One of my core beliefs as a human is that harm and violence have historical, contextual, and structural causes and that individual moralization, punishment, and dehumanization are ineffective (and inhumane) approaches for responding to harm and preventing violence. Unfortunately, these ways of responding to harm remain common and are seen on all the sides of the political spectrum. On the right, some examples are support for the death penalty, criminalization of drug misuse, and carcerality as a default response to crime. On the left, some examples are carceral responses to sexual violence and gender-based harm, social cancellation in situations where learning and growth were possible, and in a tendency to reduce whole persons to their worst actions, treating harmful behavior as evidence of irredeemable character and as justificiation for social exclusion and dehumanization. Carceral ways of thinking do not just operate through state-supported systems; they also appear in community and commerce spaces, social networks, and other systems.

When harm or violence occurs, there is often (in the United States) a societal focus on identifying the individual person who is most responsible, investigating the short-term events preceding it, and punishing the so-called perpetrator accordingly. In my opinion, this approach offers very little societal benefit. First, it takes the attention away from the victim(s)/ survivor(s) and from investing social resources into meeting their needs, in regards to housing, health care, mental health support, and the other essential things victims/survivors often struggle to access. Instead, it shifts societal attention away from victims/survivors and how to best support them and onto sensationalized stories about someone who is labeled a perpetrator. Second, perpetrators are often initially misidentified, frequently due to racial, class, disability-related, and other types of bias, and such misidentification can have lifelong implications for a person. The American justice system can also get a verdict wrong, meaning that societally, the United States uses a large amount of resources to jail, investigate, and incarcerate people, who may not have even done what they were accused of. Making an example out of someone to deter crime and prevent repeat offending has mixed evidence at best and is certainly not sufficient as a frontline national violence prevention strategy. Lastly, assigning blame to an individual for a structural or societal problem (e.g., gender-based harm, sexual violence) does almost nothing to prevent that structural/societal problem from occurring again in the future. While there are cases where a person may need to be removed from society for a time in order to rehabilitate, many people incarcerated in the United States are not actually dangerous to the public in anyway. Instead, I would argue that institutions often pin societal problems on individuals through punishment as a way to avoid holding up a mirror and dealing with their deeper problems.

Importantly, I am not saying no to punishment in all cases. I am however arguing here that punishment needs to very much take a backseat to (a) direct support for victims/survivors to meet their essential needs, ensure their safety, and prevent retaliation and (b) community-level, structural, and systemic policies, programs, and other responses to prevent harm and violence. Concretely, this might look like expanded economic programs, educational initiatives, mental health and addiction services – and more broadly, social and health policies aimed at addressing the fundamental causes of harm and violence. Lastly, I believe we need to invest at a community and relational level in noncarceral processes for responding to conflict. Notably, I am not advocating for noncarceral processes between an oil company executive and someone whose land was impacted by an oil spill. I am rather talking about in day-to-day interpersonal conflicts and the types of harm and violence that people frequently encounter in their daily lives. Noncarceral processes are well suited for relationships between everyday people (even people who hold different social identities); they are not however well-suited for a relationship between a politician and a constituent or an employee and a corporation.

A final thought I wanted to share is that I have grown increasingly jaded with individuals and communities (even those who share my political, social justice, and other values) who use highly moralized, dehumanizing, and carceral logic and language in their advocacy, community work, organizing, and other activities. For me, when I see a person labeling other community members as “problematic” (a lot of different words can be used here), it often comes across to me as that person attempting to establish a moral hierarchy and making clear where they stand on it in relation to others. While I believe in the necessity of real political and social critique, it is unfortunate that critique has so often become about social positioning, building up one’s own perceived awareness and knowledge, and dehumanizing other people. I think critique should be about discussing social and structural issues, demonstrating our own humility and learning, and inviting other people into collective transformation. One of the reasons I have largely left social media is because it is so frustrating to see these dynamics play out so frequently, particularly among people who agree on 95% of issues. It is especially frustrating to me to see individuals and communities that emphasize non-hierarchical values and looking at the world in a complex way adopt highly moralistic language and judgements of other people. This is not to dismiss the need to name harm or take accountability seriously, and I have written a longer personal essay about how I approach those processes in my own life.

One of the biggest problems with carceral approaches to violence and harm is that they do not center transformation. As Mia Warren says in the TV series based on the novel Little Fires Everywhere, “you didn’t make good choices, you had good choices.” While that may not be true in every case, many people who have not committed crimes or done harmful things have also never been in a position where they needed to or where their capacity for decision-making was impaired. In these cases, positioning yourself morally is really just an expression of privilege. I think we would all do well therefore, before we ask for someone else to be subjected to punishment or a carceral system, whether someone’s choices were a reflection of necessity and their circumstances in life. That again does not excuse accountability, but I think it creates an on-ramp for a much healthier and transformation-oriented approach for us to collectively respond to harm and violence. On a personal level, I am not here on earth to tell you that you are problematic, even if you have participated in problematic systems or made bad mistakes, and I am not here to dismiss you even if others have done so. If you are sincere, humble, and willing to learn, I am not going to not associate with you just because others say you’re harmful. I recognize that not everyone operates with that grace, but I think offering it to other people is the only place we can start.