Kaba and Ritchie: No More Police: Pushing The Conversation, A Step Further
By E. Paris Whitfield
Often people will say, "The criminal justice system is broken." It isn't, I assure you. In fact, it is working even better than the originators could have ever imagined. Both Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie, in No More Police candidly refute any pretense of safety being provided through the carceral system, to include the police/soft policing, courts, district attorneys and jails/prisons.
The carceral state, as defined by Kaba and Ritchie, reflects an intersecting "web of ideologies and institutions wielding cops, cages, laws, stories, and surveillance to meet the generalized insecurity of racial capitalism." Carceral harm is when those institutions and ideologies create restrictive, divisive, and assumptive policies that negatively shape everyday people's quality of life.
In each illustration for how the carceral system fails to prevent harms in marginalized, racialized, gendered, and differently-able-folks, to include post-incarcerated individuals' communities, Kaba and Richie both claim how carceral harm is rooted in two just sentiments: people "felt helpless" and called the police for help; but after what they've experienced with the police "it was the last time [they] called the police."
Black, Indigenous, and people of color ("BIPOC") community, and queer communities, already live on the fringes of society. And every hegemonic institution reminds them they are not "free'" because they are not white, a cis white-male, Christian, or even American, especially when we consider how careral harm is manifested in immigrant and Muslim communities.
For post-incarcerated individuals, the 13th amendment abridges their citizenship through the courts, whereas their status is legally converted to "slavery" and "involuntary servitude" once they are convicted of a crime, whether someone is wrongly convicted or not. Slavery, in essence, still exists for Black and Brown Americans, and this is at the root of carceral harm. Sit with that for a moment.
In post-incarceral-contact, you don't get to wash that 'stink' off. Let's be clear, I am not equating imprisonment to "slavery," I am saying that for those who are convicted of a crime in the United States, to include disproportionately Black/Brown US citizens whom are descendant of enslaved people, their conviction in the courts allows for their reclassification of "slavery" and "involuntary servitude," in accordance with the 13th amend, which reads:
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime wherefore the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Kaba and Ritchie's No More Police speaks to a "policy discernment process," which are questions that are designed to provide generative feedback when assessing carceral harm in hopes to curtail it. They bring up "politics of police," which highlights how hysteria drives the policies calling for more police, which in effect amounts to state sanctioned violence. Kaba and Ritchie highlight how "social policy" is based on "eligibility" versus need-based.
For structural and sustainable change it requires a "vote" on local, state, and federal elections. Social engagement depends on a citizen's enfranchisement to vote, as it is the basic and fundamental civic duty of a citizen in the United States.
For those Incarcerated Citizens, or formerly incarcerated, they don't have any such rights because of the 13th amendment. Many people fail to realize that Incarcerated Citizens often never become re- enfranchised, because of their conviction(s). In that light, we can't even begin to engage, let alone reimagine, in any structural way, in making changes to escape carceral harms--as Kaba and Ritchie asked us to consider concerning our political muscle, when our strength, our citizenship, our vote is made impotent by the 13th amendment.
I'm writing this piece while sitting on the edge of my prison cot. I'm living their words. Angela Davis tells us that prison "relieves us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities." Kaba and Ritchie highlight the reality "that people of color' can't afford the luxuries of being "relieved" of "responsibilities,"" since we are living within intersecting carceral harm(s). Kaba and Ritchie remind us that carceral stats are not just data, but are upending human lives.
Kaba and Ritchie hold a mirror up to society's face and it reflects back a sad commentary: those who are most affected by carceral harm are the same people who can help heal many of societal issues. But often they are tossed in the can like an expired NYC Metrocard. Incarcerated individuals not only have a lived experience with carceral harm, we have a vested interest in eradicating its pain and suffering, for all, but especially for BIPOC communities.
This isn't a book that you just read. Kaba and Ritchie give space to explore other conversational-rabbit holes--such as Basquiat's painting entitled "Defacement" and another which depicts a small Black figure with arms up, with the words near it, reading, "Dead Body." There's Fanon's notion of the hostile "white gaze" that surveils the Black body, which builds to Marie Gottschalk and Loic Wacquant's conversation which asserts that society punishes Black and Brown people who are impoverished.
Neoliberalism, via privatization, and budget cuts in nearly all human services, while increasing the budgets for the carceral systems points to how society punishes those in poverty.
As long as the police department creates the crime stats, they effectively set the hysteria that feeds policies for laws that feed the carceral cycles. Kaba and Ritchie counterbalance these conversations in a more imaginative way. What follows next depends on each readers' subsequent action, or inaction.
Eric Paris Whitfield is a team leader at Newburg LGBTQ+ Center, supervised under the Queers for Justice Director Alisha Kohn; a Sylvia Rivera Law Project Prison Advisory Committee Member; an Inside/Outside Coalition Member (formerly of NYC’s No New Jails); a resident poet for “What’s the Tea,” published poet (recently by Tufts University for their New National Literary Arts Journal Resentencing Journal); an Empowerment Avenue writer; and an incarcerated citizen. Paris is also a Bard College Student working on their senior thesis.