On prison feminism,
As she has the happy habit, Emilie Nicolas broke, in her column, with the doxa of good souls and went to the heart of the problem: it is less scandalous to absolve a bourgeois than to condemn the poor by the thousands. It seems to me, however, that the perspective it outlines reduces to “bourgeois” society a much larger phenomenon that encompasses the totality of human history—that of the exercise of power. It is perfectly fair to write that the overrepresentation of the poor and the marginalized in prisons does not constitute “a defect of our criminal justice, but the manifestation of the bourgeois logic on which it was created”. But this logic, in my opinion, is not first and foremost “bourgeois”, but depends first and exclusively on the exercise of power. In 1789, it was that of the sovereign in France. In 1917, that of the Tsar of the Russias. As for criminal law, it is only one of the many modes of exercise. All human societies, whatever the political mode that is exercised there – democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, etc. —, are built in the shape of a pyramid. A summit that dominates and a base that ensures life and renewal. Most of our societies are the result, in the West, of so-called “revolutionary” overthrows and the accession to power of a so-called “bourgeois” social class. Hence a vocabulary that refers more to the past and contributes to concealing the nature of phenomena that pre-exist them for millennia.
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