By Against the Grain Radio
If the problem is violence against women, is the solution the criminal justice system? Many anti-violence activists look to the police, prisons, and stepped-up criminalization for help and protection. Beth Richie says that's a misguided approach, one that feeds the buildup of the prison nation. Richie describes the contours of the prison nation and the threats it poses to women on the margins.
Beth Richie is a professor of Criminal Justice and Gender and Womens Studies at the University of Illinois, and a leader in the movement to abolish prisons and roll back the prison state.
Market logics, commodification, extraction, and exploitation condition our possibilities for life and expose many to ever-expanding forms of precarity.
The political project we are invested in will require long term conviction and must be internationalist in its orientation.
Police violence is tied to other agents in criminal law enforcement, including and especially prosecutors.
You cannot separate the racist police aggression in the streets of the US and the racist US aggression against Venezuela, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Yemen, Libya and Syria.
So-called “racial democracy” has systematically excluded and kept black people at the dirt end of the socioeconomic totem pole in Brazil, as reflected in its media.
