Instead of prisons: a handbook for abolitionists
Training in fear & silence
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Program
- Self management.
- Recommendations for action
- Street crimes
- Media manipulators
- Street crime and its victims
- Crimes of the Poor
| Training in fear & silence
. . . (Child rape) is not, by any means, the only unacceptable household condition (apparent in incest families). Chronic brutality and alcoholism are the two most frequently cited complaints (from mothers and daughters). The home is portrayed as an abode of constant fear and friction All of the children in these families claimed to have submitted to the fathers' sexual demands either because of personal threats to them or fear of future violence. In the words of a twelve year old victim: "He is twice as big as I am ... I can't fight with him. I've seen him beat the hell out of my mother who's as big as he is! Why won't he beat the hell out of me?" Yvonne M. Tormes Child Victims of Incest, a pamphlet produced by the Children's Division of The American Humane Association In order to promote sexual self determination and to combat the "training in silence and fear, we advocate the following rights for children:
Few girls reach adulthood without being sexually victimized and taught to tolerate it. These childhood molestations vary according to place, amount of force used and relation of the victim to the attacker. They include the "depantsing" rituals of young boys who attack a girl; the hostile attacks by men of all ages who corner children in movie theaters, parks and subways, selecting one victim after another; the more violent assaults of oral, anal and vaginal rape; the unwanted irritating and humiliating touching and fondling heaped on children by strangers, friends of the family, acquaintances, schoolmates, relatives. Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Program A constructive community service program in San Jose, California responds to the needs of both child sexual abusers and the abused. It operates as a unit of the Juvenile Probation Department and in close coordination with other law enforcement and human service agencies. Program objectives include:
Self management. This program is unique in that it is the only substantive attempt to apply the principles and methods of humanistic psychology to a serious psycho social problem. CSATP employs a model that fosters self managed growth of individuals rather than a medical model. Therapy includes individual counseling for the child, mother and father; mother/daughter counseling; marital counseling. which becomes key if the family wishes to be reunited; father/daughter counseling; family counseling and group counseling.
Recommendations for action
Street crimes Most of us are not telling the public that there is relatively little the police can do about crime. We are not letting the public in on our era's dirty little secret: that those who commit the crime which worries citizens most violent street crime are, for the most part, the products of poverty, unemployment, broken homes, rotten education, drug addiction and alcoholism, and other social and economic ills about which the police can do little, if anything. Rather than speaking up, most of us stand silent and let politicians get away with law and order rhetoric that reinforces the mistaken notion that police in ever greater numbers and with more gadgetry can alone control crime. The politicians, of course, end up perpetuating a system by which the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and crime continues. Robert J. Di Grazia, Boston Police Commissioner, Parade, August 22, 1976 Street crime has been officially identified as the major crime problem in the United States. For victims and residents in areas plagued by purse snatchings, muggings and robberies, street crime is a fearsome problem: the anxieties it produces are real and legitimate. Nonetheless, with the influence of the media, fear has been raised to a frenzied pitch. The fear of street crime threatens to destroy basic human freedoms including the freedom from fear itself. Office seekers exploit fear as a political issue without dealing with the economic and social conditions which spawn crime in the streets. And with the bulk of governmental crime control resources directed against the perpetrators of street crimes, citizens are programmed into believing that more military hardware and firepower, longer prison sentences and "law and order" rhetoric somehow offer them protection. Constant bombardment by the media's portrayal of crime and criminals must not mesmerize us into forgetting that the overall crime picture reflects public problems requiring structural change and collective social solutions, not military maneuvers. The "war on crime," a relatively new term, reflects the military perspective of the law enforcement apparatus and the "weapons" and strategies they employ.[84] The war problem and the crime problem exhibit striking similarities: In each case, strong social sentiments develop to support differentiation between the wrongdoers and the wronged. . a conception ... of the "good guys" and the "bad guys." In the case of war, as in the case of crime, it is widely believed that high values will be served by rendering the "enemy" his due. And, correspondingly, there is widespread distrust of any "soft" policies that seem to imply concessions to, or appeasement of, the "other side." In each case, the very process of defining enemies seems to serve some important functions psychological, social, or even economic--for the society confronting such wrongdoers. Edwin M. Schur, Our Criminal Society, pp. 1 2 On some levels the war on crime can be viewed as a substitute for the struggle against internal communism during the 1950's. The same forces and interests in our society are ready to "do battle" with groups seen as "the enemy in our midst." If ever there is a heavy reduction in the expenditure on national armaments and the threat of external forces loses some power to persuade the public, it may be that this threat will be replaced by amplification of the threat of internal conflict .... It is not possible to make war on events, and crimes are events. It is possible to make wars on criminal or on "criminal classes" because criminals are persons. Further, criminals are a particular class of persons with whom no one would willingly identify .... They are anonymous; they are disorganized, they are a minority group which can be discriminated against without prejudice. They represent a very attractive group for powerful symbolic political propaganda and action ....The criminal is a "natural" outcast. If the analogy of the "war on crime" can suggest a transfer of focus from "real war" as the threat used to herd the public along, to a symbolic "war," then the transfer of the threat becomes all the more useful as a political strategy. Thus once again, we have a basis in fear which can be used for partisan purposes.[85] Media manipulators Abolitionists recognize that the public's image of what constitutes crime is grossly distorted by the powerful alliance between the criminal (in)justice apparatus and the media. Not only is it a major factor in shaping public views of crime, but it minimizes and deflects attention from the common kind of crimes one's neighbors commit and exaggerates and spotlights another less common kind"crime in the streets " which is presumably committed by "criminals."[86] One can imagine the results, for instance, if that powerful media coalition chose to focus on the fact that in reality, the level of physical violence is greater in the homes of America than on the streets:[87]
It would not take long before exposure to such a daily media/law enforcement diet of violence in the home would raise the fears of the public to the extent that the family hearth would become as frightening a setting as the city street. Or visualize the same media/law enforcement coalition zooming in on "crime in the suites" rather than "crime in the streets." The public would soon be clamoring for stiffer laws, penalties and controls on corporations if they digested a daily diet of corporate and collective crimes: overseas and domestic bribery; economic crimes; corporate pollution; unsafe conditions for workers and shoddy merchandise such as unsafe automobiles to name a few. But for obvious reasons of privilege and interests, the focus of the criminal (in)justice systems and the media is not on corporate crime. Each week brings a fresh disclosure of dubious corporate practice. The acknowledgement by Lockheed, a company operating by grace of a historic federal bailout, of payment over the last five years of $22 million in foreign bribes, or "kickbacks" as the company prefers to call them, is current news. The harm to society from such wrongdoing is substantially less obvious than street crimes against people, but it is no less real and every bit as damaging. Massive, secret and illegal campaign contributions seeking as they do, disproportionate impact on elections and bloated influence thereafter distort the political process and dilute each citizen's political birthright. Similarly, the spectacle of the country's business elite buying up foreign officials in the name of profit undermines the moral foundations of the society. Yet, wrist slapping is the usual and anticipated response to corporate criminality... In paying an average fine of $7,000, the firms prosecuted by the Special Prosecutor paid off their fines with about six seconds of corporate activity. Most of the executives prosecuted are either still presiding over their companies or are now living in extraordinarily comfortable semiretirement. And it is still not clear that foreign bribery even constitutes criminal conduct under the laws of the United States. Editorial, New York Times, September 9,1975 Anxiety about crime is an opportunity. Like most opportunities, it can be seized for good or for ill. It can be used, as it has been, for wind in the sails of those who would glide into power with meaningless promises. Gilbert M. Cantor, "An End to Crime and Punishment," The Shingle, p. 103 The damage wrought by these media manipulators is tremendous. As one newscaster points out: In essence, the media defines who and what is legitimate .... What is good and right and safe for society ... and what isn't. It is key to the whole process of identifying and isolating the people deemed dangerous or undesirable by those who control the media. In a society run by the very rich ... it is the concerns of the poor that become somehow illegitimate, unimportant. To an overwhelmingly white nation, Blacks are outside the pall, darkly dangerous, those who threaten the structure, thru mass movement, individual action, or simply by their very existence, lose their right to be portrayed as human beings in the media. They become, in short, "criminals" of one degree or another. And criminals once labelled, have no rights that society is bound to respect. Hence, Attica. Who is, in fact, a criminal, then, depends upon your point of view or rather your position in society. More than five times as much money is embezzled from banks by executives, than is stolen by men with guns. Abuse of police power robs Blacks and poor people of their basic right to life and liberty. Billions of dollars in social welfare funds voted by Congress are withheld by the executive branch of government, in effect stealing bread from the mouths of children and shelter from entire families .... The media is largely blind to these crimes. Preferring to vilify the "street criminal" and "welfare cheater." By so doing, the media becomes an accessory to the rape of the powerless. Blacks must define for themselves what is criminal, within and outside our communities. They must include not only the street corner mugger, the drug pusher and the rapist in the alley, but also the corrupt and brutal policeman, the greedy slum lord, the exploitive businessman, the oppressive employer, the racist school administrator, the fascist politician and the war mongering head of state. The Black media must isolate and focus attention upon all the forces which undermine the quality of our lives. They must be indicted, in print and over the airwaves. From a paper by Glen Ford, Mutual Black Network News.[88] Street crime and its victims The Economic Cost of Crime (1965)
SOURCE: Based on data in The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, Task Force Report, Crime and Its Impact, pp. 44 49. Of the millions of crimes committed by all strata of society, comparatively little is committed in the streets. Middle class and upper class property crimes take place in the "suites" rather than in the streets, behind the closed doors of corporate presidents' offices or in the privacy of the home where income tax forms are filled out. Such crimes cost the public more than street crimes and crimes against property combined. In its 1974 publication, White Collar Crime, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that the yearly cost of embezzlement and pilferage exceeds by several billion dollars the losses from burglary and robbery.[89] Abolitionists are aware that poor peoples' crimes victimize mostly the poor and the Black, tho the media consistently bombards the American people with a set of false and racist myths about crime: Crime news plays a big role in forming public attitudes. A strong tendency to cover crimes with white victims and ignore those with Black victims distorts the broad picture the public gets on the subject specifically by making whites feel especially threatened. In fact, when the Community Renewal Society recently issued a computerized study of homicide in Chicago during 1973, two key findings caused general public surprise: nearly 70 percent of the murder victims in the city were Blacks, and only 15 percent of all murders were across racial lines. To compare the picture the public received about murders with what actually occurred, I checked Chicago police reports on homicides during the first three months of 1973 against coverage of the crimes in the final edition of the Chicago Tribune .... During that period there were 215 murders in the city, and 51 got some coverage in the Tribune. Twelve were described in stories that ran on pages one thru five. While only 20 percent of the murder victims during this period were white, nearly half of the 51 murder stories were about white victims. Up front in the paper, where readership is high, the imbalance was even stronger--two thirds of the murder stories on pages one thru five involved white victims. To state the statistics another way, a white person slain during this period had a one in two chance of being mentioned in the paper, and a one in seven chance of winding up on pages one thru five. But the chances of a Black victim making it into the paper was one in seven, and of winding up on pages one thru five, one in 100. From this it would seem that the public could draw simple and erroneous conclusions about crime: middle class whites are the most frequent victims of murder. In fact, as the Community Renewal Society survey showed, most violent crime is confined to poor Blacks poor Black victims attacked by other poor Blacks in their neighborhood. Phil Blake, "Race, Homicide and the News," The Nation, December 7, 1974, pp.592 93 The majority of all crimes of property committed on the street do not involve physical brutality. Violent crimes such as murder and aggravated assault, for instance, occur mainly indoors and the participants are usually acquainted or related.[90] The risks of victimization from crimes of the poor robbery, muggings and purse snatchings which constitute the majority of street crimes are concentrated in the lowest income group. Nonwhites are victimized disproportionately by all major crimes except larceny of $50 and over. A Black man in Chicago, for instance, runs the risk of being a victim nearly six times as often as a white man; a Black woman nearly eight times as often as a white woman. Additionally, Blacks are most likely to assault Blacks, and whites most likely to assault whites. Thus, while Black males account for two thirds of all assaults, the person who victimizes a white person is most likely also to be white.[91] The overall impression created by the mass media is that (1) most victims of crime are white, (2) most criminals are Black and (3) the average murder occurs in the course of a mugging. Government statistics show that all three notions are false.... A brief Columbia Journalism Review survey of t. v. news programs, the source of 70 percent of the news diet of the average American, shows that during a one month period in New York, 44 percent of the reports on murders involved white victims of Blacks, while an even more misleading 86 percent were on murders committed in the course of a street robbery or mugging. In fact, only a tiny percentage of murders are committed in the course of a robbery. Murder is, in the vast majority of cases, a crime committed by a person who is related to or otherwise knows his victim intimately. Benjamin Bedell, "Racist Myths on Crime Promoted by Media," Guardian, January 15, 1975, p. 8 For those who are cruelly victimized on the streets, even tho few in number compared to all criminal victims, statistics are of little solace. The experience of being robbed or mugged is frightening and damaging, particularly for the elderly poor already victimized by circumstance. To a poor person, Black and ghetto bound, it matters little that statistics tell us that chances of a victim being injured in an auto accident are 16 times greater than the probability of being a victim of crime on the street.[92] The poor do not have autos. Of what use is the statistic that there is an infinitesimal one in 40,000 probability of becoming involved in a felony resulting in death [93] when the media and the law enforcement apparatus has raised fears to such an extent that homes have literally become prisons? The largest prison in America has no bars, no locks, and no guards. The inmates are absolutely free to go anywhere they want at any time they choose .... No accurate statistics exist to tell the exact number of persons so imprisoned. This is not only because the number is so large and increasing so rapidly .... No statistics exist because these prisoners are all serving self imposed sentence that only they can terminate ....Millions of ... formerly outgoing people have sentenced themselves to indefinite imprisonment within their homes and apartments behind locked doors and barred windows. Dorothy Samuel, "Safe Passage," Fellowship, April 1975, p. 3 Yüklə 1,92 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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