Insurgent safety: Theorizing alternatives to state protection

Abstract

In the United States, public safety is embraced as an unquestioned social good. Broadly speaking, the criminal justice system is tasked with administering and maintaining public safety through the use of law enforcement, the courts, and prisons. First, through a focus on racialized police violence, this article develops a critique of the dominant model of public safety practiced in the United States—identified herein as ‘carceral safety’. Second, through an analysis of findings from the (Re)imagining Public Safety Project (RPSP), this article seeks to sketch out an alternative model and practice of safety that does not rely on banishment, policing, or mass criminalization. In contradistinction to the forms of state protection exercised under the seemingly innocuous rhetoric of ‘public safety’, RPSP participants conceptualized what I am calling ‘insurgent safety’: locally determined, anti-capitalist practices and ethics for reducing, and responding to harm.

Counter-carceral acoustemologies: Sound, permeability and feminist protest at the prison boundary

“…Evidently, more work is required in the fields of critical prison/carceral studies to elucidate and analyse abolitionist praxis in specific local contexts (e.g. McDowell, 2017). Building from the present analysis, future studies might examine the status of sound in contemporary practices of anti-carceral resistance, especially those enacted by incarcerated populations.…”

Monstrosity, correctional healing, and the limits of penal abolitionism

“…Reframed in critical terms, the movement of criminal legal autopoiesis thus corresponds to a gigantic juricide (Santos, 2002:16), negating the legal validity of local and alternative legal orders. The abolitionist struggles aiming to “bring into being an insurgent mode of community that counters the logics of carceral safety” (McDowell, 2019:53) are premised upon a radical critique of criminalization and penalization as instruments for the manufacture of safety. The empirical material discussed above testify to the vitality of the idea that safety is dependent upon the existence of carceral environments where “the dangerous few” can be incapacitated.…”

“…Whether they ontologize crime or not, penal abolitionists will most typically problematize criminal legal systems by showing how these systems are not only neglecting the needs and interests of victims and communities, but dispossessing, dominating, and harming them while radically failing to generate safety (e.g. Law, 2011; McDowell, 2019; Meiners, 2011).…”

“…Although the problem of “the dangerous few” is still oftentimes bypassed in the abolitionist literature (Carrier and Piché, 2015b; Parkes, 2022), penal abolitionists do confront it by a dual rhetorical strategy: criminalization and penalization are constructed as failing instruments to produce safety, and as destructive responses expanding and compounding violence (e.g. Brown, 2020; Dilts, 2017b; Kaba and Duda, 2017; Levine and Meiners, 2020; McDowell, 2019; Saleh-Hanna, 2000). The projects championed by abolitionists notably aim to shift “from justice as retribution to justice as healing” (Levine and Meiners, 2020: 181), where healing is part of a set of transformative strategies oriented toward the manufacture of a safer society.…”

Extralegal Agency and the Search for Safety in Northeast Brazil

“…Carceral security is 'controlbased' in the sense that it focuses on the definition, identifica tion and removal of threats (Jackson and Meiners 2011). Extralegal agents' visions and practices of safety are 'insurgent' (McDowell 2019) in that safety is brought about by alternative means. Yet insurgent safety is not generated independently of controlbased carceral interventions.…”