USA prison abolitionist let her six rapists get away with their crime, because she didn’t want them sent to prison.

Ideology is the enemy of good thinking processes.

I’m in what isn’t an entirely unusual circumstance in life – i.e. I have mixed feelings about something. The “something” is a story that a woman has told about her rape by six men. I have the utmost sympathy for her, and my anger on her behalf could very well see me happily eviscerating the gonads of each and everyone of those men. But, I’m also astounded and unsympathetic about her choice to not report those men to the police, because she believes in prison abolition.

I’ve heard a number of reasons why women and girls don’t report rapes perpetrated against them, but personally, this is the first time I’ve heard it’s because the victim is a prison abolitionist, and didn’t want her rapists to go to the prisons she wants abolished.

The night-long rape ordeal, in 2021, and the reasons for not reporting it was written up in The Nation by the victim, Anna Krauthamer, a writer and doctoral candidate at Columbia University, USA. Although the story apparently blew up on X when it was published on 24 January, I first heard about it from Georgia O’Keefe who writes a Substack blog called Woman: Adult Human Female.

Anna Krauthamer’s story is a long-ish narrative, in which she attempts to relay her feelings about her ordeal and beliefs in some detail, which at places seems a tad rambling. I’m not about to judge that, though, as I don’t know if one’s story about being raped could ever be concise and clinical outside of the courtroom. However, it comes across to me that she is trying to convince herself more than anyone that her stance on prison abolition is a better solution for society than imprisoning criminals.

In addressing the matter of why she never reported the rape to the police, she says –

“The simple answer to the question of why I never reported the rape is that I believe in the abolition of police and prisons. The less simple, less articulate answer is that to pursue prosecuting and potentially incarcerating other people is inconceivable to me, even when they have hurt me more than I could have ever believed possible. Because of this, I can only vocalize what I want in negative and inherently impossible terms: that all I want is for it to never have happened. The prospect of being a participant in other peoples’ incarceration is as alien to me as anything could be, to the point that I can only conceive of it in childish terms—how silly and strange it would be to have a group of people incarcerated at my expense when doing so would do nothing to fix the damage they have already so thoroughly done.”

I don’t think offering her rapists therapy and cups of tea, instead of imprisonment, would fix the damage, either.

There is a disconnect from reality and the vast variables of human nature amongst prison abolitionists. In their view, there’s no need to punish criminals if we just put all the right supportive community-based systems in place to help them instead, so prisons wouldn’t be needed. It would certainly be wonderful if we could achieve that, but as long as human beings remain flawed beings we never will, no matter how much of nice idea it may sound.

Ms Krauthamer is light on specifics about how prison abolition would work in the real world, but I guess that’s not what her story is about in the main. However, she briefly says that “Abolition is a structural worldview which ultimately contends that eliminating prisons and addressing systemic inequities will create a more just world”. So, basically an idealogue with an idea that sounds good in her head, and which she has thoroughly convinced herself will work. This might account for why – prepare yourself - she also spends a bit of time empathising with her rapists. Whilst she acknowledges that others have talked to her about how she might be leaving the rapists free to perpetrate the same crime upon another woman, or women, it seems that not sending them to prison is more important for her.

Such is the mind-mess of many women now, more so younger women, especially those who have gone to university. To do this to them is a crime in itself. Indoctrinating women to believe that they must feel more sympathy for rapists - and for men who say they’re women, as well - than having respect for themselves deserves a bloody evisceration of its own.

Classic example - Auckland University has a male criminology lecturer, Jackson Rākete, who says he’s a woman and now goes by the name Emmy Rākete. This bloke takes trophy pictures of himself in women’s toilets, and is a prison abolitionist who co-founded the group People Against Prisons Aotearoa (New Zealand). This is the kind of teacher that universities are letting loose on impressionable young adults.

The NZ Greens are donkey-deep in this ideological bollox, too, and also prioritise criminals over victims. Their policy around sentencing says –

“Enabling judicial discretion in sentencing, including by abolishing mandatory minimum sentences, life sentences, preventive detention, limits on sentence discounts, and limits on when home detention can be imposed instead of imprisonment.”

Te Pāti Māori (the Māori Party) go one better and want to abolish prisons outright.

It seems to escape these flippant idealogues that implementing evermore social services to replace prisons, is a fix that only works as a fantasy. Few people think prisons are great, but is leaving crims on the street with soft penance options for their crimes, which they’ll just laugh at, really preferable?

• Header image by jraffin from Pixabay