The reality of crime is this: most crime is undetected/unreported, that which is related to property; rates for all crime are declining; the "typical" offender for all crimes is white; the "typical" victim is African American; and crime tends to be an intra-group event. Countering these media myths of crime with the truth whenever and wherever we can is first and essential task of abolitionists.
KW: Well, it seems important to first underscore how mainstream media now almost wholly corporate controlled helps to demonize prisoners, typically downplays news about police misconduct and the systemic nature of prison violence, and promotes "get tough on crime" policies. In the hands of most media, crime becomes simply another commodity. The more sensational, lurid, horrific, and terrifying, the more profitable it is. About a dozen years ago, a guy named Steven M. Chermak did a study of crime reporting (Victims in the News: Crime and the American News Media 1995), and he found that over half the crime stories he looked at were primarily based on police and court records. Not surprising, but it limits not only the source filter, but also the perspective and information that might be available.
So the stories are framed almost entirely by arrest records, police reports, and hurried exchanges between prosecutors, police, and reporters. Now, that material may be incomplete, misleading, or inaccurate in whole or in part. But accuracy or the wholeness of the story doesn't matter. That's the narrative. The perspectives of victims of some kinds of crimes might be incorporated a little bit. But you can be pretty sure that the people already considered "criminal' whether they have been rightly charged or not; whether they have been convicted of a specific offense or not are not going to be there in any meaningful way. Not even if they have been brutalized or mistreated within the criminal legal system. That's not really a "crime." After all, don't "criminals" deserve to be treated as scum? Aren't they automatically less than human? And how often are the stories of people whose lives are shattered by corporate misconduct and exploitation centered in the reporting of corporate-controlled media? So there's a profound bias in what stories we hear, and whose voices are heard from the beginning, framing the narrative.
We almost never hear the stories that are more complicated: how, for example, police often blame victims of "hate" or interpersonal violence for assaults against them particularly if those victims are poor, people of color, and may be profiled as undocumented immigrants. We hear about prison rape as a gigantic, homophobic joke and the image of gay men so often framed as black in discourse about prisons as thugs, disease spreaders, rapists and sulliers of innocent, heterosexual white men (caution: link to racist and homophobic analysis) is reinforced, when in truth, incarcerated queers actually are disproportionately targeted for sexual violence. And there's a thudding silence in the mainstream media surrounding the experiences of most people in prison.
It's no surprise then that so many of us who don't routinely have to deal with law enforcement violence end up with the false idea that most people in prison are irredeemably violent; that they are sadistic murderers and rapists. And that prison is the only line of safety that protects "us" from these alleged violent predators. We aren't encouraged to think critically about the racial and class coding that typically goes into these images. No accident that the "revolving door" rapist image, promoted by supporters of the first Bush, then running against Dukakis for the presidency, was Willie Horton, a black man. White people, particularly, aren't encouraged to think of prisoners as members of our communities, as our neighbors. But for countless people of color, of course, prisoners are members not only of their communities, but also their families.
Today, of course, we've turned crime and policing into entertainment-rich "reality" shows on television (caution: this is an entertainment blog link). No question there who are the good guys and the bad guys. So we learn to consume demonized criminalizing images (pdf download) and police pursuit and mistreatment of those demonized "others" as both enjoyable and energizing. That is truly obscene.
I know from my own experience that many folks believe that we abolitionists are out of touch with the reality of violence and care more about "criminals" than "victims." That we are ready to loose hordes of psychotic, murdering rapists on the public because we don't care about holding anyone accountable for the harms they do to others. In fact, we are viewed as eager to "excuse" their actions. Over time, many people have come to believe that only prisons keep us "safe" from violent others. And that to even question these myths is the same as an intentional attack on "victims of crime." I know from personal experience that many think we are "unrealistic" and know nothing about the devastation of violence and crime firsthand. So wrong but it is such a prevalent belief.
The majority of people I know in the abolitionist movement including myself have experienced violence not only at the hands of individuals in the community in families, schools, at home, on the streets - but also at the hands of police or prison officials. And I don't know anyone who believes that any of this violence is unimportant or "excusable."
But we cannot just "counterattack" with our own demonizing narratives about law enforcement and those who disagree with us in order to challenge these perceptions. That just keeps the cycle going. I do believe we have to lay bare terrible truths about prison violence, but do so within frameworks that lift up the kinds of visions of community that we all hunger for. Unless there is something to fight for, and not just something to fight against, we will be on the defensive.
We also have to be willing to wrestle with difficult questions, not dodge them. Let's face it: there are some scary people who are exceptionally violent and not inclined for whatever reasons to change. They are relatively few, and we certainly shouldn't structure a whole policing/imprisonment system around them. But what do we do to help ensure that those few very violent folks won't keep harming others without just recreating the brutal system we have now?
And I think we have to deploy many tools in our struggle: facts and figures, yes, but also cultural means of humanizing the stories we have to tell. Most of all, we need to produce more cultural forms of imagination poetry, visual art, video, theater, movies, dance, posters, novels, new media that are powerful enough to even momentarily interrupt the fear that drives the anger that so often shuts down discussion.
We have to reach that emotional spot in people where they begin to recognize that they also have something to contribute to the story, and something profoundly important to gain from new approaches. We have to begin to deconstruct "us" and "them" in the general population, even as we seek to tell the truth about what happened what is happening - and why. The story of how we got to this miserable state of affairs and what we can do to get out of it.
--Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.
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