A Black Feminist's Defence of Retribution, Incarceration and Reform

Abstract

The main question that I seek to answer in this dissertation is whether prisons should be abolished in Canada and the United States. The answer I propose is that the prison systems in these countries must be reformed and alternative types of accountability should be implemented but punishment in the form of incarceration should continue to play a role in holding people accountable for certain kinds of harms. My Black feminist defence of retributivism is Kantian in nature and grounded in the notion that the justice system, and society, must be reformed for incarceration to be fully justified. I argue in defence of “Six Pillars of Reform”: prison reform, legal reform, restorative justice, moral education, reparations and a basic minimum income.

To reach my conclusion, I consider, and reject, arguments provided against retributivism in philosophical and prison abolitionist literature. I also focus on the case of gender-based violence within Black communities to resist the notion that my position should count as a form of “carceral feminism,” a term used by prison abolitionists to describe the views of feminists who argue that incarceration should be used to address certain cases of gender-based violence. Carceral feminism is also associated within the feminist prison abolitionist literature with a white feminist tradition. I demonstrate through my Black feminist analysis of the testimonies of Black women survivors of gender-based violence and the YouTube videos of Black women who I characterize as “Black Women’s Empowerment Advocates” that an intersectional, race-conscious approach can be taken to defending incarceration that should not count as “carceral feminist.”

Even though I defend the use of incarceration in certain cases, I agree with prison abolitionists that carceral systems enact extreme amounts of harm on marginalized peoples. I acknowledge the racist, sexist and classist nature of the justice systems within Canada and the United States and note the ways in which these systems reproduce settler colonialism and white supremacy. My arguments are therefore not grounded in the false notion that Western settler carceral systems have ever treated, or even considered, everyone as equal before the law.