-“Liberalism considered it proper for an employer to say to an employee, ‘You shall die of hunger,’ but improper for the employee to retort, “You shall die first, of a bullet.’”
-Bertrand Russell, Skeptical Essays.
“Murder, the most foul of all crimes. And not abstract murder like shooting an unknown enemy on the battlefield, but standing in a closed room with a live human being and pulling the trigger face to face” says Boris in Woody Allen’s Love and Death. Ask most North Americans and they would probably agree with this statement: killing Afghanis who you don’t know on the battlefield is one thing, but killing a person that you actually know face-to-face, well, that’s murder. Since the vast majority of murders (the murders that get you in prison, not drone attacks on Pakistanis or police terrorism on Black ‘suspects’) are concerning people that the person knows, this must be the reason that people who might otherwise agree people shouldn’t be locked up in cages change their tune about people locked up for “violent” offenses, especially people convicted of murder: it is not because people are actually afraid that someone who killed her/his roommate or family member is actually going to search for your family, who she/he has never met, and have them die some terrible death that people say that “murderers should be locked up,” but because people cannot deal with the idea that someone would kill a person they actually know and haven’t demonized as a terrorist, like the Afghani family who is murdered. A Black man who is killed by police is not quite ‘murder’ because Black men have been demonized in the U.S. since they were first brought to this country bound in chains aboard ships. If the policeman had killed his wife and kids, the media would talk about the terrible murder—why didn’t he kill that undesirable homeless man or Black teenager instead of his lovely, law-abiding family?
-->If your perspective is that, “No, no, no, you’re not listening to me: ALL murderers should be in prison, including the cop who killed the homeless man,” it is still very prejudiced logic, because you obviously are not talking about drone attacks on the people of Pakistan, or the boss killing his worker of starvation or a miner dying of lung disease, and you’re basically saying that physical violence (in the form of a gunshot or knife wound, not violence as in killing a man through overwork) against the oppressed and violence against the oppressor is one and the same. And you’re acting as if we have a justice system that doesn’t terrorize, demonize, and frame oppressed people at every moment. The jury and judge for Blacks, ‘illegal immigrants,’ and other oppressed people isn’t chosen from their own communities; the people who sentence them have already decided that they are 'guilty,' they do not know or care about the person being sentenced. The Papin sisters who worked as maids in a household and killed their employer’s family were sentenced to life imprisonment and eight years in prison respectively—When under capitalism do you ever hear of employers being sentenced to a day in prison for the crime of making their workers be at their beck and call and work for them for fifteen hours a day, for killing their workers by sending them to work in the mines or factories? Never, because working people to death and making their lives monotonous and estranged from all other life is not considered ‘violent.’
It’s a huge paradox when people have “Victim’s Rights” marches and attempt to frame i.e. the person who robbed and killed the person as a villainous fiend. People focus on the fifteen or less minutes that it took to kill the person, and never on the sheer brutality and madness that is life under capitalism for the exploited. Rosie Alfaro, a woman on Death Row since 1992 in California, has a Wikipedia page mostly describing the murder, and of her life prior to that it merely states, “Alfaro was raised in the barrio in Anaheim, California, near Disneyland. She became a drug addict at 13, a prostitute at 14 and a single mom at 15, and mother to 4 children at 18. Eventually, she became a murderer at 18 (while pregnant with twins) and the first woman in Orange County, California to get the death penalty at 20.” That’s it, nothing more about how she suffered, how difficult it was to able to take care of her children at such a young age, how growing up in poverty and possibly abuse affected her, or her addiction to drugs, experience of Orange County racism, and how capitalism oppressed her and many similar to her. She is a merely a murderer, now age 40, a murderer at 18 and always a murderer. It also doesn’t mention how messed up of a society it is in which the parents of the girl who was killed “cheered” when Rosie Alfaro was given a death sentence. I found a quote from Rosie Alfaro, "I do think that someone has to pay for what happened to that poor girl, and that's me, But I can't help thinking how my life stopped, ended, at 18, and that I have no future, and all that is because of drugs." And no, not everyone who does drugs robs (or has to) or kills to get their fix, but nor does everyone grow up in poverty and violence, or mental illness. We can’t leave someone behind in the fight for prison abolition because of a murder committed years ago, especially when considering how violent life is under capitalism, war on black and brown communities, immigration raids, war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, & Palestine, and police terrorism.
In Richard Wright’s Native Son, the protagonist Bigger kills a wealthy white woman, a woman who is sympathetic to him and whose parents contribute grand funds to all sorts of liberal causes, while they own apartment complexes but only allow one of the apartment complexes be rented by Black tenets thus keeping them confined in a ghetto (including Bigger’s family). Jan, the woman’s boyfriend, a communist, says to Bigger, “Though this thing hurt me, I got something out of it. It made me see deeper into men. It made me see things I knew, but had forgotten. I—I lost something, but I got something, too…It taught me that it’s your right to hate me, Bigger. I know see that you couldn’t do anything else but that; it was all you had...Ever since I got out of jail I’ve been thinking this thing over and I felt that I’m the one who ought to be in jail for murder instead of you. But that can’t be, Bigger. I can’t take it upon myself the blame for what one hundred million people have done. I’m not trying to make it up to you, Bigger. I didn’t come here to feel sorry for you. I don’t suppose you’re so much worse off than the rest of us who get tangled up in this world. I’m here because I’m trying to live up to this thing as I see it. And it isn’t easy, Bigger. I—I loved that girl that you killed. I was in jail grieving for Mary and then I thought of all the black men who’ve been killed, the black men who had to grieve for their people were snatched from them in slavery and since slavery. I thought that if they could stand that, then I ought to. ” Jan then offers to find and pay for Bigger’s lawyer. Should it not be our desire to understand and be in total support and solidarity with the oppressed person who killed the person that we loved, rather than to cheer for their life sentence?
Describing how his character Bigger Thomas was born, author Richard Wright described the various ‘Biggers’ he had personally known and his life and said, “For a long time I toyed with the idea of writing a novel in which a Negro Bigger Thomas would loom as a symbolic figure of American life, a figure who would hold within him the prophecy of our future. I felt strongly that he held within him, in a measure which perhaps no other contemporary type did, the outlines of action and feeling which we would encounter on a vast scale in the days to come. Just as one sees when one walks into a medical research laboratory jars of alcohol containing abnormally large or distorted portions of the human body, just so did I see and feel that the conditions of life under which Negroes are forced to live in America contain the embryonic emotional prefigurations of how a large part of the body politic would react under stress.” Life for Blacks in the U.S. is extremely degrading and oppressive as the New Jim Crow allows police to terrorize Blacks at every moment. Activists often like to focus on death penalty cases in which we say, “the person is innocent! He didn’t really kill anyone!” When I once was passing out flyers that said, “sentenced to die for a murder he did not commit” for Troy Davis, a young man, who was Black, stopped me and asked, “So, are you saying that it would be OK for him to be locked up if he had done it?” I stopped and looked and the flyer and thought that it was all wrong—it was not saying don’t execute (or imprison) Troy Davis because he is an oppressed man in a racist state that exploited him, it was basically saying, “don’t execute that Black prisoner, but because he never killed anyone.” Of course, a lot of Black prisoners have been framed for murder by the police and most Black men have not killed anyone at all, but the point is that we should not distinguish between the ‘guilty’ and the ‘innocent’ oppressed and thus make a moral stance in that form. To quote from Engels in Anti-Duhring: “We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and forever immutable ethical law on the pretext that the moral world, too, has its permanent principles which stand above history and the differences between nations. We maintain on the contrary that all moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the economic conditions of society obtaining at the time. And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed.”
While a black man killing a police officer in self-defense is called a 'cop killer' and murderer, in its crime statistics the FBI calls the following as the only kind of 'justifiable murder': "The killing of a felon by a peace officer in the line of duty" and "The killing of a felon, during the commission of a felony, by a private citizen." Since Blacks and Latinos compose of over 60% of all 'felons' in the U.S. it basically gives carte-blanche to police and vigilantes to kill black and brown people who they think might be dangerous due to their own racism, or if they are committing a 'felony' i.e. the 2007 case in which Afro-Latinos Miguel Antonio DeJesus and Diego Ortiz were murdered, shot in the back by a white Texan who saw them stealing and fleeing from his neighbor's house who was not at home. Talk show hosts like Bill O'Reilly of course voiced concern about the man's well-being and did not want his "life to be ruined" for killing two Black "illegal aliens" who "should not have been here in the first place." The all-white jury in this case, of course, cleared the white man of any crime, just as the all-white jury cleared the racists who murdered Emmett Till in 1955.
Alternatives to Prison
Ada Pecos Melton, a member of the Pueblo Jemez of New Mexico and President of American Indian Development Associates, writes concerning the indigenous justice paradigm and its difference to our justice system:
“The American paradigm has its roots in the world view of Europeans and is based on a retributive philosophy that is hierarchical, adversarial, punitive, and guided by codified laws and written rules, procedures, and guidelines. The vertical power structure is upward, with decision making limited to a few. The retributive philosophy holds that because the victim has suffered, the criminal should suffer as well. It is premised on the notion that criminals are wicked people who are responsible for their actions and deserve to be punished….In the American paradigm, the law is applied through an adversarial system that places two differing parties in the courtroom to determine a defendant's guilt or innocence, or to declare the winner or loser in a civil case. It focuses on one aspect of a problem, the act involved, which is discussed through adversarial fact finding. The court provides the forum for testing the evidence presented from the differing perspectives and objectives of the parties. Interaction between parties is minimized and remains hostile throughout. In criminal cases, punitive sanctions limit accountability of the offender to the state, instead of to those he or she has harmed or to the community.
The indigenous justice paradigm is based on a holistic philosophy and the world view of the aboriginal inhabitants of North America. These systems are guided by the unwritten customary laws, traditions, and practices that are learned primarily by example and through the oral teachings of tribal elders. The holistic philosophy is a circle of justice that connects everyone involved with a problem or conflict on a continuum, with everyone focused on the same center. The center of the circle represents the underlying issues that need to be resolved to attain peace and harmony for the individuals and the community. The continuum represents the entire process, from disclosure of problems, to discussion and resolution, to making amends and restoring relationships. The methods used are based on concepts of restorative and reparative justice and the principles of healing and living in harmony with all beings and with nature.”
This quote is not describing what might lead a person to “harm his or her community,” or explaining in detail how colonialist violence on indigenous people has brought alcoholism to indigenous people and how all of this contributes to violence, but it is a good example to give when describing alternatives to prison. Angela Davis has written about the Truth & Reconciliation Commission in South Africa—in which both white and black South Africans confessed their ‘crimes’ following apartheid and were dismissed—as a possible alternative, but there are huge problems with the TRC since the majority of people stepping forward with their “crimes” were Black South Africans—there was no accounting for how violent and racist white South Africans had been to Black South Africans; it was all deemed the same and worthy of forgiveness and ‘reconciliation.’ Violence committed by the oppressors to the oppressed should not be simply forgiven and forgotten with basically the same kind of oppressive political system; as John Pilger said of South Africa “apartheid did not die.” Also, a Black South African killing a white South African, like a Black American man killing a racist police officer, should not just be treated the same as a racist killing a Black person, no matter if it is through the prison system or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission—being treated the same, of course, is not even the case anyway, with the oppressed always being the ones sentenced to prison and the oppressors always having the excuse that they were committing 'justifiable murder' because they were killing the oppressed. While there is a world of exploiters and exploited that is how things will remain. The true ‘solution’ to murder is to have a society in which there is no violent exploitation through capitalism, no bosses--the means of production are owned by the people who work them, no police or imperialist wars and in which childcare is collectivized, health care is not merely a luxury for the rich, and life is not so repetitive and oppressive that so many sink into hopelessness and addiction. Eugene V. Debs said, "While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free"--He did not exclude the 'murderers' or the 'violent people' who are locked up, people who have suffered immensely themselves under capitalism.
