A group of students met in a crowded room in the Public Affairs Center on Monday afternoon to get a glimpse at what activism looks like beyond college life. Wesleyan’s Prisoner Research and Education Project (WesPREP) invited David Stein ’06, a former member of the organization, back to the University to speak about his ideas on the prison industrial complex and his work with the prison abolition organization Critical Resistance.
Stein began the talk by describing his recent work with Critical Resistance, fighting a proposal in California’s state legislature that aimed to expand the state’s prison system to hold an additional 78,000 people. The plan, created to address massive overcrowding in California’s prisons, would allow for the building of small, minimum-security women’s prisons.
Stein asserted that, despite what has been portrayed by politicians and the media as a benign effort to reform the system and address its gender problems, the construction of these new prisons would only lead to more prisoners and the government’s further encroachment on general freedom. Stein and his colleagues have been fighting this new proposal through work in the legislature.
Stein explained that the philosophy behind Critical Resistance was basically against the current system of detention.
“What we’re really in favor of is both abolishing prisons as buildings and abolishing a set of relationships,” he said.
Referring to a paper he wrote entitled “Conceptual Exorcism and the Idea of Rehabilitation,” Stein decried what he termed “the paradigm of rehabilitation.” Under this paradigm, he asserted, crime is viewed as a part of the criminal’s identity. The prison industrial complex thrives as a result of a societal belief that these so-called criminals must expunge this criminality from their being, something they can only do through the rehabilitation that prisons offer.
“I think we really need to challenge this sort of grand narrative of rehabilitation,” Stein said.
He went on to state that, rather than offering rehabilitation, prisons instead function to sanction state violence and to reinforce the gender binary and racism, among other societal ills.
The structure of the talk was informal. Stein was often interrupted with questions, and he frequently diverted from his focus to address them. Several students spoke from an activist standpoint, asking Stein how he might address various challenges to the idea of prison abolition.
According to Maggie Filler ’07, a member of WesPREP who helped organize the lecture, this activist audience was the target for Stein’s talk.
“We wanted current WesPREP members and Wesleyan students to see how alumni can find meaningful, sustaining work after graduation that grows logically out of their activities at Wesleyan,” Filler said.
Stein agreed on the value of exchanges between students and alumni.
“It’s hard to even view myself as an official alum, considering I’ve only been gone a few months,” Stein said. “But I do think it’s always important for Wesleyan students and alums to talk to younger students about their experiences, successes, and mistakes while working in various struggles.”
Many students asked Stein questions about specific activist strategies. Students wanted to know what sub-goals Stein considered most valuable and what means of protest were most effective. Rather than recommending one method, Stein responded that each person has to act in the arena that most interests them, whether it be civil disobedience, artwork, or working with elected officials, as Stein himself does. Only in this way, he said, can an activist be successful in the long term.
Students also challenged Stein’s intellectual conception of the prison industrial complex. Several people asked how those who committed harm might be dealt with in a world free of prisons. Stein first answered this challenge ideologically.
“Why someone ends up in prison and how someone ends up there are not the problem,” he said. “The problem is stopping this system of violence.”
When audience members continued to push for a more concrete answer, Stein asserted that the response to someone who repeatedly commits harm, in the rare case that this actually happens, must come from within the community.
While there was some debate, many audience members considered Stein’s talk valuable.
“A lot of times people question whether prisons are doing a good job of rehabilitating people, and to completely switch the question around and question the idea of rehabilitation is a really interesting point of view to take,” said Evelyn Israel ’10.
Stein’s article on “Conceptual Exorcism and the Idea of Rehabilitation” is soon to be published by e-journal “Proud Flesh.” Look out for it on www.proudfleshjournal.com.
Leave a Reply