One Good Argument for Youth Prison Abolition by Taiwana Shambley

ONE GOOD ARGUMENT FOR YOUTH PRISON A ZINE

BY TAIWANA SHAMBLEY

ABOLITION ABOLITION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

This zine was produced with funding from the Center of Urban and Regional Affairs, with the Public Philosophy Journal being its first home. Thank you, both. Thank you to Leeya Rose Jackson of Noisemakers Creative Studio for creating the zine’s graphic design and art direction. Thank you, too, to Chandler for your passionate proofreading edits. A special thank you to Jason Swartwood, Malaika Eban, Sam Koltes, Beau RaRa, Anna Hall, and Garret Fitzgerald for enriching the series of Youth Prisons and Ethics discussions that led to this zine. And a forever thank you to my ancestors—Rest in Power, Ellijah—and Twin Cities arts & organizing family, friends, mentors, and community members for making me.

WHAT IS ABOLITION? WHAT IS

ABOLITION?

In essence, abolition is a social movement committed to ending systems of harm. Its roots are in the anti-slavery movement of the American antebellum era, wherein abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass described slavery as an institution that “is itself an abuse”:

“The apologists for slavery often speak of the abuses of slavery; and they tell us that they are as much opposed to those abuses as

we are; and that they would go as far to correct those abuses and to ameliorate the condition of the slave as anybody. The answer to that view is, that slavery is itself an abuse; that it lives by abuse; and dies by the absence of abuse.” 1

-FREDRICK DOUGLASS

MANY CONTEMPORARY ABOLITIONISTS

tend to focus on institutions such as prisons and policing, while others focus on a wider range of systems concerning environmental justice, gender liberation, economic justice, and more.

In addition to ending systems of harm, abolition is about practicing life-affirming institutions. By this I mean ethical ways of distributing social goods, alternatives to the systems of harm. Angela Davis and W.E.B. Dubois spoke of alternatives, these “new institutions,” in their concept of an Abolition Democracy.

“DuBois argued that the abolition of slavery was accomplished only in the negative sense. In order to achieve the comprehensive abolition of slavery—after the institution was rendered illegal and Black people were released from their chains—new institutions should have been created to incorporate Black people into the social order.”2

1 From “Inhumanity of Slavery” (1850), Frederick Douglass

2 From Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (2005), Angela Davis

EXPLOITATION MARGINALIZATION POWERLESSNESS

Unjust transfer of one group to another.

Unjust processes of exclusion.

To better understand abolition and its goals we must get clear on what oppression is. Feminist philosopher Iris M. Young developed a plausible framework that captures what social movements tend to mean when we talk about oppression. 3

She offers five concrete concepts (or “faces”) that help show what systemic oppression often looks like:

CULTURAL DOMINATION VIOLENCE

Unjustly stripping “have-nots” of the means and capacity to make decisions for themselves.

Unjustly establishing the values, beliefs, and practices of one group as the norm while subverting or controlling others.

Unjust attacks on one’s body or possessions. Members of some groups live with the knowledge that they must fear random, unprovoked attacks. 4

From “5 Faces of Oppression,” 1990, Iris M. Young

4 5 Faces of Oppression definitions are adapted from Coordinated Care Services, Inc’s CULTURAL COMPETENCE: A JOURNEY TO IMPROVED OUTCOMES Training Curriculum Manual.

When Frederick Douglass said American chattel slavery “is itself an abuse,” he meant that it was inevitably oppressive–it possessed key features that oppress people in at least one of the above ways. Well, is this concept applicable to any of our institutions today?

Contemporary abolitionists say yes.

By "Institution,"

I mean a particular way of arranging social goods. This is not intended to be confused with the social good itself. For example, consider an elder who is tucked into bed with a good book and lying beside his wife who, after an hour of tossing and turning and turning and tossing, is finally arriving at sleep. His wife’s stomach makes a gurgle sound, and the elder mumbles, “We would do good to abolish the food industry.” That statement, “we would do good to abolish the food industry,” does not mean “we ought to get rid of food.”

It means that we, whoever the “we” here is intended to be, should end and find alternatives to the particular way we organize and distribute food. The elder would perhaps be questioning why, despite there being more than enough food for all of us, there are so many people who go to bed hungry.

By “key features,” I mean those parts of a thing that, if removed, render it no longer functional. A key feature of a pair of glasses are the lenses; a key feature of a burger is the meat patty; and so forth.

The Case for Abolition

Abolition

Inevitable Oppression Argument

1. Institutions that are inevitably oppressive ought to be abolished.

2. Youth prisons are inevitably oppressive.

Therefore, youth prisons ought to be abolished.

Premise 2 is in need of deeper justification, an analysis of what makes youth prisons inevitably oppressive. While I don’t intend for my analysis to be comprehensive or infallible, I do hope to get further discussion started.

Youth funnel into the system through initial contact with police via arrest or citations. Youth are then held in pretrial detention while prosecutors, (often in negotiation with defense attorneys) decide what, if any, crimes to charge the young person with. The young person then attends a series of pretrial court appearances, depending on how long it takes the prosecutor and defense attorney to land on an agreement.

If an agreement is not made, then the case goes to trial, though trial tends to be a rare occurrence in juvenile court. From there, the overseeing judge decides whether to certify the young person as an adjudicated delinquent. This opens the door for the young person to be placed in county, state, or privately owned youth prison (what the county calls “out of home placement”), group homes, electronic home monitoring, day treatment programs, community service, financial restitution, probation, or therapy.

After the young person serves the requirements of one of these options, they then have a criminal record and are legally obligated to disclose this to potential employers, landlords, and the like.

Getting these records expunged (sealed so most organizations can’t see them) is an option, though it’s a process one must apply for and is not guaranteed.5

5 “Juvenile Court Process” visual co-created by the Legal Rights Center and Taiwana Shambley.

Juvenile Court Process

Surveillance

and

separation from community

are key features of youth prisons that deserve abolitionist consideration. Systemic oppression is at work here, namely marginalization and powerlessness. Perhaps, a more concise word that captures the injustice of youth prisons is “control.”

When a person commits an act of

harm or violence, all of the groups directly impacted by that event ought to have decision making power over what happens next. This includes the victim or survivor, the perpetrator themselves, and the families and communities of those parties. In the case of youth prisons, the system, through surveillance and control, takes decisionmaking power out of the hands of the impacted parties and into those of prison staff and probation officers, groups who are not directly impacted by the event.

In this system, the people who ought to have the power, don’t. To separate a young person from their family, friends, and communities is to exclude them from public life. This exclusion is unjust because relationships are the very things that help young people heal, repair harm caused, and grow.

Afterword

How did this zine come to be? First, I came to abolition as an 18 year old spoken word poet, following one of my mentors Kyle Tran Myhre from our literary arts community to MPD150 events. MPD150 is a sunsetted collective of artists & organizers who created the Enough is Enough report, a 150 year history of Minneapolis police, written through a community centered lens. When Minneapolis police killed George Floyd in 2020, I spent that summer supporting mutual aid projects in the Twin Cities, and teaching an abolitionist creative writing course to middle schoolers.

I figured a good way to get involved—to find some use for the political anger that hovers over my head like snow—was using the resources I had access to. A car. My voice. I thank Professor Karin Anguilar-San Juan for creating space for me to study, nest, in abolition frameworks with her Fall 2020 Critical Prison Studies class; and Professor Bibiana Koh for trekking with me through our Abolition and Applied Ethics independent study the following spring. Ubuntu. An abolitionist is abolitionist through other abolitionists.

Moreover, this zine wouldn’t be possible without my friends at the Legal Rights Center, who accepted my invite to explore a series of Ethics and Youth Prison discussions together, and my mentor-professor Jason Swartwood for co-organizing them with me.

In the wake of perpetual local, strawman discourse on abolition—I’m talking about Minneapolis-Saint Paul politicians, police officials, prison staff, and a sizable portion of our own marginalized communities—I feel this zine, a resource to both clarify and further develop abolition movements, is imperative.

Lastly, I hope this zine reads as a hand extending from your ruffled paper or smeared, finger printed screen, as an invite to join your local abolition movements, fighting for a better future.

There are plentiful ways to get involved, approaches that you and only you—with your relationships and unique set of skills & experiences—can use to be abolitionist in your everyday life. I welcome you to find them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A Black transgender woman with disabilities, Taiwana Shambley (she/her) is an abolitionist fiction writer and teaching artist from the North End neighborhood of Saint Paul, Minnesota, currently living in Minneapolis. She writes stories, she teaches stories, she shifts stories, all to imagine liberation for BIPOC youth in Minnesota. A Sunspot Literary Journal semi-finalist, her fiction has been recognized with grants from the Loft Literary Center, the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and her teaching has earned her the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Teaching Fellowship.

Her writing is published by the Minnesota Women’s Press, Belt Publishing, and the Academy of American Poets. A proud spoken word baby and organizer in her youth, her work is rooted in anger and black radical tradition. You might find her hanging out at local restaurants and coffee shops.

BY TAIWANA SHAMBLEY

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