There’s a really interesting post at Feministe on tensions between feminist attitudes towards violence against women and a radical (or liberal, or progressive) analysis of the prison system. It’s certainly been a tension I’ve felt as I’ve cheered some men being locked-up (Brad Shipton and John Dewar) and despaired when others were let free (Clint Rickards). Bean quotes from Daniel Lazare’s discussion of Marie Gottschalk’s book:
Gottschalk’s assault on ’70s feminism is sure to raise the most eyebrows. She argues that the women’s movement helped facilitate the carceral state by promoting a punitive approach to sexual violence that was unmitigated by any larger political considerations. This single-minded focus led to what The Prison and the Gallows describes as unsavory coalitions with tough-on-crime types. In the State of Washington, women’s groups successfully marketed rape reform as a law-and-order issue so that, when the measure finally passed in 1975, it was “in part by riding on the coattails of a new death penalty statute.”
I don’t think any coalition between anti-rape activism and law-and-order types is necessary, but I don’t think it’s the responsibility of anti-rape activists to make sure our work doesn’t get co-opted.
I was listening to the radio today and heard that the supreme court had allowed the appeal of a man who had murdered his wife and one of the reasons was because the judge in the case had wrongly said that the defence of provocation isn’t available if someone had decided to kill someone else. I said to myself “Jeez didn’t the judge know that a defence of provocation is always available when a man kills his sexual partner?” (for full details the supreme court decision is available in pdf
The hate the provocation defence – I am sick of hearing ‘the bitch asked for it’. But here’s the thing – ultimately I don’t want Laxman Rajamani to be in jail. I don’t believe in jail. I don’t think the threat of jail stops men being violent against women. I think violent men who go into jail almost all come out more violent. I don’t think the protection that while in jail violent men are mostly only going to be violent to other men is enough for a system that churns out men more violent than they go in.
So when I argue that the provocation defence should be scrapped, or talk about the defences that should not be available to rapists, I’m not arguing that because I think these men should be in prison. I’m arguing against these defences because I think they do real damage to women, either individually as witnesses in trials, or collectively as rape myths and women-as-property is all throughout the court and media.
I think feminists need to continue standing up against our court system, and the way it values women’s words and women’s lives, but we need to do so from a stand-point that the current justice system offers abused women almost nothing. ((In my original version of this post I included this sentence: “As a friend joked, when I talked about this tension: “The correct political position is that they should let Brad Shipton out of jail so we can lynch him.” One of the dangers of writing on the internet is that words can have very different historical and political meaning in different places. I know enough about American history that I shouldn’t have included that sentence.))
The article bean quoted seemed to run together non-state actions against rapists, with the war on crime:
In Berkeley, antirape activists picketed an accused rapist’s home. In East Lansing in 1973, they “reportedly scrawled Rapist on a suspect’s car, spray-painted the word across a front porch and made warning telephone calls late at night.”
To which I say “Awesome”. I believe that the most powerful women have against rapists isn’t prison or the state (which will not act in our interests), but naming.
Edited: I realised that I needed to signal that my friend was joking when talking about Brad Shipton. Particularly outside NZ, where people don’t know who Brad Shipton is, and what he represents. I also know that lynching has quite differnet political meaning in America. I should have made clear that it was a joke earlier, sorry.
If you do away with the provocation defense, don’t you also do away with a woman’s defense if she kills the guy who’s been beating her black and blue for days/months/years? (Assuming that he wasn’t directly threatening her life at the time, in which case her killing him would of course be self-defense.)
I think it’s wrong to vandalize property, especially of someone who’s been accused but not convicted of a crime, but even of someone who has been convicted. Picketing the sidewalk or street in front of their house, however, I am perfectly OK with (in the US you have an indisputable constitutional right to carry a sign bearing any message you please — apparently this right is void if the president happens to be nearby, but I digress).
Um, you had me up till you came out for lynching. I am from an area of the United States where they used to regularly lynch people for alleged rape, and, well, I think law and order is MUCH better. You want to reform the law? I am all with you. Eliminate the defense of provocation and add imperfect self defense? I am there. I will even go with Lu – exercising your right to free speech on public sidewalks? I’ll print the signs. But painting messages on people’s porches, making warning calls at night, and forming lynch mobs? Trust me, the other side in the culture wars invented these tactics, and they will always use them more effectively than us. Don’t go there.
Actually, let me explain my point a little more rationally. Your claim is that you should not rely on the state because you cannot trust the state to act in the interests of women or other oppressed groups. I can – to an extent – concede the point. One of my criticisms of many on the left is that they often argue in favor of giving the government more power to help the powerless without realizing that the state will inevitable use those new powers to help the powerful. My retort here is that we who have lived in the former Confederacy have ample empirical evidence that if you give the state the power to effectively legalize vigilante justice, the state can and will use *that* power to help the powerful at the expense of the powerless.
I dated someone who was accused of rape. After some calling around I got to the *actual* story of what happened, from the woman involved. While under the influence of acid, my boyfriend (then her boyfriend) came on to her and kept approaching physically until she finally got her “no” understood. She was in a cast from hip to ankle at the time, so I think he could have forced things had he wanted to. He was horrified by the incident and never did psychedelics again.
I found out about this because she saw him at a housemate’s party some years later (while I was dating him), and was upset at seeing him. Her friends somehow misunderstood the whole thing and were bound and determined to label him a rapist, get him kicked out of his house, and generally ostracize him from his social scene. They didn’t know me. They didn’t include the ex-girlfriend in their actions. Once I’d done enough digging I called one of them and explained what’d actually happened, and asked them if they might have thought of talking to me at all? They were somewhat sheepish. My boyfriend did move, however, as it seemed the only resolution to the situation by the time things got that far.
What if the ex-girlfriends’ friends had decided to spray-paint “rapist” on my boyfriend’s car? Would he have deserved that? Would it have accomplished anything?
Things can be complicated, is all I’m sayin’. I was with you til the lynching too.
1. What Lu said. Would it have been awesome to have vandalized, spray-painted and harassed the Duke lacrosse players for being accused of rape? Whatever the merits of vigilante justice, I don’t see why it can’t wait until after a trial.
2. I suspect Maia is right that prison does not serve a very strong rehabilitative function. On the other hand, I believe prison does serve to discourage crime and to assuage public demand for vengeance. Moreover, I understand that most violent crimes are committed by people younger than, say, 35. Youth is a problem prisons seem well designed to address. If we can incarcerate people with poor impulse control during the years when they are especially prone to violence, I expect that we can reduce violent crime (at least, reduce it outside of prison walls).
3. Just to be clear, New Zealand doesn’t have a provocation defense to the charge of rape, right?
Maia, your criticisms of what happens to someone when you send them to jail is something I can agree with. I’ve heard jail referred to as “graduate school for criminals”. It seems to me that punishment for crimes should focus on restitution.
So, tell me; if we get rid of jail, what do we do instead to deal with criminals?
Decnavda:
One of my criticisms of many on the left is that they often argue in favor of giving the government more power to help the powerless without realizing that the state will inevitable use those new powers to help the powerful.
I would also argue that giving the State more money generally results in it’s using that money to benefit people with money.
RonF-
You are right. But just as I pointed out above that the flip side of granting the state more power, granting the state the power to legalize vigilanteism, can be used to aid the powerful, the flip side of giving the state more money, giving the state the power to assign and enforce private property rights, will also be used by the government to make the rich richer. That is why I support welfare “redistribution” (technically “predistribution”, but I won’t derail this thread further by explaining that here) through a basic income or a negative income tax. Help the poor by giving the money TO THE POOR, rather than to bureaucrats.
Help the poor by giving the money TO THE POOR, rather than to bureaucrats.
By Jove, could we have discovered a commonly-held principle?
As a general rule, any distribution or subsidy should be paid to the people making the economic decisions, not to the institutions that desire to serve them.
I’ve edited the post. Sorry I didn’t do more internationalising last night. Both because references to lynching are much more problematic in an american context, and without knowledge of Brad Shipton the joke is much less clear.
Decnavda – I’m not advocating that the state ‘allow’ people to do anything – just that we do it, that we put at least some feminist energy into non-state ways of dealing with violence against women.
RonF – people say that a lot and I don’t understand it. In other contexts ‘what we’re doing isn’t working but we have to do something’ doesn’t make much sense. If we’re currently making things worse, then why not just do nothing? There are lots of suggestions about where to start in changing prisons, and the drug war is the obvious place, but I think the current system is worse than nothing.
If we’re currently making things worse, then why not just do nothing?
Because doing nothing might make things even worse than that. The town decides to build a guard tower to shoot arrows at attacking bandits; this causes the bandits to become more aggressive in their raiding. So the town tears down the tower and announces a policy of passivity; this encourages four more bandit gangs to move to the area. It’s rare that ceasing a failing strategy will bring us back to a status quo ante that’s any better than where we are right now.
In other words, you have to have a replacement plan. “Let’s just chill” is usually unworkable advice.
I usually think Maia is pretty much always right, but I have to disagree with the idea that a movement isn’t responsible for its co-optation…it seems dealing with this is important element in strategy, and I am not sure that “responsibility” with all that moral connotation, is the right framework. Another way to look at it is whether a feminist strategy which, however unwittingly, contributes to the mass incarceration of the poor and the racially oppressed, can rightly be considered a feminist strategy in the broad, radical sense that socialist feminists like Maia use the word.
Curiousgyrl – I must have been expressing myself very badly if you think I’d disagree with any of that.
I think feminists need to be very, very, careful not to be co-opted by law and order people, or to reinforce law and order. I just think that good anti-rape work should be quite unco-optable – particularly if you don’t reifnorce the idea of rapists as dangerous strangers
I’m planning to write a post about what sort of legal reforms I think feminists could and should push for that wouldn’t play into law and order ideas.
Lu – at least in NZ the provocation defence has been unsuccessfully used by women whose partner was abusing them.
I couldn’t figure out why this post seemed so wrong to me — aside, of course, from your joking aside about lynching. The problem is that you are analyzing the problem of our justice system from only one perspective.
When someone is accused of rape, there are a lot of ways that the investigation, trial and punishment of that person can go wrong. One way is for the police and court system to discount the word and experience of the rape victim. Police can fail to appropriately collect evidence and they can harass and otherwise harm the victim who comes forward. In courts, judges have allowed defense lawyers to subpoena women’s mental health files, have asked victims to demonstrate the physical position they were in when they were raped for the jury, and have essentially allowed victims to be tried. These are sexist responses to the victim.
Another way that a rape investigation and prosecution can be unjust is for the police and courts to discriminate against the accused perpetrator. Police can decide that a stranger rapist must come from a certain racial group. They can rough up a suspect or deny him basic rights. Judges can bias the jury against the accused, can refuse to hear evidence, and can sentence people ruled guilty according to racial bias. These are racist responses to the accused.
There are of course other issues, like the erosion of free public defender programs, sentencing laws that mandate incarceration for non-violent criminals, the removal of prison programs that once helped to reduce recidivism rates, and forced labor in prisons. (All problems in the United States.)
Feminists are right to want women to be able to prosecute rape through the justice system without fear of repercussions to female victims. Rape is a violent crime and people who commit it are dangerous. You wouldn’t say that people who don’t like murder are responsible for the oppressive nature of incarceration. It’s not the fault of feminists who want a less-sexist justice system that we also have a racist and classist justice system that is overly punitive.
If you want justice, you have to approach social problems from more than one perspective. Luckily, feminists are allowed to wear their anti-racism activist hats on alternate Thursdays.
In other contexts ‘what we’re doing isn’t working but we have to do something’ doesn’t make much sense. If we’re currently making things worse, then why not just do nothing? There are lots of suggestions about where to start in changing prisons, and the drug war is the obvious place, but I think the current system is worse than nothing.
Because I don’t agree with your premise. I don’t think the current system works well, but I wouldn’t say that it doesn’t work at all or that it’s worse than nothing. It does at least get violent criminals off the street for a period of time. It’s existence does at least discourage people to a certain extent from doing something that might lead to their incarceration.
Tell me; say we close the jails tomorrow. What do you think would happen?
“particularly if you don’t reifnorce the idea of rapists as dangerous strangers”
I think this is key–when people tell me not to walk there or do this or whatever and the subtext or explicit reason is that I’ll be raped, I often respond that the only time i ever was raped it was by a rich white guy who I thought I knew well. I’ve never been raped walking home late at night. That doesnt mean it can’t happen, of course, but its true that avoiding that kind of situation hasn’t helped me avoid rape.
balabusta – I explicitly say that I believe in prison abolition. I don’t think the problem is just who ends up in prison or how (although obviously that is the problem), for the reasons I list in this post So in this post I was responding to the fundamental ways I don’t think prison is a solution to rapists (unless it’s Clint Rickards – and I understand that no-one otuside NZ will understand my attitude towards Clint Rickards, Brad Shipton, Bob Schollum and John Dewar – but there’s only so far you can take writing for an American audience). When I’m rejecting the prison system as a whole I don’t feel the need to catalogue all the problems, I just started on the angle I was going from today.
RonF – You mention getting violent criminals off the streets. Shall we start by agreeing that prison for non-violent crime is useless? I could get behind that.
curiousgyrl – Having re-read the post I see what you were responding in your first comment. What I meant is that if law and order types start using feminist language to try and defend their position there’s nothing we can do about that, except make clear that we disagree with them. We have no control over misuse of feminism. Although I do believe that we should be very careful over hte alliances we build.
I can see I’m going to have to do a follow-up