If I didn't want to abolish Greek life before the protest the other Friday, I certainly do now. The outrage and aggression exhibited by campus Greeks, the emotional overreaction, the unwillingness to engage productively with substantive critique—all this clearly shows that our party-happy campus culture is producing a generation of coddled conservatives with a strong sense of entitlement, dangerously delicate sensibilities and an alarming inability to cope with the real world.
I wrote the above as an exercise in parody, inverting the fatuous criticisms invariably lobbed at campus activists as predictably as cows pass gas. As it happens, I think it's all true. Frat students are so sheltered that the mere suggestion they've behaved inappropriately sends them into bouts of mass hysteria. Sorry, folks—your prison party doesn't count as a safe space.
Look, the prison system in this country is violent, racist and inhumane. As such, it's an offensive and inappropriate party theme. It really is that simple.
Had Delta Sigma Phi and Kappa Kappa Gamma but acknowledged this, we all could have moved on. Instead, we're stuck in an endless defensive reaction in which protestors' actions are subjected to repeated scrutiny—a textbook example of white fragility. Meanwhile, Greek students complaining that they did not receive equal airtime during a teach-in organized by activists apparently confuse a prison protest with a high-school debate. (Mass incarceration: pro or con?)
Not that our ungracious Greeks presented themselves as pro-prison. The consistent tack taken by frat folks at the event was to suggest that they were deeply concerned about the injustices of the prison system, while simultaneously questioning the legitimacy of abolition as a tactic and an aim. Given that these were the same people who'd held an incarceration-themed party not 48 hours earlier, their newfound passion for criminal justice reform seemed a miraculous metamorphosis, to say the least.
But let's ignore Laocoön's famous warning and take these Greeks at their word. Ostensibly, we're all on board about the injustices of the criminal "justice" system; all aware that there are more black men under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850; all concerned about the enormous racial disparities in prosecution, sentencing and punishment; all alarmed about the quadrupling of incarceration rates that has left the US with 5 percent of the world's population but almost a quarter of its prisoners—70 percent of whom are people of color, with black women the fastest-growing group and Native Americans the largest group per capita. Supposedly, the only line separating campus protesters from those they protest—aside, of course, from that little question of the prison party—is whether abolition represents a serious solution to these ills. I think it does.
The precondition to imagining a world beyond prisons is remembering that there was once a world before them. At the protest an earnest young man engaged me on this question. "We've always had police and prisons," he claimed. "Without them, it would be total anarchy. Surely you wouldn't want that!" (Actually, I told him, I'm quite open to the idea—but that's another story.)
In point of fact, however, police and prisons are remarkably recent inventions. While jails have long been used, in certain cultures, to house people awaiting trial or punishment, the notion of incarceration as itself a form of punishment dates only to the tail end of the 18th century. Meanwhile the modern police force is of even more recent provenance, emerging in England and the United States between 1825 and 1855.
So if earlier eras (and other cultures) had long gotten by without police and prisons, why did they emerge? The short answer is the need to protect a violent and unequal social order. In the southern United States, the first modern police forces emerged out of the earlier slave patrols. In the North, while police were also used to capture runaway slaves, their primary purpose was to enforce work-discipline, quell political riots and, perhaps most importantly, to prevent workers from going on strike. The common theme, then, was the need of wealthy elites to protect and preserve private property—whether to enforce the status of slaves as property or to deprive workers of access to it.
But American history is also a fruitful place to look for alternatives to incarceration. While indigenous justice systems were as diverse as Native American societies, none had anything resembling police or prisons (nor, relatedly, private property). Indeed, indigenous justice practices have been a major source of inspiration to prison abolitionist proposals for restorative justice and community-based alternatives to policing.
There are two things I find encouraging about this cursory history. First, alternatives to police and prisons have existed and hence can do so again. Second, most people do not naturally tolerate violent levels of social, political and economic inequality; indeed, policing emerges precisely because such inequality can only be maintained through violent force. This is why abolishing prisons is part and parcel of dismantling capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy.
For those looking to explore these questions further, there are many resources available. Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow," Angela Davis' "Are Prisons Obsolete?" and Ruth Wilson Gilmore's "Golden Gulag" are great places to start. The African and African-American Studies and History departments offer regular courses on mass incarceration and the history of policing. Additionally, the International Comparative Studies program is currently hosting a year-long lecture series on "Mass Incarceration and the Carceral State." Since our fraternity and sorority members have expressed such a deep interest in penal reform, I'll expect to see them all there.
Bennett Carpenter is a graduate student in the literature department. His column runs on alternate Tuesdays.
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