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Prison Abolition in Practice: The LEAD Project, the Politics of Healing, and a New Way of Life
Abstract
In 1982, in a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles, a speeding police car hit a five-year-old boy and killed him. Susan Burton, the mother of the little boy, experienced the agony of losing her son because of this preventable “police incident.” In 1999, with her own recovery under way, Burton founded A New Way of Life (NWOL), a group of transition homes for women coming home from prison in the Watts district of Los Angeles. Burton's life reveals how an abolitionist perspective works to transform the lives of incarcerated women. This chapter elaborates how prison abolition works to transform and heal lives. It describes the transformation of Burton and the Leadership, Education, Action and Dialogue (LEAD) Project—a political education program that fosters critical analysis of the prison-industrial complex. The LEAD project grew out of a collaboration of NWOL and the Los Angeles chapter of Critical Resistance, an abolitionist organization that Burton began working with in 2003.
... Transformative interventions are intended to help people understand the larger social and structural context of their incarceration and the circumstances that led them there. These kinds of interventions are also intended to effect personal transformation through social and civic engagement in order to challenge those conditions, and scholars have attended to their success in doing so (Keahiolalo-Karasuda 2008;Shigematsu, D'Arcangelis, and Burch 2008;Goddard and Myers 2017). ...
The catastrophic failure of the prison system in the United States has prompted a shift in criminal punishment system rhetoric and policy toward reform. Numerous programs and initiatives facilitate reentry for the hundreds of thousands of individuals coming out of prison every year, but these and other reforms remain problematic. They do little to improve the social and material conditions of those attempting to reintegrate. By failing to question the social, historical, political, and economic conditions of criminal system problems, they reproduce the oppressive social conditions that they are intended to address. This article diagnoses several major issues with conventional reform efforts in rehabilitation and reentry scholarship and praxis and argues that what is needed is not further attempts to improve these reforms but, rather, an approach that considers these problems through an abolitionist lens. An abolitionist frame, I suggest, is particularly useful in articulating suggestions for change. I apply an abolitionist analysis to an examination of reentry, illustrating how abolitionism helps to diagnose problematic reentry reforms and how an abolitionist approach to reentry can address these issues in a more effective, profound, and enduring way.
... I was working at the time as an organizer with Critical Resistance 1 and in this capacity, was invited to facilitate biweekly workshops with residents on topics such as the war on drugs and the troubled history of prison reform. This effort became regular and was eventually named the LEAD Project (see Shigematsu et al. 2010). In 2006, Burton hired me as A New Way of Life's Director of Programs and in this capacity I spent 5 years developing the organization's leadership, education and advocacy initiatives while interacting on a daily basis with residents, former residents and a growing network of formerly imprisoned women and men. ...
Despite decades of critical reframings, policy and practice on prisoner (re)entry often remains situated within a framework of individual responsibility that fails to acknowledge the structural drivers of criminalization. Attending to individual symptoms rather than root social, political and economic causes, such approaches may ultimately reinforce the inequalities and injustices that fuel imprisonment. This article presents a case study of an alternative approach. It examines A New Way of Life Reentry Project, a nonprofit organization in South Los Angeles, California, that offers housing and support to women coming home from prison through a critical and holistic framework—one that attends simultaneously to the physical, mental and social contexts that shape lived experiences before, during and after prison. Drawing from 7 years of observation and participation, supplemented by ten in-depth interviews, I argue that a critical, holistic approach can have a significant positive impact for people returning home from prison.
The ‘sex offender’ is the subject of intense media focus, public attention, political manipulation, as well as psychological, sociological and correctional interest. He is categorized, classified and vilified by the public, the media, the psy-disciplines and through diverse correctional practices. This paper dissects the social construction of the “sex offender” category, examines the resultant problems for the abolitionist stance, and proposes a way to move the conversation forward. I conceptualize what engaging with the issue of sexual harm would look like from an abolitionist perspective and explore various initiatives such as Circles of Support and Accountability, and other promising initiatives that would work well for people who are likely to or who have sexually harmed.
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