Hello all,
Anne (Wolf) and I were talking about the ways in which the Trayvon Martin case does or does not challenge our views on Prison Abolition the other day, so I thought I would link to this blog post which discusses the issue. She doesn't really take a firm stance on the issue, but it's food for thought.
In the post you linked to, the writer is telling us that the issue isn't prisons, it's prison-states. True true. But then she goes on to talk about accountability--she says she wants dude to be held accountable. But what does accountability even mean when people are able to live in states of emotional and social infancy for their entire lives? The guy who killed Trayvon seems to express a very limited capacity for understanding justice. And the people who jumped to advocate on his behalf (check out the local commentary in the Sanford paper) are also seeing this situation through a hypocritical and infantile framework. That framework sees justice as advocacy for meaningless/undefined freedom while it enacts justice as concrete oppression. I agree with your blogger that our energies are better spent advocating for and making systemic change than seeking punishment in a way that denies the potential humanity of people who do damning and horrible (and most often harmless--selling grass/operating in alternative economies) things. Prison abolishment won't happen overnight and it may not happen at all. Right now, however, while we're advocating for the abolishment of prisons, we simultaneously need to be very worried about what we're going to build in place of the prison industrial complex. Prison abolishment is revolutionary. Revolutionary things are often done without serious thought to what will come after the revolution. In the absence of serious thought about what will come after the revolution, and in the absence of building a humane and well thought-out post-revolution infrastructure, we end up with crises like our America.