To Deconstruct the System , We must Deconstruct our Minds

   

The readings we've read this week have been a big eye opener and very informative in specific to Angela Davis book and Ana Durazo. The two authors give a unique perspective on how to address sexual violence within communities of people of color and how the very system that is suppose to protect people from such violence and achieve justice for victims are indeed perpetuating those acts.Through criminalization  and creating social,  racial and gender inequalities of people , these institutions help ascend and control the violence within those communities through the emphasization that their individual behaviour is what is being examined and not their race and gender which has historical and social connotations associated with it is due to colonization. Davis mentions the increase of prisons which further increased prison inmates which mostly constituted of people of color , majority being black men and women. She gives a clear view on how society has accepted this reality through the social and state constructions of criminalizing their racial identities and how they must imprison them to keep society at large "safe".

What intrigued me about Davis book was how she mentions when it comes to the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex ; how women prisons and  issues regarding sexual violence are often ignored and neglected and how the majority who occupy these prisons are women of color. Once they are put in the system , it's as if they have no basic rights to their bodies or identities and can be violated in a racialized and gendered form of sexual violence. Once they are criminilized and put in those institutions , they are not regarded as humans who are entitled to basic rights and dignity and the manners in which they are treated do not matter outside those walls. As I read the disturbing ways women were violated in those prisons , it made me sick to my stomach that these methods of inhumane acts happen within these institutions that we think protect us from criminals , just because these women are imprisoned does not mean they should not have the right to basic protection and privacy to their bodies. They have no voice , no autonomy , no agency , no respect or acknowledgment of their humanity , identity and presence of worth.  Just as in society , some people are given more privileges over others, within the prison system , white women were given an option to be transferred to mental institutions as their behaviours were justified through personality and mental disorders where as women of color and their behaviour were justified as naturalized and therefore deserve to be imprisoned. It is not to disregard or assume that white women in these institutions were not sexually assaulted by people who hold authority over them but there are differences in the way sexual violence is practiced in concern to women of color. These systemic oppressions do not provide  any regard to people of color and are not put in the same standard as everyone else because society is constructed in a form that delegitimizes their rights and right to protection against perpetrators within society  and within the state. Is prison abolition a way to dismantle these oppressive systems ? Maybe but I think we must deconstruct our minds and understand the ways in which we as a society , we reinforce these acts to be normalized in these institutions by doing nothing and that our safety matters more than the 'others 'and to believe we are treated equally under the law.