Liat Ben-Moshe will join a virtual event with The New Press on Friday, May 21 at 2:00 p.m. (3:00 Eastern) for a discussion of her book,
Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition. She will be joined by Angela Y. Davis, Beth Richie, Maya Schenwar, and Victoria Law for a conversation about disability, madness, and prison abolition.
Liat Ben-Moshe provides case studies that show how prison abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Her analysis of lived experience, history, and culture charts a way out of a failing system of incarceration.
Does Mass Incarceration Keep Us Safe? — Victoria Law on Prisons and Policing elle.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from elle.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
We Don’t Need Prisons to Make Us Safer
Illustration by Keith Bishop/Getty Images
To the statement that prisons provide safety, we should ask, “Safety for whom? And from what?”
The United States now has 2.3 million people behind bars of some form or another. These are not 2.3 million isolated individuals their imprisonment sends reverberations into their families and communities. On any given day, 2.7 million children have a parent in prison. Incarcerating that parent removes a source of financial and emotional support for both children and adult family members. For families who are already in economically precarious situations, removing a parent can plunge them into poverty, reduce their safety, and make them more vulnerable to arrest and incarceration.
Victoria Law
Victoria Law
has been researching and writing about incarceration, gender, and resistance since 2000. She is the author of Resistance Behind Bars and the co-author of Prison By Any Other Name. She is a co-founder of Books Through Bars–NYC and the longtime editor of the zine Tenacious: Art and Writings by Women in Prison.
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