In 2020, I participated in a weekly Black Lives Matter protest held at a busy intersection. Passing motorists mostly showed support for my signs — drawings of victims killed by the police, like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. However, protesters carrying “defund the police” signs got overwhelmingly negative reactions.
I believe defunding the police is a nuanced idea that wrongly sounds extreme to many people. Still, I felt a similar initial resistance to the book “Free Them All: A Feminist Call to Abolish the Prison System” by French author Gwendola Ricardeau. Though unpleasant, dysfunctional and in need of reform, prisons seem to serve a function. If prisons didn’t exist, what would protect society from serial killers and serial rapists? Should such dangerous individuals really roam free? Though slightly skeptical, I hoped there were alternative forms of justice to incarceration I didn’t know about, and a link between feminism and prison abolishment sounded intriguing.
Ricardeau believes in abolishment for many reasons. Prisons fail in two important functions — deterrence and rehabilitation — since harm continues to be done despite the threat of prison, and those emerging from lockup often commit harm again. Also, widespread crimes affecting large numbers of people, such as racism, sexism and the destruction of our planet, aren’t addressed at all by the current criminal justice model. Prisons uphold structures that don’t benefit the majority of people: capitalism, white supremacy and the patriarchy.
Our penal system is a concern for feminists because it punishes women whether they have caused harm or not. Women like Ricardeau with incarcerated relatives or loved ones suffer multiple losses. Wives and girlfriends suddenly must shoulder bills and child care on their own and find time and money to travel to prisons for visits. On the emotional side, women with incarcerated loved ones experience shame and social humiliation. Family relationships shift and weaken.
Women inside prisons face a different set of problems; they are likely to be isolated from family and friends even more than incarcerated men, as women’s facilities are few and far between. Incarcerated women often find themselves abandoned by their male partners on the outside. Psychoactive drugs are frequently prescribed to women inmates, which Ricardeau posits is intended as “domestication.” Surveys conducted at Georgetown in 2015 show that between 30% and 80% of imprisoned female minors are sexual abuse survivors, and they are not safe in prisons either. In the 1970s, the high-profile case of Joan Little brought attention to sexual assaults perpetrated by male prison guards against imprisoned women.
Ironically, prisons are often framed as a means of keeping women free from sexual predation. But as Ricardeau points out, in 2014 in France, the ratio of rape convictions to the number of sexual assaults was 1 to 100. Class and wealth are factors; people convicted of sexual assault in France are nearly always from the working class, while certain victims of assault, such as the indigent, sex workers and minorities, are deemed unimportant by the justice system, and their requests for help go unheard.
After enumerating the many inequities of the penal environment, “Free Them All” finally details what abolishing prisons could look like. Ricardeau reminds us that individuals manage to resolve conflict every day without getting the criminal justice system involved. On a collective level, options such as reparative justice, restorative justice and transformative justice (TJ) exist. These approaches are closely related and focus on resolution, negotiation and, ultimately, healing.
Both reparative justice and restorative justice seek to reintegrate, rather than isolate, perpetrators of harm. Monetary restitution is sometimes sought from offenders, or meetings are held between perpetrators and victims for the purpose of reconciliation. Ricardeau notes that this approach may not work well for victims of domestic violence.
The concept of TJ began in the early 2000s. One of the founders is a Quaker, Ruth Morris, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence articulated the main principles. Ricardeau even mentions the Seattle organization Communities Against Rape and Abuse, which calls itself an “anti-violence movement actively resisting the prison industrial complex.” The goal of TJ is keeping communities responsible for harm that happens within them, which includes victim support, perpetrator accountability, nonviolent values on a community-wide level and systemically changing the conditions that cause harm. This approach is creative and case-based rather than dealing in absolutes.
TJ made me feel hopeful about the idea of a flexible form of justice. After all, different variables and circumstances exist in every case. Creative solutions seem more appropriate than trying to lump everyone who causes harm into the same few categories. Yet, Ricardeau points out in her matter-of-fact way, TJ also has difficulties too. It can be time-consuming, and some victims may not have access to community resources. And going back to my initial concerns about serial offenders, how can the accountability of some perpetrators be trusted?
“Free Them All” brims with information, but the book rarely veers into the personal. Ricardeau tells readers she was involved with an incarcerated person but doesn’t elaborate. Perhaps she felt her experiences had no place in this fact-based argument for prison abolition, but I kept hoping to hear about them anyway.
Her writing is efficient but soars into lyricism in the epilogue, where Ricardeau compares the struggle for prison abolition as “a journey where we might be tempted by forks in the road. As we advance along this path, the landscape appears from new angles, and sometimes we notice that we have made a wrong turn. For us women, this path is littered with traps; because we are often holding up more than half the sky, because those among us who have walked in the shadows of the walls know the path is long, especially if we carry within ourselves the memories of those who have lost their lives here.”
What the book primarily taught me is that the collective — the community — holds the key to addressing difficult issues. In the 2020 protests, I only grasped a small part of the problem with my signs. It is valuable to acknowledge the victims of a dysfunctional system, but it is even more important to look at the circumstances that caused them to be victimized. Society as a whole needs to undergo an upheaval. In a different world, with better distribution of resources among all stratas of people, there would be fewer crimes committed. We excel at singling out certain individuals — members of the trans population, the unhoused, the incarcerated — and making them into “the other.” But we are all more similar than we are different.
The only way things can change is if people band together, acknowledging our shared humanity.
Read more of the Jan. 3–9, 2024 issue.