If Prison Abolitionists Are Principled They Should Welcome Trump's Pardons

It's either for everyone or for no one.

Let freedom ring.

Donald Trump has pardoned all those who were charged or convicted of offenses in connection to the January 6^th riot at the Capitol. For prison abolitionists, this should be cause for rejoicing. You should practice following your worldview to its conclusions. If you seriously believe in prison abolition, then it must be universal. And if you believe, as many prison abolitionists do, that we must be practicing pre-figurative politics, meaning that our current political tactics and guiding strategies should be of the same ethos as what we want to see in our idealized, non-oppressive future world, “prefiguring” the glories of tomorrow, then you should be glad anytime anybody is released from prison, right now, regardless of their crimes, their politics, and the politics of the people doing the releasing. It’s pre-figurative! We are creating the world we want to see tomorrow, today! I’m not being flippant here. I am taking prison abolitionists at their word. If we don’t want prisons, then we don’t want people in prisons. I do admire this vision because it correctly identifies one of the greatest evils of our time (not the greatest, critically), our inhumane prison and criminal justice system, and imagines a world where it is possible and just to tear down the walls that make up that system in furtherance of a better society. Every hour of human life spent behind bars in our country today is wasted life. Anyone who takes even a casual glance at the collective conditions of U.S. prisons knows how horrific they are. So set them free, all of them, regardless of what they did at the Capitol on January 6th. Prison abolition is a lofty goal, and its advocates must be principled if they want to be taken seriously.

Prison abolition is misguided though.

For the record, I’ve never been a prison abolitionist, nor am I a fan of prefigurative politics, because the first is unjust, and the second puts the cart before the horse. I will tear down viciously anyone who tries to tell me with a straight face that war criminals such as Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and George W. Bush should not be locked up for the rest of their lives. For the unforgivable crimes they committed, they deserve to have the rest of their lives be wasted behind bars. I have the receipts. We know what they did. I must be emphatic about this because I am of the left and the left needs to rid itself of the idea that there is no just cause to punish people. Is it ideal to punish people? Is it halcyon? Is it kind? No, but neither is the world. Even in a socialist society, my dream, a society without war and labor exploitation where everyone’s basic needs are guaranteed and the environment is not commodified but protected, the world will never be ideal nor halcyon nor kind. There will always be reasons to remove people from society for their actions, even a socialist society. Their confinement must be humane and enriching and hopefully brief and focused on getting them up on their feet again so they may return to nourish themselves and their community. That’s the ideal dream land. But the need for confinement will remain, because humans are human.

That dream land is assuredly not where we are today. Today, the government steals money from our paychecks in order to finance a genocide and the people who helped carry out that genocide are sleeping as soundly as their geriatric bodies will let them inside their multi-million dollar mansions. There are U.S. veterans walking around today who raped, tortured, and murdered countless Koreans in the 50s, Vietnamese in the 60s and 70s, Iraqis in the 2000s, and Afghans in the 2010s. I’m sure a great many of them aren’t sleeping quite so well as George W. Bush given that they actually pulled the trigger, but they deserve to be locked up all the same, or to at least see a courtroom before they blow their brains out. That would be a modicum of justice. And, though it is still a long shot, it is much more likely for us to apprehend our war criminals than for us to dissolve our prisons. Journalist Nick Turse, who has carefully documented American atrocities in many articles as well as his masterly book Kill Anything That Moves, where he interviewed many perpetrators of war crimes in Vietnam, knows exactly who these war criminals are. Turse, calling out the hypocrisy of the U.S. going after Russian war criminals but not our own writes in The Intercept:

The United States is awash in war criminals. Some are foreigners who fled accountability in their homelands. Most are homegrown. They live in places like Wheelersburg, Ohio (a confessed torturer), and Auburn, California (a West Point grad who presided over a massacre). Like these [Russian] veterans, most have never been charged, much less tried or convicted. If [Attorney General Merrick] Garland or Eli Rosenbaum, whom he tapped to lead the Ukraine War Crimes Accountability Team, want to find them, I can provide addresses.

I met an Iraq War veteran in a bar in Shepherdstown, West Virginia who confessed to me about torturing people, people he knew were just random civilians picked up off the street. I liked the guy. He was funny. I felt sorry for him. I would drink with him again. But in a just world he and his compatriots would be punished for their crimes. And not in the “I’m gonna feel sad about what I did for the rest of my life” kind of way, but in actually seeing a courtroom and having a sentence handed down kind of way. I’ll see you when you get out, bud.

In regards to Trump’s pardons of those convicted of crimes carried out on January 6th, frankly I think most of the sentences those people got were too harsh and infringed on civil liberties, but that is beside the point. Is Trump’s pardoning of them merely a way to take care of his base while saying fuck you to the frightened liberals who feel that our “democracy” came under threat that day? Of course! Was Joe Biden’s pardoning of his family for any and all crimes they’ve ever committed just a preemption of any future indictments and a way to protect our system of total, uninterrupted political corruption from administration to administration? Of course! But if you’re a prison abolitionist, you are arguing for eliminating the mechanism by which we currently mete out justice for such things, and these concerns of cynical special pleading should not factor into your analysis. The worst white collar fraudsters and psychopathic war criminals and rightwing conspiracist insurrectionists should never see a prison cell. Your prison abolition is universal, or else it isn’t abolition. In a future socialist utopia, prison abolition is an easier sell (though as I said above, I still wouldn’t buy it). But in today’s world, are you really serious about organizing your political energies around abolishing a thing that is so necessary in the immediate here and now? Does that seem worthwhile to you?

Of course the criminal justice system is weaponized against anyone that the state deems to be its enemy. I’ve written about that in regards to “terrorism” and racial justice advocates. Of course prisons are used to police the poor. Of course prisons are a form of modern-day slavery. Of course the capitalist state never locks up corporate criminals. Of course prisons are a site for unspeakable horrors. Of course prison guards have little to no compunction about murdering prisoners, even en masse. I am afraid none of this changes the fact that we need prisons. I would rather the left spend its political energy making sure that the correct people are locked up, the truly evil and degraded, namely our imperialist rulers, and not the guy stealing your shit for dope money.

Which brings me back, briefly, to those prefigurative politics, a common strain amongst the left. I won’t bore you with a lengthy discussion about nonhierarchical anarchist politics versus the merits of Marxist-Leninism. The literature on that question is long and deep and contentious and goes back 180 years if not longer. I will just say that Jo Freeman’s seminal essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness does a great job of explaining exactly why adherence to prefigurative politics actually hampers our ability to make lasting change. As Freeman writes, “Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren't very good for getting things done. It is when people get tired of ‘just talking’ and want to do something more that the groups flounder, unless they change the nature of their operation.” If you truly believe in achieving something as transformative as prison abolition, a tall task which will require the buy-in of most of the population, then I suggest reading your forebears.

And for a good overview of the very recent global failures of prefigurative politics, read If We Burn by Vincent Bevins. His conclusion is clear. “In some of the more utopian strains of anti-authoritarian thought,” he writes, “the riot is supposed to become the new society, but this has not worked out so far.” If our goal is attaining the power to change things, then we need to use the tools that work in the here and now, not some idealized future. “If marauders attack your village,” Bevins writes, “you should probably not respond by acting the way you hope to live when they are gone.”

Drawing on the thought of longtime Brazilian activist Rodrigo Nunes, Bevins writes:

…organization works, and you can use it for good or for evil. It was an overreaction to reject them simply because they led to trauma in the twentieth century… Yes, we have to confront that they have the potential for misuse. But if you refuse to use the tools that work, you are not really building; you are refusing to take responsibility, and you are ceding your power to other people. … If you want to help people, if your goal is to confront the problems facing humanity, that means a focus on ends, and it means constructing a movement that can stand the test of time, in addition to remaining democratic and accountable.

Prefigurative politics is great for some limited things. Food Not Bombs doing food distributions is great. Creating a little commune can be good for the soul. Endeavoring not to perpetuate the harms of the dominant society within your political organizing spaces is admirable. But the extent to which your prefigurative politics prevents you from using organizing strategies that actually work to gain power, namely using a hierarchical structure to make decisions and articulate clear demands, is the extent to which you are consigning your political project to effective irrelevance. Your commune will not stop an imperialist war. Your art show will not remove someone from office. Your meditation session will not abolish private health insurance. Your anti-oppression pledge will not defund the police. Your food distribution will not shift the balance of power. And yes, your nonhierarchical party will not tear down the prison walls. All of those things can be part of a political organization’s activities in consciousness raising and getting people together to take collective action. But the second you start saying that we can’t have leaders because that’s “oppressive” is when I know your visions really are nothing but pipe dreams.

To all you prison abolitionists out there, Donald Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 people of their January 6th offenses. I’d call that one of the biggest prison breaks in history, baby. You should think about the implications of what you advocate for. Think about what you hope to actually achieve and how you will achieve it. And ask yourself, who are you willing to walk the streets with today? The Sackler family? A Proud Boy? A Nazi? A killer cop? Genocide Joe? As for me, if I see a billionaire on the sidewalk, it is on sight. That’s the only kind of prefigurative politics I’m interested in.

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