daisychainnihilism

shamwowxl:

funereal-disease:

I think a lot of people misinterpret my focus on redemption and empathy as brushing abusive behavior under the rug, and I want to clarify my perspective on that.

I think there’s a huge, huge difference between “this person fucked up, but we’re going to try to help them move forward” and “this person did nothing wrong”. I spend a lot of time thinking about criminals’ rights and how we can reintegrate wrongdoers in a dignified and productive way. Like, a lot. That doesn’t mean I forget for a second that they have, in fact, done something wrong.

It’s not that I believe abusive people are perfect angels who have done no wrong. It’s that I believe in a society where doing wrong is something you can come back from. And I think that’s very difficult to grasp when you subscribe to an angel/demon dichotomy. Either you’ve completely absolved a person or you’ve shunned them forever, so if you’re not doing the latter, then clearly you’re doing the former. Which is not at all what I’m striving for.

You can acknowledge that someone did something really, really shitty, or even a lot of somethings, and still desire a world that treats criminals in a more empathetic way. You don’t have to sugarcoat the abhorrent things that a lot of criminals have done to believe in their inherent dignity. I’m not for prison reform because I believe criminals are blameless. I’m for it because I think blamelessness is irrelevant to whether you should be treated like a human.

as someone who (v. briefly) interned and volunteered in a prison rehabilitation program, there’s real value to modeling redemption. people aren’t born knowing how to apologize and make amends, own their wrongdoing and identify the patterns that led to their behaviors, and follow that up with seeking out more constructive environments so that they don’t repeat their past mistakes. that’s HARD WORK, and abusive people in particular tend to avoid labor (because one of the ‘perks’ of abusing people is that you can get them to do all of your labor for you! be it emotional, financial, chores, child-rearing… if you intimidate the people around you they’re gonna have to do that work for you). demonstrating the value in working towards redemption, without the guarantee of forgiveness, the PERSONAL value in becoming better is super important. but so is the basic ‘here are the steps in this process broken down’ models we don’t see very often.

we treat people incarcerated like they’re unforgivable, and then wonder why the recidivism rate is so high. so many of the people I worked with really truly wanted to rebuild their lives and undo the hurt they’d put their families and communities through. not just to avoid going back to prison, but because they didn’t want to be the cause of anyone else’s misfortune. which is pretty goddamn selfless*. and the program I worked at was so great- it was set up to support people at every stage of re-integration into the community and provided the tools to work towards being self-sufficient and confident and healthy, to un-learn the language of cruelty and communicate with compassion and empathy. parole doesn’t do that. fucking prison doesn’t do that. both are tools designed to exploit the vulnerable and silence dissent. which would be abundantly clear if we as a society bothered to consider what atonement should look like.

*imo at least half these people shouldn’t have been doing time at all and didn’t need forgiveness because they’d done nothing wrong, but it’s not like the american penal system asked me.