so disgusted reading this story today. this man got a fully suspended sentence for pleading guilty (when he initially lied to the cops and said she attacked him, and only admitted it when CCTV footage was produced), and because the judge wants to save his precious army career while the victim has lost her job due to her injuries. he also bragged about beating her on snapchat and the reason he did it is because she asked him to stop calling people slurs. i hate it here
Nobody is really. I always thought it was a stupid talking point.
It's a decently prominent line of leftist thinking, going at least back to Angela Davis. I agree it's a bad talking point, though. Virtually no one means abolition abolition, so any conversation on the topic immediately gets sidetracked with a semantic debate. It's also silly to re-define what abolition means then use it as a slogan, especially when there's a closely related conversation about how we didn't actually abolish slavery due to the 13th amendment carve-out for prisoners.
Honestly even under FALGSC we'd need to do something with the occasional person who loses it a throws their ex out an airlock or whatever. I mean unless we develop actual brainwashing technology, but that comes with it's own gross moral implications.
Also, assuming us commies ever actually take over the U$A, wtf are we going to do with the massive chunk of the population who are totally brain-rotted CHUDs? Renaming prisons "gulags" doesn't really change the fact you're detaining a person in a location for engaging in anti-social behavior. The war on drugs has been an unmitigated failure and I believe we should be treating the real root cause of the issue with crime, poverty. I'm also all for trying to make prisons as humane as possible. But you do actually need to do something about violent criminals.
If you consider like Crime and Punishment and stuff, isn't prison abolition, while not achievable just like immediately under capitalism, a really important goal for a communist society to work towards?
As a long term goal, I think yeah we should seek to use prisons a little as possible and what prisons we have should be humane as possible. I don't think even under an ideal society we're ever gonna get to zero, there's always going to be people who engage in violent anti-social activity.
But that is really, really long term. In the actual short term, if there was actually a communist take over, we'd probably have to be detaining a lot of people, both fascists and organized crime elements since they're often a tool of counter revolutionaries. You can say prison abolition is your long term goal but you're gonna confuse most people when you say that but then also call for gulaging most MAGA Chuds.
Those chuds want prisons to stay around longer, ez paradox of tolerance dub
Chuds: "We need to imprison people who are having a negative effect on society!"
Communists: "Okay" gulags Chuds
Chuds: "No not like that!"
simply imprison people until we don't need prisons anymore
but unironically
I mean there is sort of an ironic truth to this
Really the best way to reduce crime and therefore for the need for police and prisons is to create a more equitable, prosperous, stable society. Doing that is a long ass process though and there's a bunch of people out there who have an incentive to disrupt or undo it. So, you have to stop them, which usually means imprisoning them.
I mean, the story illustrates why prison is a bad idea: the judge couldn't serve justice because it would have meant creating bad consequences.