go away, do their “reimagining” and come back when they can put forward a comprehensive plan that details the new structure and institutions of the replacement they propose for the current system of policing. But no, neither politicians nor the commentariat ever challenges these people to put up or shut up.
The bête noire of Leftists/”Progressives/radical feminists is the demand that they be specific. Requiring rigorous thought and analysis based on objective evidence to come to practical solutions, is not their bag. Their forte is the emotionally overwrought, sanctimonious finger pointing of anger junkies, and solutions based on nothing more than the foggy headed ideas dreamt up by cosseted academics in their mono-cultural echo chambers.
Saying we should abolish the police is like saying we should abolish hospitals because people who go there are more likely to die than people who don’t. Unfortunately, when you create an echo chamber by screaming at anyone who disagrees with you this is what you end up with.
Well, yes, they’ve tried this in Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis and various other Democrat-run ****holes in the US. Needless, to say, violent crime is through the roof. For instance, by April last year, Portland had experienced two homicides. This year it has experienced 25 homicides (these were the figures up to last weekend, as reported on the Summit Properties podcast).
Anyway, the police in the UK seem to be happily abolishing themselves. Not a day goes by without at least two or three of them being kicked out of the ‘service’ or sent to jail for various serious crimes. It comes to something when your police force is the most criminal organization in the country.
Sir Robert Mark, during his time as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, defined a successful police force as one which caught more criminals than it employed.
That’s a really, really low standard for the Commissioner of the capital’s police force to set.
Abolition won’t help anyone, but helping isn’t the point. These people are about tearing down civil society and all of its institutions. The activists don’t care about women, nor do they care about minorities. If they did, they would engage in actual work instead of the rote activity of marches, slogans, and signs that are all about garnering individual attention so one’s friends might see them as good people.
If we weren’t uniquely vulnerable thanks to our biology, why exactly would we need feminism in the first place?
What an ironic question, coming in a time when womanhood itself faces an existential threat from bio males pretending to be women and their supporters, some of whom are also females. Biology has been judged as heresy, haven’t you heard? To claim that only women can give birth or have periods is to be radical who must be un-personed.
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc.
I agree, and would just add in response to the quote, “we” (that is women I’m guessing) don’t “need” feminism at all, which is why most women (us) are not feminists.
I don’t think you have read that correctly
I don’t agree, but please feel free to explain in more detail.
We all depend on “community based care”, or as I call it, the Police. Trained to deal with the darker side of humanity with the physical ability to do so. Many of whom are women!
I remember a recent conversation with a police officer, before Covid. He said that with the cuts to social services and other community support organisations, the police had indeed become social workers of last resort.
There is a sound financial case (as well as pragmatic and even moral reasons) for also funding appropriate non-policing services for the community – at an adequate level.
Except that most social work departments are worse than useless, as the regular appearance of yet another serious case review into the death of a vulnerable child reveals.
That a bit unfair to social workers. Many of them have more or less given up, because they receive very little support from the establishment, or from society, headed by the media who love to howl that the murder of some poor child by the latest of his mother’s ‘boyfriends’ is somehow the fault of the social worker. Of course, when a child is removed from a potentially abusive home, that’s insensitive and paternalistic.
A friend of mine used to be a social worker. She was able to go and see such families accompanied by two (burly) police officers. When that stopped, she started looking at retirement packages. As she said, it might not have ultimately stopped the ‘stepfather’ hurting the child, but it stopped him hurting her.
Feminism is a Western pathology created n the main by New York intellectuals, most of them Jewish writers. It frees nobody. It reduces Woman to the status of a de-natured cypher. It robs her of her truest fulfilments. It damages the family and children. It is an evil of our age.
You seem to see disagreement as pathology. That can’t be healthy!
🙂
You seem to want to excuse the destruction of Western civilisation. Why? What is it you hate about the sublime and unmatched cultural edifice of European Man. Explain.
Where on earth do you get that idea from?
I rather like European culture, Western civilisation, and British traditions. One of our more admirable traditions is the way that, over the centuries, we welcomed victims of foreign persecution – Huguenots, for example.
If you oppose the rejection of multiracialism you oppose the survival and continuity of European peoples and all the glories we create.
And, er, Jews, who can’t be detached from ‘Western civiliation’. (I can’t quite see why Mr Standing has to suggest that feminism was invented by ‘Jewish writers’.)
Yes that was Freudian slip ( ho ho)
It stems from the all-Jewish Frankfurt School which advocated any and all means to destroy Capitalism. All culture and Christian morality to be crushed or corrupted. Feminism, gender theory and identity politics are some of the tools employed.
Feminism has become a punchline by its own hand. When these women will not rally around actual women in the face of bio men pretending to be women, it’s hard to be sympathetic to the cause.
Or rally around the victims of Muslim paedophile prostitution gangs.
I’m always puzzeled by the focus on female victimes of homicide.
The stats are there for all to see:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/homicideinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2020
I could easily go on. The focus on female victims is odd – it would seem that they have been reasonably constant and the flucations are in male victims.
Also most women who are victims know the person that kills them, which is not the case for male victims. This highlights a way for these cases to be reduced – and obviously there is things for, dare I say it, the police to do here – having counciling is unlikely going to stop anyone prepared to murder an ex-partner.
But a bigger issue is surely the random murders of men, by people (men) unknown to them? Or maybe this isn’t an issue because it just shows how bad men are and we would all be better off without them?
The measure of a civilzation is how well it treats its most vulnerable members, not the discrepency between the most and least powerful.
There was a shocking programme on one of the terrestrial channels last night about a man murdered by his alcoholic female partner, following a series of violent attacks upon him by her. The closing sequence revealed that at her trial for murder the judge expressed an understanding of her difficult childhood and gave her 16 months. A man’s life worth sixteen months – probably less than a year if she behaves herself inside.
Abolishing or defunding the Police, abolishing or defunding Prison?
Who ARE these idiots?
ONLY criminals or the truly mad could think that would benefit society.
The enduring question is why on earth is anyone of any sense even entertaining such lunacy?
Abolishing the police is a crazy idea – so much so that even BLM didn’t advocate it. “De-fund the police” was about redistributing some resources to more appropriate interventions, rather than treating every problem as a law enforcement one. You can agree or disagree with that idea, but the groups this article is about are not even mainstream within BLM – any more than they represent the Sarah Everard vigil where one of the groups also showed up.
See my post below. They defunded the police in Portland last year and abolished the unit dedicated to removing illegal firearms from the street (or something like that). Homicides are up over 1000% year on year.
I have not read the details of changes to police budgets in Portland, or the decisions on which operations were cut. The “defunding” point seems to be that medical or social services might be more appropriate than armed police for someone who has passed out in a doorway, for instance. For removing guns from the streets, not so much. That does sound more like a job for the police.
Perhaps there was a breakdown in common sense?
Police routinely find themselves dealing with mental health issues and very troubled souls. Often it does not turn out well. Some years ago in southeastern Virginia, we had a gentleman spotted late one evening running down a urban street. He was naked, maintaining an erection, and carrying what I believe was a cleaver. Who do you call? You call the cops. Take the cleaver out of the equation. Who do you call then? Still the cops. You could have this guy wearing a banana hammock and your local EMT or social services organization (if they are even open this late) will refer you to the cops. My point to this rather bizarre tale is that the cops end up by default with a lot of high risk community contacts. They are not prepared to handle them ; but who is? You can cut police department funding any amount you want and social services is not going to answer this bell. Cops will take the call
It’s quite well known that in Nelson’s navy the cat o’nine tails was used on offenders. What’s less well known is that it was chiefly used on those who committed offences against their fellow sailors, such as theft and violence. It was there to protect sailors from the worst elements, and its use on a skilled topman or gunner would have been exceedingly rare, except where the captain was a clinical sadist.
Prison serves the same function now. Sending rapists on a course of mental health treatment won’t stop them reoffending anywhere near as reliably as jailing them.
Not when you jail them in women’s prisons, as long as they claim to ‘identity’ as women.
I’m inherently suspicious of any ideas that can’t be shown to work incrementally – that somehow a big revolution is necessary to solve all the problems at once, but these cannot be done as reforms in increments.
“Well, their solutions to state policing include ‘more mental health provision’, ”
This was one of the late Soviet era solutions to too many inconvenient prisoners also. Quite apt given the political instincts of the woke.
Defunding the police needs a pilot project to see how well it works. Hollywood would make an ideal test case. Of course, the private security apparatus would also be stripped away.
I’m seriously thinking of changing my name.