“The Union for the Rights of Prisoners (URvG) was founded in Austrian prisons, all members with full organisational rights are prisoners while associated members outside support their work.”
This is how we usually begin any presentation of our Union, but the truth is that those who go out and speak about what we do (and who authored this article) are not prisoners, and have never been incarcerated. While we insist that prisoners must play a leading role in the fight for their rights, we are, of course, aware of the instrumental position that non-incarcerated people occupy in this struggle, as well as in the pursuit of abolitionism more widely.
Protecting the rights of all prisoners is a conflicting act
Most people care less about the daily details of our work; they care more about our core motivations for doing it. The questions they ask usually stem from deep-seated beliefs that are inseparable from their political leanings. Most people think prisoners deserve more punishment, not support, for their crimes. A smaller group understands that crime is intimately linked to structural inequalities like poverty, discrimination, stigmatisation, institutional violence, and that someone already struggling to build a livelihood under an unjust system is far more likely to end up in prison. But even this group often expects us to be selective: to support prisoners based on why they were imprisoned, or what they believe politically.
We ask for neither. Sometimes prisoners tell us why they’re in prison, and honestly, this can make empathy harder. It’s difficult to hear that someone’s imprisonment is tied to violence, abuse, or sexual assault, or to hear that children are involved. Sometimes prisoners share their political views, which can be just as difficult as knowing the reason for their imprisonment: prisons have the same demographic as society at large, so there’s no reason they’d be any less sexist or racist than other civilians.
Prisoners themselves also wonder about our motivations for doing this work. Many see us as altruists acting out of charity, which is flattering but untrue. Some suspect we get social capital or personal satisfaction from playing saviour.. which is partly true, but not what drives the work. There would be less triggering ways to soothe a saviour complex.
Over the years, we’ve compiled some argumentation for these questions. Probably the most common one is: imprisoned people lose one fundamental right, the right to liberty. But according to the law, they keep all other fundamental rights, and so the state must abide by its own laws. Actually, a lot of what we practically do can be reasoned with and explained by this argument. Yet, that reasoning shouldn’t undermine our position: our goal is not to hold the state to account and rally for its better functioning.
As abolitionists, we strive for the dismantling of all repressive state practices, and that means abolishing the prison system in and of itself rather than reforming it. Our departure point for abolition is the criminal justice system because it is an attainable infrastructure we can contest. But as antifascists, anti-capitalists, queer-feminists, anti-racists and anti-imperialists, we know that this is just the entry point to a much bigger pursuit for transformation: from abolishing the concept of the family to abolishing racial capitalism.
Beyond purity politics
Rachael Romero. CC License
We believe the entire prison system should be abandoned, not that some people deserve incarceration while others deserve freedom. Supporting only the prisoners we’re politically aligned with would be purity politics: a logic rooted in colonial racism, hetero-patriarchy, and white supremacy, all of which strive for uniformity and exclusivity. The prison system itself is a manifestation of that same logic, a way of ridding a supposedly pure society of its “impurities.”
Our perspective frequently sparks intense debate, but we accept this friction as part of navigating systemic ‘impurity’ or, as Donna Haraway puts it, ‘staying with the trouble’. We believe it’s possible to oppose punitive practices without losing sight of the fact that harm caused by prisoners is real. In fact, we want to widen society’s idea of harm beyond the actions of a perpetrator, to include a whole system that is itself unjust and harmful, and use that as an organising north star.
This puts us against right-wing “law and order” politics, but also against feminists calling for harsher sentencing for sexual violence, or leftists who want to see right-wing activists locked up. We’re sometimes accused of neglecting victims by calling for abolition. But under state punishment, victims are little more than witnesses to a procedure between the state and the person it punishes. Restorative justice, by contrast, centers the conflict between victim and perpetrator. This position puts us in dissensus even with many of the prisoners we support, who call us idealists for ignoring the real dangers of criminality. But prisons don’t make society safer, they just make prisoners suffer, and they perpetuate cycles of harm. (the corroborative research: 1, 2,3)
The cardio of practising abolitionism
In practice, this means continuous communication with people in prison: answering letters, supporting their demands, and respectfully pushing back when they demean other prisoners. It also means to continuously communicate with the prison system and the people who enable it (the police, the bureaucrats, …) to solve prisoners’ individual problems. While we do this, we do not shy away from critiquing the whole punishment apparatus, a daily task that we believe may spark in people a more critical outlook on the criminal justice system and its pitfalls.
As part of the wider abolitionist practice we’re building, this work also means collaborating with movements who strengthen our intersectional position: building allyship with groups fighting police violence and racial profiling, groups standing against the unlawful detention of migrants and asylum seekers, and groups defending the rights of women and trans people, whose needs are often invisible inside prisons.
Within activist circles, we’re sometimes criticised for our indiscriminate support of prisoners. We’re open to that conversation, even though it surfaces a lot of discomfort: it’s hard to defend prisoners who are politically opposed to us, and even harder to be in touch with the institutions we despise the most every day. But it’s worth the toll when we manage to win small improvements that mean a great deal to people entirely dependent on the goodwill of the prison system. After some years of doing this work, we know that it is a dance between pragmatism and radicalism, one that satisfies neither side fully.
This isn’t an easy ride, but we were never in for the easy wins. What we believe in demands persistence and commitment for the long haul. It is about what we learn and adapt in the way, and how we stay true to who we are accountable to.
We want a world without prisons for everyone, and this holds true whether we agree with every prisoner or whether we disagree with every prisoner. We want a world where the police are replaced by community mechanisms that ensure its own safety based on self-determination. We want an abolitionist practice, not just a theory. And we know that building this practice reveals the bitter truth: that the state is de facto the ultimate perpetrator of violence, not the one to set the record straight and provide ‘security’ (to whom?). The prison system is just a stepping stone to greater abolitionist achievements, but to build that practice we must live with contradiction and reject purity politics. As Alexis Shotwell would say, “purism is a de-collectivizing, de-mobilizing, paradoxical politics of despair. This world deserves better.”
References
- Cullen FT, Jonson CL, Nagin DS. (2011) Prisons do not reduce recidivism: The high cost of ignoring science. The Prison Journal. ;91(3_suppl):48S-65S.
- Nagin DS, Cullen FT, Jonson CL. (2009) Imprisonment and reoffending. Crime and Justice; 38(1):115-200.
- Raaijmakers EAC, Loughran TA, de Keijser JW, Nieuwbeerta P, Dirkzwager AJE (2016) Exploring the relationship between subjectively experienced severity of imprisonment and recidivism. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency.;54(1):99-127.
- Alexis Shotwell (2016) Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times
