This week, a (necessarily bourgeois) judge, Matthieu Poliquin, decided to absolve another bourgeois, Simon Houle, an engineer that time, of any criminal record after he was found guilty of sexual assault and voyeurism. The sentence of 18 months in prison demanded by the Crown would have harmed the bourgeois career of the accused, concluded the judge. It is indeed quite fashionable that a bourgeois criminal can continue to travel as he pleases, especially if he seems to be of “good character”, as Judge Poliquin believes.
After all, prisons were never designed for the bourgeois. On the contrary, the modern prison system has developed rather to monitor, control and punish populations who offend their sensibilities of the day. (Here it would be necessary to cite many works as references, including of course the essential Michel Foucault.)
In Canada, the list of over-incarcerated “undesirables” is long. Indigenous people, who make up 5% of the country’s population, make up 28% of prisoners in federal institutions; blacks, who make up 3.5% of Canadians, account for 9% of the prison population. And corrections officers use force more often on these two groups of prisoners. One would really have to ignore all of North American history to see in these statistics a bias to be corrected with easy solutions, or worse, evidence of a “character flaw” in these segments of society. Criminal justice and penitentiaries, in this corner of the world, were developed in particular as technologies of control of black and indigenous lives.
Prisons are also used to watch over the poor.
Study after study shows that people incarcerated in Canada live largely below the poverty line, are often unemployed (and even homeless) at the time of their arrest, tend to have very little education and have a history mental health and addiction issues.
Prisons are, moreover, the solution that our society has found to keep an eye on the “mad”—and perhaps especially the “mad”—who don’t have the right social profile. Researchers profiling incarcerated people see the large proportion of men, and even more women, in the prison system who have experienced childhood abuse—psychological, physical, and often sexual. While we debate the place that rapists should have in prison, we too often do not understand that these establishments are filled with… their victims.
Survivors of residential schools for Aboriginals, ex-children of the DPJ, young people from dysfunctional families who self-medicate with one drug or another populate the prisons. At the mercy of budgetary austerity, the social safety net is being cut – but most certainly not in the criminal justice system, from the police to the judges. Failing to heal traumas and their devastating effects on vulnerable communities, their manifestations are punished and the humans who embody them are caged.
It is not a question here of a “defect” of our criminal justice, but of the full and complete manifestation of the bourgeois logic on which it was created.
We are therefore dealing with a system that is not “broken”, but which works wonderfully. It produces exactly what it was set up for: to govern the social banishment of some to guarantee the comfort of others. Prisons, basically, are the first and best-funded of the “not in my backyard” movements. They are not used to solve social problems, but to ensure that they are carried out as far as possible from the good people. This is why, on the other hand, rehabilitation and healing are far from being the main concerns of the system.
Prisons, I was saying, were never designed for the bourgeois. The scandal this week is caused by the audacity of a judge who dared to explain this reasoning. And in feminist circles, we are rightly concerned about the consequences of this decision on survivors of assault who wish to denounce.
With reason, we want institutions that do not trivialize sexual violence and that hold perpetrators accountable for their actions. We want the victim to be able to obtain justice, for them to feel safe, for the seriousness of what they suffered to be recognized, and for there to be no more repeat offenses on the part of the aggressor. Above all, more generally, we want sexual violence to stop being a scourge on society. We hope that the justice system will no longer be complicit in its continuation.
On this, all along the line, we are completely right.
The danger, with the news, is to fall into what is commonly called carceral feminism – the belief that prisons, as a technology for controlling bodies, ultimately constitute a viable strategy for eradicating sexual violence. Prison feminism is about believing that longer and harsher sentences for each abuser will ultimately lead all women to safety.
When we understand who populates our prisons, we understand that carceral feminism is necessarily a bourgeois feminism. And that seeking to demand more prison sentences for all, as a solution to social problems, is an avenue that necessarily leads to the destruction of the social environment of poor women and racialized women.
We can completely denounce Judge Poliquin’s decision, the trivialization of violence that it implies and the classist double standard that it represents without seeing prison as a panacea. We are right to be shocked that a bourgeois escapes prison because he is a bourgeois. Ideally, we should also be shocked that poor people constantly end up in prison because they are poor.