What is Crime
As I close in on my second year as a public defender in North Idaho, the idea that crime is something that is done to people keeps coming back to me. And more specifically the idea that criminalization is a process that is done to people. We are taught to think about crime as though there are unlawful acts that, when committed, should be punished in the interest of making us all safer. In reality, the process by which certain populations are criminalized is a process that dehumanizes, reinforces hierarchies of power, and ultimately destroys lives - all the while making our communities less safe. Criminalization is the process of otherizing, and intentionally making certain populations into criminals through political decisions that come together in a wide array of social forces and institutions.
Crime is an ever-present subject in popular culture and media. Despite the continuous messaging, these platforms do not accurately represent what crime is nor how it functions, and do more to obscure than to shed any meaningful light on these processes. Crime is sensationalized making unsuspecting media consumers believe they are the next victims of some deranged criminal; when in reality, the vast majority of the population we consider criminals are themselves the victims of hierarchical economic and political structures that sustain themselves on the back of their criminalization, and without that intentional process they would not be criminalized begin with.
The project of abolition is building a society in which the people who are currently the victims of these institutions and hierarchies are supported with the resources needed to thrive. Instead of being intentionally deprived of education, healthcare, and housing through a system of austerity, the average “criminal” would be given the support necessary to not be swept up in the crushing reality of criminalization. There are many who feel that this solution will never fully do away with crime, that even people with all their material needs met sometimes commit heinous acts like rape and murder. That may very well be true, but the fact remains that the vast majority of people in prison are not wealthy. According to the prison policy initiative, incarcerated people have a median income of $19,185 prior to their imprisonment. Regardless of whether or not wealthy people also commit crimes, they generally are not in prison for them. Moreover, the singular carceral solution begs the question: is our broader system of criminalization worth the costs of entrenching prison and police power, that prevent us from actually solving or preventing those heinous acts?
Moving on from these carceral systems of punishment requires a clear-eyed look at what crime is, what it means, and who actually commits it. Immeasurable damage is done by the most powerful members and institutions in society, for example, wage theft each year by corporations dwarfs all property theft but it is rarely considered crime. When it is, it’s almost always handled in civil court instead of brutally criminalized. Board members are rarely hauled out in front of judges in shackles, that treatment is saved for a specific type of property theft that falls clearly along race and class lines. Wage theft, pollution of air and water, are all handled differently than the systems of criminalization that wraps up millions of working Americans. The more money one has, the less likely they are to be criminalized' and the systemic response will almost always be skewed in such a way to protect their power and position. Think of Sam Bankman-Fried out on $250 million dollar bail after committing financial fraud of massive proportions while 450,000 languish in local jails in pre-trial detention because they are unable to place bail which is often less than $500. Neither SBF, nor the 450,000 in pre-trial detention have been found guilty of any crime, but the privileges and protections available amount to two completely different systems.
Media coverage often focuses on the most violent and sensational crimes, leaving the impression that these events are far more frequent than they are, and obscuring the fact that the systems ostensibly there to deal with the fallout actually make our communities more violent and less safe. Incarceration wraps millions up in a system of state surveillance and violence. This incredibly violent and destructive system is somehow always seen as necessary and needed. And the alternative would just leave the public in danger. This view is a distortion of the actual facts and evidence - studies show that greater police presence and longer prison sentences have no impact on crime, and if anything increase the crime rate - and these solutions totally fail to see the possibilities of building alternatives to replace failed carceral solutions.
Some may see it as a question of proportion. For every rapist or murderer brought to justice, there are hundreds of petty trespasses, small thefts, battery, and assaults that lead to charges but barely rise above the level of interpersonal dispute; and all manner of drug and alcohol related offenses that are best classified as victimless crimes. In almost every case, none of these “crimes” are prevented by police, jails, and prisons; and to the extent they are solved, victims are rarely made whole and the social forces that led to their victimization are all but completely ignored.
This isn’t to say there should be no recourse for people who harm other people; however, police and prisons do nothing but endanger the people who they interact with. It’s eye-for-an-eye justice that leaves everyone worse off and doesn’t solve any of the root causes of what the media report on as “crime.” Yet that doesn’t stop crime from being pitched as an existential crisis coming for anyone and everyone in an attempt to justify those systems.
Criminalization is a force used to protect the powerful and further marginalize the marginalized. The goal of abolition is to attack those marginalizations often by eroding the structures of power that keep them in place to begin with. That should also be the goal of socialist politics, which are a much-needed antidote to the political structures that uphold capitalist power structures, chief among those structures being criminalization. It’s worth pondering what exactly is criminalized and what goes without sanction.
Criminalization and the Creation of Criminals
Each year businesses commit wage theft to the tune of $50 billion dollars, but it is essentially never prosecuted. The wealthy and powerful evade over $1 trillion dollars in taxes yet IRS scrutiny and criminal charges rarely follow. Fraudulent overdraft fees amount to more money taken out of people’s pockets than all burglary, larceny, car theft, and shoplifting combined, yet there is no urgency from the criminal legal system to solve that problem. It’s also probably worth mentioning that police civil asset forfeiture (state-sanctioned police theft) also significantly outpaces these numbers.
Direct deaths from corporate air and water pollution significantly outweigh the life lost from manslaughter and all forms of murder—even if you count police murders in these numbers, which official crime statistics rarely do. Lack of healthcare and housing is rarely seen as a violent crime, but those who uphold the current capitalist status quo and most benefit from it are directly responsible for the violence that is artificially locking people out of these resources, oftentimes to directly profit from their misery. Deaths from pollution and austerity are just seen as unfortunate but necessary consequences of our system, not something worth preventing by cracking down on the perpetrators.
If all this brutality is rarely considered criminal, what is criminal? And why? Again, criminalization is a deliberate process that is used to otherize and ostracize in the reinforcement of the status quo and power structures that benefit from its continuance. Corporate malfeasance isn’t criminally prosecuted, but all manner of victimless drug and property crimes are, with many held in pre-trial detention sometimes for years. Marginalized and impoverished populations come into contact with police and the carceral state more frequently than their wealthier counterparts that are spared this inconvenience. For this reason, minor assaults and batteries that have no lasting damage become the subject of the carceral surveillance state and lead to charges, convictions, and incarceration. For millions, untreated substance abuse and mental health issues are met with failed tough-on-crime policies instead of a helping hand. The list goes on and on. It’s by design that the punishment these “crimes” bring nearly entirely fall on the poor and working class, the black and brown, the gender non-conforming; and increase the marginalizations that put these groups at risk to begin with.
Jail and prison rip people from their families and communities, prevent them from working or maintaining an income, work, a place to live, and stability are all lost, and incarceration almost always exacerbates health and mental health issues. Policing is carried out with the intention of filling jails and prisons, not rehabilitating or providing social services. And so it’s incredibly important to be very skeptical of the notion that filling jails and prisons actually improves society; and if it does, we must always press these institutions to prove that openly and publicly. But again, they don’t; they are centers of violence that breed precarity and devastate lives. The only tools that police have are jails and prisons, and if everything looks like a nail to a hammer: police are the hammers and the unsuspecting members of the public are the nails.
Jails and prisons are sites of violence, and also provide the structural component necessary to ignore broader systemic violence. The complex multifaceted social problems that eventually come to criminalize people are all swept under the rug instead of dealt with on their own terms. Austerity and a lack of resources is allowed to fester until people are met with the only meaningful social response provided: policing and incarceration. The path of marginalization that leads to criminalization is marked by a distinct lack of social investment; abolition aims to turn austerity on its head and invest in people before they find themselves in the clutches of criminalization to begin with.
Abolition as an Alternative
One criticism that is often made in bad faith against abolition is the idea that abolitionists do not provide alternatives to police and prisons. That’s simply just not true. Abolitionist, black feminist and marxist organizers, writers and journalists have written extensively on abolitionist frameworks and alternatives. It doesn’t take much research to find, nor is it impossible to imagine what those alternatives might look like. The vast majority of functions police carry out could be carried out by other actors and institutions and everyone, including the police, would likely be better off if that was the case.
Currently, police respond to all manner of mental health and substance abuse related crises, despite their being ill-equipped to respond to the situation, and often escalating to violence that never would have happened absent the police. Social workers and mental health professionals are much better suited to provide the de-escalation, treatment, and resources needed to resolve these crises. Alternatives to armed officers should focus on de-escalation and plugging people into systems designed to treat mental illness and the material deprivation that often exacerbates it. It’s important not to recreate carceral systems under the guise of healthcare via commitment or other means, but carefully reconstructing what first responders look like could help avoid this dilemma. There is no reason for armed officers to respond to mental health calls. First responders more akin to EMTs with social work experience are far better suited for that important work.
Substance abuse issues would benefit from a similar approach. People making the autonomous decision to ingest substances shouldn’t be met with criminalization and incarceration at all: decriminalization is the answer. And resources and treatment should be made far more readily available than they are. In a system with broad socially supported resources made available for free at the point of service, most people would engage with these institutions before their substance abuse issues grew so unchecked as to be deleterious to the community. For most people, once those problems reach that point and some intervention is necessary, allowing that to happen on the interpersonal, family, and community level, instead of at the behest of armed officers and to avoid incarceration, would leave everyone better off. Again, think EMTs and social workers instead of armed officers.
Likewise, there is no reason for armed officers to serve as the enforcers of traffic and low level city code violations. Speeding is dangerous, and in a society that provides little to no public transportation for its population, a check on that sort of behavior is needed. However,it shouldn’t involve an armed officer with the potential to escalate that contact into violence or incarceration. If the lack of that threat of violence encourages people to run or try to avoid consequences (although it's unclear that this is true), they can be tracked down through vehicle registration or other means of enforcement and brought to account proportionate to any damage caused. There is no need to engage in a dangerous chase or threaten force simply to bring people to heel. The vast majority of people comply without the threat of state-sanctioned violence and removing that from most equations would leave everyone better off.
For truely violent behavior like rape and murder, police do not serve as points of prevention or intervention in a timely and effective manner. Police, prisons, and jails do not make victims whole on the back end and serve to perpetuate violence. If anything, there is evidence to show that they make the problem worse, with victims being afraid to report abuse to police, and often ending up criminalized and incarcerated themselves. This isn’t to say there wouldn’t be some specialized force or institution available to respond to active shooters or intervene in truly violent behavior when possible, but it’s worth noting that the current systems we have in place do not serve this function effectively. There is no need to tie what should be a limited and specialized response to the broader structure of police that and have been shown to target victims rather than help them, and criminalize all manner of other behavior that does not rise to the level of the type of violence police need to be present for. Murder and rape are edge cases in the broader criminal legal system, they make up about 15% of the actually convicted prison population. We accept all kinds of murder mentioned above in the form of air and water pollution, the perpetrators of which never see a court much less a prison cell. This minor segment does not justify the sweeping system of surveillance and violence that does little to prevent these acts or make people whole once they happen anyway.
Material support, housing, education, and treatment are a better response to most of the behavior that is currently criminalized. Meeting people’s material needs is the only way to make our communities safer. It’s important to carry out these policies in a way that they don’t just recreate carceral solutions and surveillance, but that can be done and has begun in ways described above.These are possibilities that imagine a transition to a different society with less carceral responses and less reliance on the violent institutions that feed the carceral state. The broader project of abolition also imagines transitioning from our current system of Keynesian carcerality and social austerity into something different entirely - and investing in people’s material and social needs in such a way that intentionally prevents criminalization. Looking at the trends of other capitalist carceral states who nonetheless have higher levels of material investment bears this out to some extent. Social investment, paired with the understanding that the carceral state does nothing to actually prevent crime, is a future worth considering.
Imagining a world without police isn’t difficult. Those on the left who are hung up on carceral solutions simply lack imagination. Abolition is multi-faceted and imagines both the conditions required to make carceral solutions irrelevant and also those required to reimagine those institutions entirely. Understanding crime as a process done to people to enshrine power, and not acts carried out by the inherently anti-social against the powerless, is an important shift on the road to reimagining the carceral state.