that post about who prisons should/shouldn’t be for is really surreal like I Do Not and Probably Will Never Have The Spoons To Get Into It as much as this topic deserves but. it’s wild how leftists on this site see very clearly how

1. police are corrupt, racist, ableist to their core, originally founded to capture escaped slaves and crush protests and riots
2. police only exist to protect capitalist interests and, i guess to give the illusion of safety to white upper and middle class people
3. criminalisation has always failed, always does more harm than good, and always targets marginalised groups. see the war on drugs, see how it hasn’t affected white people and our drug use in the slightest, see prohibition, see sex work
4. prisons are dehumanising by design and do not act as a deterrent to potential criminals
5. crime rates are a direct function of poverty and quality of life, and the presence of cops and Tough On Crime policies haven’t been proven to have any impact on crime at all
6. all judicial systems are imperfect, and risk people being imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit. this applies even in a perfect world to hypothetical courts free of all racism and biases, which we’re currently failing at

but we’re only up for prison abolition Until A Certain Point. i get why that is, the idea of rapists and unrepentent/unjustified/cold-blooded murderers On The Street where they’re ‘free to strike again’ is terrifying, on a close and personal level. but it’s amazing that i’m seeing people say they don’t trust cops, don’t trust prisons, don’t trust capitalist states to have our interests at heart, Except for when it scares us to go without those things. like if you’re for prison abolition at all, if you think in principle there’s nothing a human being could do to deserve their human rights being taken away by the government, then that needs to include the Scary Crimes done by Scary Bad People. because you’re falling for the illusion that the current system is protecting you from them already, and they’re not.