Put Them In Prison

I’m thinking about relegating spaces this week.  I am thinking about the spaces society relegates to the things that are criminalized and how I very rarely, if ever, have to navigate these spaces.  The prison and law enforcement systems are very powerful in separating the different spheres, and there is questionable elements of individual choice and social construction involved in relegating spaces.  First I think of wage gaps, lack of mental illness programs, lack of community affordable housing, criminalization of homelessness and sex work, missing and murdered indigenous women.  These things are all organized in my mind as products of structural inequality.  Circumstances that are created as a result of hierarchical systems of inequality that lead to vicious cycles with no exit due to lack of functional services and funding.  This cycle in turn, opens doors to things that may be questionable categorized as ‘personal choices.’ But without the appropriate community outreach in place, the socially constructed problem may be just as much a social problem as the problem of the individual.  To exacerbate this, many of the community programs in place (homeless shelters, sexual assault centres, protective measures) have the capacity to hurt more than help due to lack of education and intersectionality when approaching issues.  This, limiting the individual to even fewer spaces or forcing them into negative, dangerous spaces.

Listening to the presentation on The Kindred House in Edmonton on Friday, I drew connections to Angela Davis’ prison industrial complex and the ideological work that the prison performs.  The Kindred House discussion forced into my mind once again the criminalization of homelessness, and more specifically, the criminalization of sex work in Edmonton. We talked in class about Davis’ prison industrial complex.  As the corporation profits off managing prisoners, the wealth gap is reproduced that led to the incarceration in the first pace.  The use of labour in the privatization of prisons operates much the same way as using labour in the military industrial complex. This forces one to think about who is really profiting off the prison system. What, in theory, is promoted to separate good from bad and keep the greater population safe, is no longer acting as a boundary between the inside and outside worlds.  With the privatization of prisons and the constant building of more prisons to house more prisoners, it is evident that the two worlds very much rely on each other- we now both need good law abiding citizens and criminals. In talking about the negative relationship between the people who use the Kindred House and the police, I was once again left wondering which was a more powerful force in their criminalization: their individual, illegal choices or the ideological force that the prison serves in evacuating society from actually having to deal with its social problems (Davis 16).

Finally, in thinking about spaces, I have a personal story to share.  I live right downtown, in the middle of the visible changes in the downtown core due to the gentrification processes and the constructing of the “Ice District.”  I often will bolt up in the middle of the night and run to the window to check out screams, crying, or yelling and more often then not, my partner will wake up to me on the phone with the police.  Much the same instance, a couple nights ago we were both woken up by the faint screams of someone yelling “help” at the top of her lungs.   A man was beating a woman in a dark parking lot.  She was lying on the ground, we believe she may have been holding a sleeping bag.  He beat her before taking off and coming back once more to find her again.  Without getting too much into the outcome that transpired (which was little next to nothing), I found myself sitting up that night convincing myself the woman had a network she had created for herself of people who could offer her protection excluding authorities.  I believe this to be myself both trying to remove guilt from watching and yelling to the man to get away from my ‘ivory tower’ of sorts, but also to prevent myself from considering too much the spaces of protection that may be closed to her. If both were imprisoned, would society then not have to deal with her screams in the night?  How simple it would be to criminalize her being in a dark lot at two in the morning than to talk about why.