Your Revenge Fantasies Aren't an Argument for Prison

The carceral justice system offers no solutions to transphobic violence. It is one of the primary sources of that violence.

I got this message on Tumblr today, and I want to make my response to it very, very clear.

You can have whatever emotions you want about the horrific stabbing of Jacob Williamson, and in the privacy of your mind you can envision whatever kind of gruesome fate for his murderer that you want. But the reality is that the carceral justice system is one of the largest sources of physical, emotional, and sexual torment for transgender people on this planet. Prison is not a solution to transphobic violence. It is a cause of transphobic violence.

Transgender people are ten times more likely to be assaulted by a fellow inmate and five times more likely to be assaulted by a corrections officer, according to a National Center for Transgender Equality Report.

Within the prison system, transgender people are frequently denied gender-affirming medical care, and housed in populations that do not match their identity, which increases their odds of being beaten and sexually assaulted.

The alternative to being incorrectly housed with the wrong gendered population is that transgender people are also frequently held in solitary confinement instead, often for far longer periods on average than their non-transgender peers, contributing to them experiencing suicide ideation, self harm, acute physiological distress, a shrunk hippocampus, muscculoskeletal pain, chronic condition flare-ups, heart disease, reduced muscle tone, and numerous other proven effects of solitary confinement. Many survivors of solitary confinement never recover from it.

Photo of a prison division by Matthew Ansley, courtesy of Unsplash.

The prison system is also one of the largest sites of completely unmitigated COVID spread, among other illnesses, with over 640,000 cases being directly linked to prison exposure, according to the COVID prison project. We know that number is wildly under-estimated because prisoners, especially trans ones, are frequently denied medical care. Anywhere from 20 percent to 68 percent of prisoners with chronic conditions are denied medical care, according to the Vera Institute.

The basic needs of prisoners are also completely overlooked. Just last year a 27-year-old Black man named Lason Butler was found dead in his cell, having perished of dehydration. He had been kept in a cell without running water for two weeks, where he rapidly lost 40 pounds before perishing. His body was covered in rat bites.

Every year that a person spends in prison knocks two years off their life expectancy. The prison system alone is responsible for shaving 5 years off the average American life expectancy because we incarcerate so much of our population, nearly 1% in any given year.

This kind of treatment is unacceptable for anyone, no matter who they are and what they have done, and I shouldn't have to explicitly connect the dots for you, but I will. One in six transgender people has been to prison, according to Lambda Legal. One in every TWO Black transgender people has been to prison. And since we should all care about people who are not transgender just as much, let me remind you that one in five Black cisgender men go to prison in America.

THIS is the fate you are consigning all these people to when you say that prisons must exist because there are really really bad people out in the world. We should all know by now that this is not how the carceral justice system works. Hate crime laws are under-utilized, according to Pro Publica, and result in few convictions. The people who commit transphobic acts of violence tend to be given softer sentences than the people who resemble their victims.

We must always remember that the violent tools of the prison system will be used not against the people that we personally consider to be the most "deserving" of punishment, but rather against whomever the state considers to be its enemy or to be a disposable person.

You are not in control of the prison system and you cannot ensure it will be benevolent. You are not the police, the judge, the jury, or the corrections officers. By and large, the people who are in these roles are racist, transphobic, ableist, and victim-blaming, and they will use the power and violence of the system to terrorize people in poverty, Black people, trans people, "mad" people, intellectually disabled people, women, and everyone else that you might wish to protect from harm with a system of "punishment." Never mind the fact that incaraceration doesn't prevent future harm anyway.

You can't argue for incarceration as the tool of your revenge fantasies, you have to argue for it as the tool that it actually is. The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it claims to do. And the prison system's purpose has never been to protect or avenge vulnerable trans people. It has always been to beat them, sexually assault them, forcibly detransition them, render them unemployable, disconnect them from all community, neglect them, and then unperson them.

Put your emotions aside here, and remember that the people in prison have a lot more in common with Jacob Williamson than the person doing the stabbing. They’re getting stabbed and left for dead regularly too.