INCITE! calls for “community-based responses to violence that do not rely on the criminal justice system” (3). A Utopian response to this plea would be to convert the prisons which are already built into livable communities where the perpetrators of violence could get intensive counseling as a prerequisite for reentering society or be deemed criminally insane. This would be done with an underlying knowledge that all who take part in acts of violence are suffering from past harm done to them –whether through the insanity of their minds as they perceive their environment or from actual previous violent events.
The Prison Industrial Complex as it stands now reminds me of the way in which surgery removes cancer, the ‘criminals’ are the cancer and prison is a place outside society which while incarcerated the prisoners cannot hurt it. As far as I know there are two ways of removing cancer from the human body. One is through the medical profession and invasive surgery. The other is through a New Thought movement which maintains that all ailments in one’s body is one’s own creation do to the pattern of thoughts one maintains each and every day and because of this a person can change their thoughts and create a new thought pattern eradicating the cancer from their body. INCITE! concludes their goal is the “creat[tion of] a society based on radical freedom…this society, safety and security will not be premised on violence or the threat of violence” (3). INCITE!’s goal is comparable to the New Thought movement and if built up from an individual scale, I maintain that eventually the abolition of prisons can be possible.
