To celebrate a year of publishing a monthly newsletter, Iowa City Mutual Aid solicited responses to the prompt “what does a world without prisons look like?” Here is my response.
Prisons are a symptom, edifices to a culture insisting people are either good or bad—a lesson we learn as children and one that saturates our media, politics, policies, and the ways we move through the world.
Prisons are places where we lock people away for their faults and imperfections. We build them to contain those who harm so we can pretend to rehabilitate them; those who are mentally ill because we don’t have treatment for them; those without homes because we don’t have houses for them. We build prisons to hide, out of sight, the people we choose to discard rather than care for.
And then we build more. We rebuild them. We expand them. Prisons become an excuse not to construct—or even imagine—something better.
A world without prisons is a world that accepts each of us as a human with imperfection and responds with care, rather than exile. It is a world oriented toward healing and transformation and justice for those who cause harm and those who are hurt. It is a transformed world of peace that knows people are not simply good or bad. It is a world that knows each and every one of us needs healing, causes harm and is worthy of care.