{"id":30040,"date":"2018-09-07T03:45:13","date_gmt":"2018-09-07T10:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=30040"},"modified":"2018-09-06T13:17:46","modified_gmt":"2018-09-06T20:17:46","slug":"world-without-prisons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2018\/09\/07\/world-without-prisons\/","title":{"rendered":"World without prisons?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prof. Liat Ben-Moshe teaches disability studies at the University of Toledo. (photo from Liat Ben-Moshe)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

University of Toledo assistant professor Liat Ben-Moshe moved to the United States in 2002 to do her doctorate in disability studies at Syracuse University, as the field was not offered in Israel at the time.<\/p>\n

Ben-Moshe describes the field as one \u201cthat looks at disability as an identity and a culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo,\u201d she said, \u201cwe read things about mad culture \u2013 \u2018mad\u2019 as in \u2018crazy\u2019 \u2013 deaf culture and a variety of disability histories, disability laws and social movements related to disabilities … as well as representation [of] people with disabilities and disability, in general, in films and in literature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ben-Moshe is a member of and has been a leading voice in the disability community. She works to educate anyone who will listen about disability rights, to change the outlook.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not asking for charity,\u201d said Ben-Moshe. \u201cWe are asking for what is rightfully ours, like an increase in disability stipends and things of that nature. At that time, there was also no kind of formulated disability law.\u201d Now, there is, and there are both similarities and differences between such laws in Canada, the United States and Israel, she said, noting, \u201cThey are all rights-based laws, discrimination-based laws.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Ben-Moshe was developing her understanding of disability law and how society began looking differently at people with disability, she started seeing correlations between how people with disabilities were being treated in institutions and how prisoners were being treated.<\/p>\n

Society has dismantled many large institutions for people with mental and intellectual disabilities. \u201cPeople don\u2019t really understand how massive these institutions were,\u201d said Ben-Moshe. \u201cSome of them housed 3,000 people with intellectual disabilities in the heyday.<\/p>\n

\u201cClosures of these facilities came out of a desire to really change the way that we understand what disability means and how to react to it on a social level,\u201d she explained. \u201cWe don\u2019t need to be segregated in order for the civility to be viable in our communities. And the reason I\u2019m connecting it to the prison arena is because there has been \u2013 and, today, for sure \u2013 a vibrant, although quite small, social movement that advocates for the closure of prisons…. By that, I mean prison abolition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ben-Moshe contends that people should not be locked away as punishment.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really a radical framework \u2013 to understand how we can react to each other differently and how we can respond to harm that\u2019s done to us differently … without segregation, without locking people away,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen you take this [locking up] idea of out of sight, out of mind, [something] that only exacerbates the root of the harm, you can see a lot of connections between this [non-segregating] framework and the framework of deinstitutionalization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just as some people thought that deinstitutionalization could not work, there are those who don\u2019t believe that decarceration is achievable. But Ben-Moshe said we can learn from how deinstitutionalization took place in most American states and in Canada, and how well it has worked, in general.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow do we learn from it, as a historical precedence?\u201d she said. \u201cA lot of my work is about bridging those two ideas \u2013 frameworks and social movements.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ben-Moshe mentioned the 128-page ebook called Are Prisons Obsolete?<\/em> by Angela Davis (Penguin Random House, 2003). In it, says the description online, Davis argues that \u201cAmerican life is replete with abolition movements and, when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly, the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom\u2026. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is no short answer to the question of how to abolish prisons. But, according to Ben-Moshe, the answer has to come from communities. The prison abolition movement in the United States, she said, is led by the black feminist movement and, in Canada, it is led by indigenous groups, as these communities are most impacted by the prison system.<\/p>\n

Insofar as the movement\u2019s success in both countries, Ben-Moshe said, \u201cI\u2019d say, definitely, there is, in Canada, a pretty vibrant prison abolition movement. As it is in the U.S., it\u2019s pretty varied. Some of it does come from the indigenous perspective. For example, the idea of sentencing circles.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn many indigenous communities, there has never been a prison. So, we don\u2019t necessarily need to go back in time to see what it means to live in a world without a prison. We can talk to the indigenous people who have never bonded to this idea of prison. Not to romanticize it. I mean, harm has been done in those communities, but how did they deal with it? That\u2019s definitely something that\u2019s going on in Canada, as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ben-Moshe pointed to the somewhat new concept of using ankle bracelets, as opposed to imprisonment, as a misguided move. The way she sees it, by doing this, instead of reducing incarceration, the prison walls become endless.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are for-profit things that people who are incarcerated have to pay for,\u201d said Ben-Moshe. \u201cAnd what we see is that people who would have not even been incarcerated before now get ankle bracelets.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the same way that disability can\u2019t exist in a place with no barriers, prisons can cease to exist if people are taught how to better work within society\u2019s limits.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf everyone spoke sign language, those who are deaf wouldn\u2019t even be categorized as disabled, because they would just be a linguistic minority,\u201d said Ben-Moshe. \u201cDisability is not something in people. It\u2019s something in the interaction between people and their environment.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn disability studies, we talk about \u2018ablism\u2019 (able-ism), which is oppression that people with disabilities face. But, I also connect that to racism, sexism and other forms of oppression, to say that we\u2019re always living simultaneous forms of privilege and oppression.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rebeca Kuropatwa<\/strong> is a Winnipeg freelance writer.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prof. Liat Ben-Moshe teaches disability studies at the University of Toledo. (photo from Liat Ben-Moshe) University of Toledo assistant professor Liat Ben-Moshe moved to the United States in 2002 to do her doctorate in disability studies at Syracuse University, as the field was not offered in Israel at the time. Ben-Moshe describes the field as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[8349,8350,7022,1997,8351],"class_list":["post-30040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-decarceration","tag-deinstitutionalization","tag-disability","tag-mental-health","tag-prison-reform"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}