Hello all. I am doing a project for my women and gender studies class that is known as our, “Liberating Action,” and it is our final. We are asked to do an action that will display outward movement outside of the classroom based in our class content. Our last lecture covered two concepts. One being, “Radical Love,” which I could easily understand as “Radical Empathy.” The other being prison abolition. I felt very strongly about these two topics and so did my peers.

We had some intense conversations on weather or not we could totally abolish the prison industrial complex. People shared their personal stories that related to loved ones wrapped up in the system, myself included. Everyone had different reasons for why their family and friends had contact with law enforcement, that inevitably lead to long relationships with the courts and prisons. The common themes in crime were, addiction, low-income and poverty, institutionalized racism and resource scarcity. The question that came to us was, how do we present services to people who are at risk for crimes of oppression?

This moved us into our next topic, “Radical Love”. As I understand this ideology, it is a channel of empathic tendencies that one can have for an unsuspecting individual. We circled around this topic with the idea of prison being the universal solution for crime. People added in that same old tune of our society needing to punish wrong doers for public retribution. More specific crimes were given for conversational purposes, for example; Human trafficking. The point made was that some people need to be punished with a prison sentence. The other half of this is to ask how that person became a human trafficker? How did that person get there and how can we meet them where they are at now? Hence, “Radical Love.” In addition, how can we as a society, implement more preventative services for individuals before we hit that point of crises?

Here is a clip of the famous Angela Davis speaking on prison abolition from a feminist perspective. (Same clip shown in class) This got our conversation going. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB-LsYyMFWI

Please feel free to inject ideas here. Any opinion welcome.

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