Stanley-Eric-Captive-Genders-Trans-Embodiment-and-Prison-Industrial-Complex

Abolitionist Imaginingstrans women of color, could access. It challenged me to make sure I wasnot leaving myself at the door when I entered abolitionist spaces. Thisreminded me of the legacy of trans people resisting state violence andwhose stories have been suppressed both in and out of abolitionist movements.So for my own politicization process it wasn’t just what caughtmy attention, but what held and challenged me, what grew my soul andsense of somebodiness. This means to me that politicization is a sacredmoment—a sacred process—and throughout my life sacred spaces haveheld and increased those moments and processes.CG: “PIC abolitionism” indexes so many apparatuses of state violence,surveillance, and policing, as well as modes of resistance, healing, andaccountability. How you do make the concept politically intelligible andtangible through your own work?DR: I’ll spend anything from many minutes to many hours (dependingon who I’m talking to and working with) illustrating how the formationof the prison and policing regimes are inseparable from the apparatuses ofracial genocide on which the United States is based. How is the prison aparadigmatically anti-black genocidal institution? Where do we find theconnections between policing and the land displacement, cultural genocide,and geographic incarceration of native and indigenous peoples inand beyond North America? What is the concept of “civil death” andhow does it shape a society in which 2 million people are locked up bythe state? What’s the critical difference between an activism that addresses“police brutality” and one that addresses “police violence” or even domesticwarfare? If we ask—and begin to answer—questions like this, we candemystify the prison’s apparent normalcy and political invincibility, andbuild a different set of historical and political assumptions that recast ourunderstanding of the prison regime as a focal point of a collective, radicalpolitical creativity—abolitionism—that takes seriously the monumentalchallenges of freedom, liberation, self-determination, and anti-violence.I’ll put it another way: If one is willing to commit to an unapologetic,rigorous analysis of what prisons are, where they come from, andwhat they do, in a way that respects and challenges the intellect and sensibilitiesof the person or people one is engaging, the abolitionist positionmakes more sense than not. This is not to say that we don’t need to engagein simultaneous conversations about how to deal with repressive, oppressive,and exploitative forms of structural violence that would not simply327