E 60: Abolitionists Rising: Reimagining Justice Beyond Prisons with Lisa Guenther

Picture a world where our concept of justice is redefined - where punishment is replaced with connectivity and relationship building. This profound shift is the heart of our discussion with the insightful academic, Lisa Guenther, who has extensively researched the effects of solitary confinement on individuals. Lisa gifts us with her wisdom as we scrutinize the impact of solitary confinement, navigating the complex concept of carceral power, and highlighting the controversial issue of carceral feminism.

We're unafraid to question the status quo. As staunch abolitionists, we debunk misconceptions surrounding the abolitionist movement and paint a vibrant picture of a future without prisons. Instead, we explore the possibilities of a society that champions public health solutions and reallocates funds from the criminal justice system towards building a more supportive and equitable world. We dream about a justice secretary who champions diversity and qualifications, a far cry from what we currently have.

We round off our conversation with the gut-wrenching tale of the proposed women's building in Holloway. 

The story is a testament to the collective fight for justice, a struggle marred by the council's mishandling of funds and ignorance of the community's wishes. Lisa shares her experiences, shedding light on the commodification of women's struggles and the necessity to amplify their voices.

 So, join us as we embark on this journey, not just to explore justice, but also to incite action towards a more equitable society.

Transcript

Farah Damji : 0:01

Welcome to this episode of the Rebel Justice podcast. I'm Fire Dancy, I'm one of the three women who started the View magazine and I'm formally an incarcerated woman. Today we're talking to Lisa Gunther, one of our academic who's spent a large amount of her academic life researching segregation and the effects of solitary confinement, which are tantamount to torture, on prisoners and people held in custody. I wanted to just touch on what justice means within the framework of who must I be in order to be there for another? I think that's really fascinating because I think our identities as women in particular were required to shape, shift to be mother, to be child, to be lover, to be friend. All the time we're shifting these identities, but actually within the context of if we want to be I don't know if we call ourselves campaigners or activists, or I think it's like workers actually, how do we be? How must we be in that frame, using your philosophical and also your experiential background as well?

Lisa Guenther : 1:15

Yeah, I think this was something that kind of came up earlier when we were talking about how perverse it is to separate someone from other people in order to put them on the right track to live well with other people, and also to blame that person if they start to crumple in extreme isolation, that they couldn't handle it, rather than it's the violence of the system itself. So I think the way the system works is justice means punishment, responsibility means liability. Like you did this, you are to blame for this. Therefore, you must suffer pain for this. And does that actually make sense, even if we look at it from within the system's own logic? Why would spending two years less a day in a concrete box in any way compensate for or make right an act that was in contradiction to the law? Like, how do those two sides of the equation equate? But that's, I think, the equation we're looking at when we look at justice as defined by criminal justice systems. It means someone has to pay for something and the way, the currency of that debt, that repayment, is time, time in a place where you're going to be separated from other people but also crammed in with a whole bunch of other people that you know you often don't have enough space to live well with if you're in an overcrowded prison. And I think what I have learned from observing and participating in transformative justice movements and restorative justice practices and abolition movements more broadly, is a sense of justice as connection, as building and rebuilding relationships, as like accountability not as you did this, therefore you have to pay for it but an invitation and also ethical pressure to give an account of yourself.

Lisa Guenther : 3:42

We harm other people all the time, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not, sometimes in ways that are criminalized, often in ways that are not so, whether we are in conflict with the law as deemed by the courts or not, we're dealing, we're trying to make justice in this relational sense. All the time, when we have a conflict with a friend or a family member, I mean, one response to that conflict can be okay, I cut you out, you're not part of my life anymore. Sometimes you need to do this with people who are not listening to you and are harming you in ways that just don't allow you to thrive. But what I'm really intrigued by and inspired by is justice as an everyday practice of relationship building and community building. We figure out, how do we?

Lisa Guenther : 4:40

We're always going to have conflicts and, as vulnerable human beings, we're always going to harm one another, deliberately or not.

Lisa Guenther : 4:48

How do we work through that without defaulting to that, you know, like conceptual and practical shortcut of okay, you did this, you're out, you, you need to be separated or you need to be exiled because you messed up? So, yeah, I think it's complicated because sometimes it often it is the people we're closest to that have the capacity to harm us in the most insidious and deep ways and, I think, within restorative justice practices, unless they also have a political analysis that's feminist and that's critical of patriarchal power. Sometimes women can be pressured into being the ones who forgive, the ones who you know overlook. Okay, I will, for the sake of sustaining this relationship, I will sacrifice what I need and I don't think that's cool at all, but I think part of moving through patriarchy and dismantling it will be practicing and building the skills for conflict resolution, that is, relationship sustaining and building, rather than depending on social separation and, ultimately, social death at the limits of that, for keeping each other safe and holding each other accountable.

Farah Damji : 6:19

That's so interesting because we I mean just in my own life there's very few times that I felt the need to kind of exile someone completely, just get them so far away. And even then there's been later years or months or weeks later there's been reconciliation in you know all but one case I can think of. But we're so quick as a society to just throw them away on the kind of human bonfire of the prison system, the justice system. And I think that's such a great answer for me personally, because if we were to take some of that personal responsibility and somehow infuse that upwards into the collective responsibility of the justice system, I think we could use things like restorative justice, we could use transformational justice, we could use all these other alternatives to just throwing someone away.

Farah Damji : 7:06

Because if we look in our own lives we don't do that very much and if we do, it's a number of anger, not in that kind of feminine way that you were saying, where we have to make allowances, but where there's a kind of reciprocal coming together of responsibility and accountability. But we don't do that in the justice system. It's so one sided, the voice of the victim is totally removed and in our case it's the king that's doing it to us. You know, now it's Rex versus whoever, and I think you have the same prosecution system there, don't you? Or you've got this horrible leftover from the colonial days of King Charles prosecuting you and the voice of the victim is so removed and the defendant, the perpetrator, becomes isolated, alone and almost like I see them on an island where no one can kind of reach them and it's just all these things being done to them.

Farah Damji : 7:57

And I think that idea of personal accountability and bringing that into the justice system is so important. It might make for better changes. Existing in the costumous days is something else that you've written a lot about mentally and physically, and how it affects people. Can you tell us about how you think it might affect people's bodily autonomy? You spoke a little bit about the situation where the woman was being segregated because she was being abused by a guard and then locked up and doubly punished, and the clothes that we have to wear to kind of fit into this strange gray world where everything is gray. So we have to be dressed in gray men's clothes as well. But I'm interested to know a little bit about how you think existing in that, in that costal space, affects us.

Lisa Guenther : 8:42

Yeah. So some of the writing and thinking that I've done around this is okay. So I wrote this book on solitary confinement and it engages with first person testimonies of solitary. And then, on the other side of that, I felt like I'm writing about an experience I have not had myself. I'm writing about an experience of the carceral state as someone who's never been in prison, like as an incarcerated person myself. And yet I live in this world that is totally shaped by carceral power, that is a carceral state, and that carceral state has two components or two kind of like interlocking actions. One is locking some people in to this gray space where you have to wear gray uniforms and a gray with gray walls, and then the other component of that that might seem like the opposite but is also working totally in tandem with it, is people locking themselves in, locking yourself into your securitized apartment building or home, locking yourself, locking other people out by locking yourself in to secure environment where you feel, whether you're right about this or not, that the state is there for you. Like if you're nervous about some stranger you see on the street outside, you can pick up the phone and call the police and you can have the confidence that they will be there for you to get this suspicious person out of your life. We don't have the prison without that component as well.

Lisa Guenther : 10:35

Michelle Foucault, philosopher, social theorist, talks about this in terms of bio power, what he calls bio power that within a population there are some whose lives are supported and securitized and kind of reinforced, and those whose lives are abandoned and micromanaged into oblivion, and he calls that making live and letting die. And so I have been over the last 10 years or so oh my God, that's a long time I've been really trying to kind of attend to, okay, what are the carceral spaces that are actually highly securitized, highly protected, but also locked into that biopolitical logic of making live and letting die. And so, even though one has a lot more license to move around and to do what you want and to go through security checkpoints, if you're on the side of making live, you're also deeply invested in and locked into a system of carceral power. It's also a system that makes other people's lives far more precarious and far more exposed to premature death than they would be if we had a system that's oriented towards building those sorts of webs of support that we were talking about just a minute ago through restorative, transformative justice. So, yeah, I think that there are ways in which our relationship to bodily autonomy like do I get to choose what happens to my body? Do I get to control the integrity of my body that plays women off one another who are on different sides of this social chasm of making live and letting die.

Lisa Guenther : 12:30

And one of the ways that I see this happening is through what some people call carceral feminism, and it comes out of anti-violence movements within feminist organizations advocating and addressing a very real problem which is, for example, a woman calls the police, thinking that they will come to her aid in a domestic violence situation, and they do nothing, like they don't arrest the abuser. If anything, they take his side, they might abuse her further and it makes her situation worse. And so there is this kind of impetus in some feminist organizations organizing around domestic violence and intimate partner violence to increase punishments for abusers, to increase a kind of reliance on the carceral state systems of punishment to keep women safe. One of the insidious knock-on effects of this has been that if police have to, if they have to by law arrest someone when they come to a scene of intimate partner violence, and they can't decide, for whatever reason, given their perspective, who is the perpetrator, who is the victim? They'll arrest both people, and so relying on the state and state violence to keep women safe has not been a very effective strategy for most women, and so that's one of the ways that I see the gray space of inside prisons not being just a particular site within our society, but actually being a very intense microcosm of relations of power and abuse within our society as a whole, and that the way we try to like dismantle those insidious connections is not by, as women, trying to get state violence more on our side, but rather standing in solidarity with women on both sides of the prison walls to try to figure out what do we actually need to keep each other safe from violence and abuse, and how do we actually build a world where there's less of that violence happening?

Lisa Guenther : 15:01

Is it by punishing abusers in a way that never actually forces them to give an account of themselves but, to the extent that they're targeted by the state, sometimes gives them this sort of sense that I'm the victim here, I'm you know, and gives them one more person to fight against, or one more entity, whether it's Rex, the King or whatever the correctional officers of the particular facility where he's held if he either does get arrested and convicted. So that's a very long response to your question and it maybe went in a different direction than what you wanted me to talk about. But I wanted to sort of get at this point that we're all affected, whether we've ever been arrested and convicted and incarcerated or not. We're all affected by this logic of the prison system, and the more we can kind of critically unravel our investment in that system, I think, the better chance we have of actually building a safer and more mutually accountable world.

Farah Damji : 16:12

No, I think again. I think that's such a full answer and I think you've really articulated so well for me how horribly codependent and co-existential they are and how one really relies on the other to exist, because we can't take a macro view of it and say, actually those people are getting harmed and I'm involved in that harm. Because it's like holding up a mirror to society and saying you are creating harm, trauma, violence, you're paying for it, your taxes are paying for it, your votes are endorsing it. And people who are not involved in the justice system always think it's sort of happening over there to someone else. It's not really me, I'm not a bad person, it'll never. What do I care? And then it happens to someone you love and it's just so. You enter this labyrinthine world of just miscommunication and weird words and outcomes that no one could even imagine, and I think that's why it's so important that we start to realize it's like joining the two sides of our brain, isn't it? And saying actually this can only work if this is working properly too.

Farah Damji : 17:17

We've had our own huge problems here with policing is meant to be by consent and there's been just the most appalling case after case after case of violence against women, sexual violence, murder rate in the Metropolitan Police, which is our main London the biggest police force, to the point that there's been reviews by Baroness Louise Casey saying it actually just needs to be completely dismantled and made into the smaller police forces than it used to be, because it's become absolutely unaccountable. And there was a really violent, horrible death of Sarah Everard which really kind of focused everyone's attention on. Hang on a minute. You can't call the police to help you and protect you and if the police are actually the ones who are gonna attack you and rape you and kill you, where do you go as a woman? You ask men, what are you worried about? What are you thinking about? Oh, I'm worried about the football, I'm worried about my job, I'm worried about my mortgage. You ask women, I'm worried about staying alive, I'm worried about not being raped. You know these are not things that are equal kind of anxieties to have in a society.

Farah Damji : 18:22

You very proudly describe yourself as an abolitionist. What does that mean to you in the context of women who others would say present themselves as a risk to society or to themselves? So I also consider myself an abolitionist and I'm always asked well, what would you do about violent women? Well, first of all, there's so few women who are violent just for the sake of violence. It's always triggered. I mean I sound very anti-men here, but there's always a man. In every single situation that I've known, there is always a man who's triggered it and I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. But what do we do Like when we're asked that difficult question about right, so you wanna shut down all prisons? Well, what about people? I mean it's very famous one here, you know, joanna Dehaney or Rose West, or people like that. Women like that how do you respond to that, lisa?

Lisa Guenther : 19:10

Well, it is a question that you constantly get asked if you take a stand as an abolitionist, and I think one of the things that's missing when that question gets asked is that abolition is not just about getting rid of prisons. It's not just about like, okay, well, this isn't working, let's eliminate it and have nothing. You know that. It's also a practice of building up and creating and strengthening practices of conflict resolution, of building restorative justice circles that sustain relationships rather than destroy them, of building the kind of health access to healthcare, including mental healthcare and emotional support and substance use support that support people to actually live healthier, more thriving lives. So abolition is this creative project that you know like. Maybe there's some marginal, you know 0.1% of women who can never be reached by any sort of supportive practice. We're just determined to destroy the lives of others.

Lisa Guenther : 20:33

But I think the phantasm of the sociopath who just you know like, has as their one goal the destruction of the lives of other people, it justifies a very coercive, very destructive, actually even arguably sociopathic system that doesn't actually fulfill the promises it makes to people, but somehow those promises still keep hanging in the air, so that often when police or prisons are seen to be corrupt, then the call is for more police, or somewhat different police, bigger or smaller, or, you know, more geographically dispersed prisons, and I think we need to actually need to take seriously and look at seriously at the whole logic of the system, which is not just a logic within particular institutions, but a social logic that affects all of us.

Lisa Guenther : 21:35

And so that's usually. At that point the other person has usually walked away, because I've been talking for 15 minutes and going in different directions. But the long story short, I think it's a creative practice as well as a matter of dismantling the institutions we have, and that it's a world-building practice, and we can't let the fear or the alibi that there are some people who are unreachable by supportive practices make the whole project fail, because abolition is also a horizon, it's an orientation, it's something that we work towards, not something that we assume we're even ready for as a society. We have to build up our skills, build up our relational muscles, to be ready for a world without prejudice.

Farah Damji : 22:27

Yeah, and I think it's also about starting to look at. You touched on those public health solutions, justice, reinvestment, diverting funds away from the criminal justice system. There was a week a few weeks ago, where every single day there was another story about a Met Police officer and abuse a Met Police officer and murder a Met Police officer and rape. Every single day and every single day, the narrative is just oh, it's a bad apple, it's a bad apple, it's a bad apple, how many bad apples? And the whole thing about bad apples is that they rock the whole barrel of apple, which is the end of the story, but no one ever gets to that. So, yes, I think you're right, we have to really look at dismantling and keeping this overarching framework. But also, to me, abolition isn't a goal, it's a way of being, it's a state of being, rather than just, yeah, shut down the prisons and let everyone out. I mean, that's not gonna solve the problem. It's got to be. You have to start looking at the underlying reasons why women in particular offend what the drivers are because they're very different from the way that men offend and the reasons that men offend and actually looking at how we can fix those deep rooted social injustices that then cause women to get into bad relationships that make them offend, to get into drugs or alcohol, to get into, you know, cohesively controlling relationships, to get into bad states of mind mentally, that this is the only option. So I think you're right. I think there's so much in what you've said that is so hopeful really, and looking at it as kind of a long-term, not a linear goal, but more like a kind of a spatial creating a state for it, kind of a presence.

Farah Damji : 24:07

So here we have a justice secretary who the latest one is just another appalling, just I don't know where they find these people. They pick the person at the bottom of the list. So we've got one at the moment and he's just come out with more ridiculous rhetoric. And I can't wait for the next collection because the next one, I think, is gonna be the first Asian woman justice secretary. Shabana Mahmood is actually my MP in Birmingham and she's an amazing woman. It would be brilliant if someone like her could. She understands the law, she's a barrister, she's actually got some experience, not just, you know, white, middle-class male justice secretary again. So here we have Alex Chalk. I don't know who the present justice secretary is there or what, even he's what the title is. But if they said, lisa, we've decided to make you justice secretary, what would be your? What would be your? What would you plan? How would you change the system as it is?

Lisa Guenther : 25:00

Well, it's such a tantalizing fantasy and at the same time, I think I'm more inclined like given the importance of perspectives of people with lived experience to make decisions that affect their own experience. I think my move would be to open up the decision-making capacity to a collective process that would actually involve people who have been in prison, who know that system from the inside out. So I think the abolitionist move there like and the most powerful move there would be actually not to be like. I decide this this is the thing. My decision would be to pluralize and ground decision-making power and to listen to the expertise of people who have been in that system and have witnessed and experienced its brutality from the inside out, not as guards, not as wardens, but as incarcerated people. Yeah, so I think that would be the way I would want to use that.

Farah Damji : 26:21

That's such a fantastic answer. That's just a great answer. Thank you so much. Is there anything else that you want to add that we haven't covered?

Lisa Guenther : 26:30

Yes, okay. So this I mean. I would really love for us to have a conversation with the P4W Memorial Collective and the view and the work that you're doing there. So the P4W Memorial Collective is a group of women who are in prison at what used to be the only, the one and only federal prison for women in Canada, and it's in Kingston, the city where I teach university, and actually the university I work for owned the prison for 10 years after it closed down. So it closed down in the year 2000.

Lisa Guenther : 27:09

And since it closed down, due to a number of factors, there was a series of suicides in the prison. Women lost their lives due to intolerable conditions in the prison. There was also an uprising in the prison that was put down by an emergency response team that stripped the women naked and shackled them and left them on the floor for seven hours, and security footage of that incident was leaked to the public. And then there was a big inquiry. All of these factors led to the closure of the prison and since it was closed, even before it was closed, there's a group of women who have wanted to create a memorial garden for women who died at the prison. So the prison sat empty from 2000,. It's still empty now.

Lisa Guenther : 28:01

The university that I work for bought it and thought oh, we'll turn this into student residences or we could use it for office space or archives. Nothing was ever done and the garden was never created. Ultimately, the university sold the prison to a private developer who is now turning it into condominiums and a retirement village and they're planning a hotel and retail space. And so the women are still fighting and have secured a memorandum of understanding with the developer to create a memorial garden.

Lisa Guenther : 28:37

But it's still very precarious, and just the fact that this space of punishment and death and suffering and torture will be flipped into a private for profit venture for, you know, luxury condominiums and business is itself a horrible and potent expression of the way that carceral power works. That it's not just that. The whole extraction of value from the suffering of women continues even 23 years after the prison has been closed. But undaunted, the women who did time there have organized an art exhibition. They have a website. They would like to create a mobile art gallery that can teach people about the history of this place, and also this memorial garden that will be a place to mourn and remember those who didn't make it out of the prison. So I think there'd be so much for you all to talk about together and to share also just how important it is to have some something like the view or tight wire where women can express themselves and share.

Farah Damji : 29:55

Oh, absolutely Now however, we can support and amplify, please, please do put us in touch with them. And it's very strange the Holloway prison, which was the big prison in Islington in London, was shut down and the mayor of London basically bungled a money to this supposedly private social private developer, peabody George Peabody, obviously being an American philanthropist, but his whole, I mean he must be rolling in his grave right now. The women at Holloway. We said we want a women's building. You know, you've killed women in there. I know women that died in Holloway. You've killed women in there and we want a space to honor their legacy. And yes, yes, of course, of course, no problem, of course we'll do that. We need a women's building. Blah, blah, blah.

Farah Damji : 30:34

So it went from this fantastic proposal to this really substantial women's building to like a couple of floors in the back of somewhere sort of hidden away. And the council has been, you know, bungled the money to agree with this. And it's just so heartbreaking to think of all the death and destruction that's now going to be these luxury flats, and I've seeded in our blood really. You know, the foundations are soaked in blood and I don't know how people in their right mind one live there, but apparently the flats like a million pounds and so can totally resonate with with what's going on there.

Farah Damji : 31:07

But they did start something called the community plan for Holloway and they fought quite hard. They got some good architects and designers and lawyers involved. But you know again, women are just our bodies, are experiences, are tragedy and our pain just all get commodified and all get nicely conceptualized into this lovely little village for people to go and live and it's like no, that's just so wrong. So I know how ever we can amplify. They sound like amazing women and we'd love to get their art and their stories in the view as well. Thank you very much.

Farah Damji : 31:39

I just learned so much from you. It's been such an honor and a pleasure to talk to you as well.

Lisa Guenther : 31:44

Thank you, and I feel exactly the same. I've just really appreciated your very thoughtful questions and the and I've learned also so much from from you.

Farah Damji : 31:56

The View magazine is the only platform by and for women in the justice system where we keep our experiences, strength and hopes at the heart of our organization, in spite of enormous pushback from those who refer the status quo of opacity and disinformation. They say that some might, as the best disinfectant, pull back the blinds and join our resistance movement fighting for a fairer justice system for all of us.