- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
A black mom was trying to cross the street from a bus stop, because the nearest crosswalk was almost a mile away. A driver hits her child and she gets blamed for “jay walking”. Just an insanely evil country.
I disagree with the entire conception of punitive and carceral justice, as does the data when comparing to systems based on restorative and community driven justice approaches that directly empower the community to effect justice.
I think that in order to effect any meaningful change in criminality, including simple criminality such as we have here, we need to entirely abandon the idea that punishing people is an effective approach to reducing criminality. We literally have decades of data showing the opposite, that criminalization and carceral Justice create criminals and create more effective and dangerous criminals. Why would it be any different in this case?
We need to focus on restoring the victims as much as possible, and empowering them within the justice system to have a meaningful say in whatever actions are taken towards that restoration and prevention of further crime, but not by empowering them to criminalize and incarcerate people.
If our goals in reacting to crime are to minimize harm to victims, minimize future harms to other unrelated potential victims, and to restore to the best of our ability the harms done by the perpetrator, then we should focus on that, and not punishing those who commit crime, because the two are unrelated.
Putting peope in prison was not the point of my original post; preventing repeat dangerous drivers from harming more people was. I’m absolutely open to alternatives to incarceration.
Do you have some examples of what could be done to minimize harm to victims and, in particular, prevent future crime?