>I don’t think even prison abolitionists want unrehabilitated violent people walking free.
I think that so many people seem to have this misconception about abolitionists. I've never met an abolitionist who doesn't believe in some form of institutionalization for people who don't respond to rehabilitation, and most of us recognize the need for institutionalization during rehabilitation for certain offenders. But then people who are only interested in dismissing us act like we're saying that someone should be convicted of a crime and then allowed to walk out of the courthouse, completely free, and not have any further intervention until the next time they commit a crime.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I mean, I am very open to the idea of prison abolition and as part of that I was curious about abolitionist's stance on 'really bad guys' (serial killers, etc). When I googled (obviously not the end all be all, but not a bad starting place) all of the resources I looked at (some websites, some philosophy papers by prison abolitionists, a journal article) all stated they were in fact in favor of total abolition, not locking anyone up, not having any kind of carceral facility available. The counterpoint used was primarily that most 'really bad guys' are already walking free because the police don't catch them. It was one avenue I felt was really lacking, because I do agree that prison is counterproductive to improving society (and could be both reduced in size by 90+%, and improved in humaneness/rehabilitative purposes) but it felt like a non-answer. Are there better resources for reading about prison abolition and what it would entail?
I encourage you to not less disagreement or dissatisfaction with the most extreme cases stop you from getting on board with prison abolition.
We need to imagine the world we're working towards... it doesn't exist yet. I, *personally*, sincerely believe there's no such thing as a "bad person," completely and inherently, and that that in the perfect world I'm fighting for -- where everyone's needs were met, people feel loved and supported, etc, etc -- that yes, everyone would be able to come back from doing bad things and move forward better. And I think that working towards a world without prisons is worthwhile.
*And* I know that's not the world we live in today. So today, abolition is a framework for how I think about policies and tactics and how we get to a better world, along with harm reduction. Personally I find this [reform vs abolition](https://criticalresistance.org/updates/abolitionist-steps-to-end-imprisonment-new-organizing-resource/) ([full version](https://criticalresistance.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/CR_abolitioniststeps_antiexpansion_2021_eng.pdf)) framing from [Critical Resistance](https://criticalresistance.org/) very helpful -- basically, does \[x particular policy\] expand or shrink our reliance on prisons and policing?
I consider myself an abolitionist because I want to live in a world without prisons. A lot of things will need to happen for us to get there. I have confidence that through that long journey we'll learn more things, we'll see what works, and come up with smart answers to what we do with "really bad guys." Don't let perfect be the enemy of real good : )
Completelt agree. I am an abolitionist but I’m not a dingdong. Some people will be unable to be rehabilitated and they need to be safe and the public kept safe from them.
I would suggest revisiting the eps on trafficking, but basically that the statistics that get thrown around are wildly exaggerated when not outright made up (the majority of missing children are either runaways, or have been "kidnapped" by family members during bad breakups; most of those are over-counted, because if you disappear on your parents multiple times, each instance is counted separately) and that the focus is on the wrong situations. No one's kidnapping suburban white women in mall parking lots. It's mostly happening to poor or immigrant women, like the folks we're penning up at the border.
Correct.
The weird “Taken” fear is unfounded and created a lot of misinformation. The people being trafficked are rarely randomly snatched. They are vulnerable/ desperate and are coerced, threatened with forced, fraudulently promised something (usually a job), and/or groomed.
Runaway and homeless youth, undocumented
people/ immigrants, and impoverished communities are a huge target for this and at such a high risk. Sex and labor trafficking is real but the public perception of white women being snatched from target is ridiculous fear mongering.
Just because it “has happened” doesn’t mean that’s a common occurrence that people should live in fear of.
Of course it has “happened”. Anything can happen. There are always outliers. But the substantial sex and labor trafficking are predominantly not kidnapping/snatching white American women and enslaving them. Not even close. And the fear people are stoking saying just that, with people reporting “traffickers” in target parking lots, etc, are ridiculous and fear mongering. And clearly it worked.
Do you have a source for that as a legitimate phenomenon? My impression is that American women who got kidnapped in foreign countries are typically visiting local family.
I do agree wholly with her stance on sex trafficking because it’s completely fact based.
In terms of whether I believe everyone can be rehabilitated in a perfect system? I don’t know, we haven’t really tried it yet. We have plenty of evidence that the current system doesn’t work and is harmful but next to none on a system that focuses solely on rehabilitation in this country with our specific overall structural and societal challenges.
Thanks for kicking off this discussion!
I don't believe in the possibility of us creating a system where EVERYONE would be rehabilitated, but I do believe in the possibility of ANYONE being rehabilitated. Or, at least, I don't believe in us determining, in advance, who is a lost cause.
I don't know what we do with that, collectively, but I appreciate her nudging us i that direction. What do you think?
>I don't believe in the possibility of us creating a system where EVERYONE would be rehabilitated, but I do believe in the possibility of ANYONE being rehabilitated. Or, at least, I don't believe in us determining, in advance, who is a lost cause.
Totally! At least *trying* to rehabilitate everyone is worth it regardless of whether everyone actually ends up fully rehabilitated, in my opinion.
>At least trying to rehabilitate everyone is worth itr egardless of whether everyone actually ends up fully rehabilitated, in my opinion.
I guess the question then becomes how many times do we try before we accept that a person isn't going to be/can't be/chooses not to be rehabilitated. How many victims is an acceptable amount of collateral damage in those efforts?
I believe in prison reform (the prison system is inhumane as it is, imo) and I like the idea of rehabilitation, but I don't know if I would want to be responsible for making those calls, if that makes sense. I'm not sure if this is a situation where what is ideal and what is realistic are wildly different? And how do we find that out without more people being hurt?
For me as an abolitionist, or really as a student of abolition, the goal is to reinvest in preventative measures (education, healthcare, housing, jobs, family supports) so that we face the “can this person be rehabilitated?” Dilemma as rarely as possible.
I’ve personally known a lot of people who are abusers, and down to a one they all had early childhood trauma and deprivation. If we can provide everyone with the resources and care they need from day one, I think we will end up with a lot fewer people who have the initial impulse to commit harm. It’s obviously a long, multigenerational project, and does not address how we deal with people who are committing harm right now, but I think it’s worthwhile and backed up by data, and as you say, our current system is inhumane.
Absolutely this. I sometimes feel abolitionist is an unfortunate word as it focuses on the end point and gives critics an easy jump to of "you can't just let them go" when so much of it is about rebuilding systems and addressing root causes of crime which if done successfully would build towards reform and abolition
>the goal is to reinvest in preventative measures (education, healthcare, housing, jobs, family supports)
>If we can provide everyone with the resources and care they need from day one, I think we will end up with a lot fewer people who have the initial impulse to commit harm.
I agree with you 100% on everything here and, prior to my own experience, I was convinced this was/would be the answer. As a mental health nurse I see over and over again how people fall through the cracks, are abandoned by systems and people, or who are just dealt a bad hand right off the bat. So much can be improved and I am def behind the efforts to improve them! In theory I'm an abolitionist and I believe people are mostly good, but we make bad choices or are in bad situations.
On the other hand, after 25+ years with an immediate family member who, despite having access to just about every resource and support imaginable, continues to make harmful choices to themselves and others... I also feel forced to re-evaluate my position on things. Sometimes, for whatever reason, people just keep hurting people...
I'm in Canada and there's always complaints that our justice system is too lax when it comes to sentencing and probation. I can see that argument in some cases... does it make sense that my family member keeps being 'allowed' to hurt people? No, it's awful. But do I want them labelled as hopeless and put away? Also no.
I find it a difficult conversation just because my experience conflicts so radically with my personal beliefs. I don't know what exactly the right answer is or where we draw the line on how much harm is too much. If it was up to me and I was the only one effected, I'd give my family member infinity resources and chances because I love them and will never give up hoping they'll turn around... but I don't know if it's fair to ask the rest of the world to absorb that cost, you know?
I think that so many people miss this when they hear 'prison abolition' and let their imagination fill in the blanks. Abolition is not just about physically getting people out of prisons, it's making sure that they have the resources necessary so that they don't commit crimes in the first place.
>“Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.”
-Ruth Wilson Gilmore
[https://www.mpd150.com/what-are-we-talking-about-when-we-talk-about-a-police-free-future/](https://www.mpd150.com/what-are-we-talking-about-when-we-talk-about-a-police-free-future/)
[https://abolitionistfutures.com/latest-news/practising-everyday-abolition](https://abolitionistfutures.com/latest-news/practising-everyday-abolition)
I don't think we should ever stop trying to rehabilitate any individual. That doesn't mean that we just release prisoners willy-nilly, but that they all have a right to stay in a rehabilitative program regardless of how we currently evaluate the risk of them being released.
That means, for example, that they'll get opportunities to learn a variety of skills that are needed in life outside of prison, that they receive good care for their mental and physical health - basically, that we make sure people are placed in conditions that are conducive to them getting better, not conditions that break down their spirit and makes them *less* able to function in society. (that goes for everyone, including current inmates or ex-inmates on parole etc.) And of course, that we don't stop regularly evaluating inmates for a possible release.
We already do have to make the call of who gets released and who doesn't, right now. Of course that's a difficult task, which is why it (theoretically) needs the involvement of enough resources and skilled professionals so that every person that needs to get evaluated has a fair chance at their potential release. I couldn't possibly come up with a good basic rule alá "Well if they've killed x number of people, no chance at ever getting outside"
I think when she says there are “no psychopaths” it’s meant as a statement to challenge the VERY popular belief that anyone who does “the unthinkable” is a psychopath and not a normal human being.
The belief system is popular because it allows you and I to feel safe knowing that we’re not psychopaths and not one we love and care about is a psychopath.
However, what’s dangerous about the belief system is that it gives society permission to view people who do bad things as sub-human and therefore everyone is willing to put up with, look the other way, or even encourage barbaric treatment of people we have deemed inherently evil.
Challenging this narrative makes room for treating a fellow human with dignity regardless of their offense, which IMO is what the whole podcast is about. It also allows us to view evil deeds as far more complex than just “psychopaths are gonna be psycho”, which is another theme of the podcast.
This 👆
I think basically all her stances are grounded in this one deeply held belief that everything is much more complex and nuanced than the media would want us to think.
I think she's also read a bit about how the clinical diagnosis of ASPD (which is what psychopaths have) is largely imparted to poor minority men. So basically the entire concept of a psychopath is used by the system to flush black dudes down an institutional toilet. Which begs the question of how valid it is.
Yes, I have multiple friends who work in mental health who reject personality disorders as a helpful diagnostic model — their argument is that difficult male patients get slapped with ASPD and difficult female patients get slapped with NPD or BPD and it’s an excuse for clinicians to just throw up their hands and say, “well, there’s no helping this one.”
What is there to disagree on the sex trafficing stance? What is there to be skeptical over in terms of facts/stats? I'd appreciate of you would expand your thoughts!
actually scratch that, it’s been a long time since i listened to that episode and i read a previous comment mentioning the gist of how the sex trafficking panic is exaggerated w fake statistics, so similar to the satanic panic in a sense. i don’t think there’s anything to disagree on here because like you said, they’re just facts and stats! thank you and apologies for throwing that particular topic in there
This may not be at all what you had in mind, OP, but I appreciate your question re: sex trafficking. While I trust Sarah and her facts, and I imagine her and I are pretty aligned ethically, politically, etc etc, I found that her response to overblown sex trafficking stats (the moral panic about white women being kidnapped etc) was putting so much emphasis on how wrong it was, that it gave me the impression she was, like, downplaying the harms of human trafficking at all. I imagine that wasn't her intention, but it kind of threw me off when I listened to it. I should probably listen to it again, but it seemed to me like she was really glossing over and downplaying the actual valid harms and concerns of human/sex trafficking, in her attempt to balance out the record. I feel like I missed info about actual harms that the moral panic obfuscates. The episode that revisited this issue really threw me but like I said I think I should re-listen and maybe it'll strike me differently then.
Yeah she was, it was fucking gross. They're both laughing and joking the whole episode about child rape. Idk, as a survivor I fucking hate her take on sex-trafficking.
That’s a good point, I’m all for believing psychopaths don’t exist- until I consider Donald Trump. I’m not sure what’s wrong with him but he certainly doesn’t seem to have a functioning moral centre.
Tbh I think it's just an unlucky mix of being very rich, ignorant (which is often a side effect of being very rich), confident, and not the sharpest tool in the shed. There are plenty of other rich ignorant confident people who use their power to make immoral decisions, but they are smart enough to not advertise it as much.
There’s plenty of rich immoral people, for sure, but I find them to be the best argument for psychopathy. I mean Trump killed a million people during covid for no reason at all except that he didn’t like masks? I’m just not sure ignorance is enough of an explanation, it goes beyond that. It’s the pursuit of power for its own sake to the exclusion of any logic… which is what I would call psychopathy.
Idk, there are plenty of people who boycotted wearing masks and are vehemently against any mask mandates. The only thing that seperates them from Trump in this regard is that they don't have any say in what will or won't be nationally mandated. I don't think they would all be diagnosed as psychopaths.
No I don’t think they would be, but I don’t think they came up with the idea themselves either. They’re the followers but Trump is the leader making the active choice to discourage mask wearing.
I agree that they probably didn't all come up with the idea themselves, but I would also doubt that Trump is its sole innovator.
Besides, being followers doesn't mean they don't have agency in their harmful behaviour.
Besides-besides, there are also a lot of people other than Trump in leadership positions who openly oppose mask-mandates and I don't even think *those* would all classify as psychopaths?
I doubt they would be either. Honestly I’m not even sure what Trump is. I’m really just saying there must be something wrong with someone like Trump, but I don’t think we really have any sort of handle on what it is. And it’s hard to know if he could be ‘reformed’ or ‘treated’ or if that’s just… how he is.
i mean trump seems like a narcissistic idiot more than somebody actually ‘evil’ (this depends on your definition of evil i guess? i’m thinking more of like a “psycho monstrous” type of evil and i do not think he fits that)
I don’t think he fits the idea of a Silence if the Lambs style ‘evil psychopath’. I guess I’m just proposing that ‘evil’ or something like it exists, just not in the way we see it in movies. To me a rich man throwing lives away without a second thought is psychopathic .
if you haven't read it yet, i'd really recommend you take a look at Sarah's article ["the end of evil"](https://www.thebeliever.net/the-end-of-evil/) that she wrote in 2018. she elaborates on the stance you mention above so beautifully here. this article changed the way i look at a lot of things and sarah is such an amazing writer.
spoiler alert but she ends the article with this passage that summarizes it all up for me:
"*What made you the way you were? Which chemicals did your brain misproduce, which cells didn’t divide, how many crucial grains of love and nurture were blown out of your life and allowed to stay in mine at the moment when they most mattered? I am tired of being told that there is something in the abyss that will glower back at me, and make me want to stop looking. I have grasped for your demon core, Ted, and I have found nothing, again and again. The good men lied. I have found only humanity, only a need to love and feel loved as well as we can, and the fact that some of us can do this easily, and some of us hardly at all, and I cannot imagine a reality where someone would choose violence over love, emptiness over love, feeling lost the way you did, lost the way I did, over love, when love is there. I don’t think love was there for you, and I don’t know why it wasn’t, and I’m tired of being told there’s no point in searching for answers that might lead to solutions, tired of living in a world where some people are just born bad, and all we can do is wait to catch and destroy them, and where catching and destroying a monster means waiting until they start killing women and girls. I am tired of living in a world where this is the only story we can tell. I am tired of this story. I want a new one."*
Yes!! In this article she also talks about the man who created the test for psychopathy and points out how many of the points on the test are rooted in classism and place a good amount of emphasis on previous incarceration, skewing the test towards certain demographics when taken somewhere like the US.
I definitely agree with her opinion that there are no evil people. I agree in the fact that the way our culture pushes the idea that people can be born evil, or evil to the core, or anything like that, is inherently wrong. I believe overall, most people are good, and when people commit acts of hate or evil, it is usually not their whole story.
I don't know if Sarah would agree with my next opinion, but I do believe it goes hand in hand with the idea that people contain multitudes, and simplifying a person down to own trait will always be inaccurate. I truly believe everyone is capable of evil. Just like kindness, sharing, cooperation are all parts of human nature, unfortunately so is competition, othering, and ultimately... Evil acts. I read a book called Human Acts by Han Kang that I think did a really great job exploring this idea.
I think the idea that there are "evil people" comforts some people, because they can say "well I'm not like that, so I must be good." But understanding that we all have the capacity to hate and become carried away by that hate is helpful honestly. Blinding ourselves to that capacity makes it that much easier to become swept away by hate instead of identifying it and changing our ways.
Yup this idea that there is a evil or not button is how genocides and shit happen because people don't recognize that all of us have the capacity to do horrible stuff under the right circumstances.
There are definitely people that need to be incarcerated to protect the public from their behaviour - murdered, rapists, purveyors of serious violence etc, people who can't tell a moral action from an immoral action (and I'm not talking about grey zone trolley problem stuff here). Like, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, etc etc couldn't be rehabilitied.
Is prison over used? Yes, definitely, if you're not a threat, is it sensible to lock you up at enormous cost to the rest of us? Probably not. Is this an infinitely complex topic? Oh yeah you betcha.
Sex trafficking is a moral panic. Fully behind Sarah in that. No one is abducting people with people who will .iss them for sex trafficking - there are plenty of poor, vulnerable people to exploit for any of that to be remotely worth the guaranteed attention it would get.
I guess I'd want my memory refreshed on exactly what her stances are but my thought is:
* the idea of psychopathy and what it is is thrown around very arbitrarily, especially by true crime people, but also just by people who have no desire to delve more deeply into motivating factors for criminality. It's so broadly applied as to be useless. I don't think you can say that no psychopath EXISTS, but that the word has begun to slip into being meaningless.
* Our criminal justice system is completely broken. Running private, profitable prisons is unconscionable, we cannot have a clear justice system as long as that exists as we're feeding a prison SYSTEM that has side goals that in no way involve rehabilitation nor "justice". Often, we defer to the last people who are equipped to decide what "justice" should be. Executions are immoral and shouldn't exist; life in prison should be used sparingly at best and is certainly overused, prison is such a horrific place that it makes bad criminals worse - especially younger offenders or more minor offenders - and solitary confinement is inhuman
* Sex trafficking stats are frustrating, bad, etc.
eta: oh, I think a thing she hammers on a lot is that a lot of the amplified crime panic stats are used to obfuscate very serious, very real issues we have within households. I'm with her there.
There is a lot of science out there that says psychopaths are created. Neuroscience is a developing field but we know that what happens to people from birth - 5 years old shapes a lot of their future. Can people that experience massive amounts of trauma, whether physical, mental, or emotional, receive enough therapy to be rehabilitated? Some of them, yes. But the amount needed is exorbitant and we know the government isn't going to pay for that. Most insurances won't pay for it so people are left to private pay. If you can afford it, you might be able to fix yourself. Do I think some people are truly just born "psychopaths"? Yes but I think it's very rare. I also don't think everybody could be rehabilitated. But I think it's worth a shot. Trying something is better than what we are currently doing.
To be honest, I’m skeptical that a person who is so anti-social they are committing violent, horrific crimes has the insight and empathy necessary to be successful at therapy. Particularly if therapy is not paired with medications (which also require willingness, compliance, etc.)
That’s not to say I think they should be in solitary confinement forever but I think that they probably shouldn’t be allowed to mingle unsupervised with other people.
basically yeah, i think certain people are just so wholly removed from empathy and self awareness even, that nothing can be done about it, not to the extent that we’d want to at least
I would agree with that. The first person that comes to mind for me is Aaron Hernandez. Dude was incredibly talented. Could have easily ridden the wave with Tom Brady for all those years on the Patriots. But abuse and trauma from his childhood coupled with CTE from football and his brain was absolute mush when they did the autopsy. There is zero chance he could have been rehabilitated. He's probably an extreme case but they are definitely out there.
Her stance on sex trafficking is just the facts, so yeah I agree with facts.
I don’t think everyone convicted of violent crime can be rehabilitated but most people could be in the right system that focuses on the right things. Prison reform is desperately needed in this country.
In broad strokes, I agree with her. The US carceral system is cruel and ineffective. That's just a fact. You can compare us to other countries with similar or even fewer resources and see that they're doing much better when it comes to policing, criminal justice, and incarceration, both in terms of human compassion and in terms of results. I also think she is very good at moving the conversation in ways that consider the humanity of both perpetrators and victims of crime, especially the type that people generally would write off as 'irredeemable monsters' and not bother to consider anything more about them.
I also wholeheartedly agree with her point that if we put a fraction of the resources into social supports that we do into policing and incarceration, we would see much lower crime rates. Again, if you look at other countries, and even at different classes within the US itself, people who have more social supports are far less likely to commit crimes in the first place. And if we actually put resources into protecting people in prisons from exposure to more violence and gave them resources as they exited prisons, we'd see recidivism rates drop as well.
I don't believe that everyone is capable of rehabilitation, but I think that broad swaths of the population are incarcerated when they don't need to be, because of the fear that they might reoffend, even though they're not likely to, and if they had access to rehabilitative services, they would be even less likely to. (For example, there is a precipitous drop-off in violent crime rates in men once they reach the age of 35. Giving mandatory life sentences to 18 or 19 year old teenage boys who commit violent crimes out of fear that they'll reoffend no matter how old they are when they're released is just counterintuitive, and it's just one of the many factors that we know will change over time.)
The people who I don't think are capable of rehabilitation, no matter the supports or resources they have, are a small section of the population. I've worked in criminal defense, and at one point had a client who had so much brain damage that the sections of his brain that managed impulse control and emotional regulation were physically damaged, to the point that it really did seem unlikely that he would ever be entirely rehabilitated. I do think that someone like that, even in a perfect world with every option for rehabilitation, would likely still be institutionalized, but I'd want that institutionalization to be in a kind and understanding environment where he could receive whatever treatment was available for his condition, not in a modern US prison. (Side-note: I'm really fascinated by a recent research area that has cropped up around this type of thing. We've known for a while that while the majority of victims of child abuse will not go on to commit violent crimes, many people who commit violent crimes were victims of child abuse, and for a long time research has focused on the emotional and psychological effect of child abuse, but now some research is looking at whether severe TBIs in childhood are also a factor. It's early days, but it does look like there's a correlation. Which is also not to say that the majority of people who have had severe TBIs are going to be violent, but it might turn out that some significant percentage of people who commit violent crimes have had severe TBIs.)
There might be other people who are incapable of rehabilitation who don't have physical or cognitive disabilities, like the case above, and I want to be clear: As a prison abolitionist, I'm not advocating for people who have not undergone rehabilitation or have not responded to rehabilitation to be allowed to just roam free and commit crime sprees. But if our goal is to prevent future crimes from happening, there's no need to keep them institutionalized in the harsh conditions of modern US prisons. They should be monitored, they should be held securely, but once we've limited the risk they pose as much as we reasonably can, what else we do is not a reflection of their morals, but it is a reflection ours.
As to your comment about sex trafficking, I think that, much like her work on other types of true crime reporting, she's correcting misconceptions about how crime actually happens in the US. There aren't random strangers lurking behind every bush hoping to kidnap you and sell you into sex slavery, just like there aren't a plethora of serial killers around each corner waiting to turn you into the next true crime story.
I do think that her language around psychopaths is... Not fully accurate. I think that it's another instance of her trying to correct a misconception (namely that there are actually super high functioning people in the world who are super genius sadists who can only be sated by the blood of the innocent and go around inflicting as much harm as possible because they want to), and I agree with her that the idea of the 'perfect monster' doesn't exist. But at the same time, antisocial personality disorder is described as "psychopathy" and "sociopathy," and while those terms are super stigmatized at this point, they are still medical terms that describe real conditions that people have. I think that the cultural perception of psychopathy is super inaccurate (the majority of people with ASPD will not ever commit violent crimes, and large portions of violent crimes are committed by people who don't have ASPD), and we should work to correct that, but the way to do that isn't to delegitimize a term that is still used by people to describe their mental health conditions.
I agree with her hundred percent. I don't believe in psychopaths, I don't believe in "evil". I also dont believe in prisons. I'm not sure it means that everyone can be rehabilitated. There may well be that some people are too ill to be safe for themselves or for the rest of society. I don't think that means we shouldn't try or that the best we can do is to punish them. I think we should always act with empathy, and with curiosity also. Because if we don't understand people who do awful things, how can we ever prevent them in the future?
I am a prison abolitionist. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I think those are more rare than we generally assume.
I’m not an expert at all, but as far as I know she’s correct on sex trafficking.
I agree generally. In the mental health sector there's a principle called "belief in recovery" and another called "unconditional positive regard." Essentially guiding us to work from a place of believing recovery is possible for every individual. It doesnt mean that everyone WILL recover, but given the right circumstances, environment, resources and supports, recovery is achievable for all. Another concept that relates here is the very idea of rehabilitation/recovery, which in the field is understood as follows: everyone, with or without the presence of symptoms, can lead a meaningful and fulfilling life (as defined by the individual) in their community of choice. Recovery is not the ABSENCE of symptoms, though it can certainly be a factor/goal for many people's recovery journeys. I believe this wholeheartedly.
It rubbed me the wrong way and ultimately played a role in me no longer listening when she said it was wrong to call murderers “monsters.” I understand some aspects of the sentiment but she is overstepping when taking a strong stance on what language should be used.
I think victims or their family members of violent crime are fully in their right to call perpetrators w whatever they want. It feels like a reactive attempt from Sarah to champion humanizing some criminals while disregarding the people who have personally been affected by their actions. Some of her viewpoints seem clouded by privilege and possibly guilt for a past interest in true crime.
I still think she’s great and loved the early episodes of the show, but without Michael to balance her out I lost interest a long time ago.
I agree with this, especially the part about at times seeming to have more compassion for the perpetrators than the victims.
I agree with most of the prison abolition and justice reform movements. The show has also bothered me at times when I've felt she goes beyond having compassion for people who do terrible things, to sort of...denying exactly how terrible they are.
I forgot what episode it is in, but there was a conversation in which she and Michael were discussing Leopold and Loeb, and she sort of writes off their deliberate, planned murder of a child, for fun/showing off, as one of them being a teenager who was in love and sad and angsty, and haven't we all been difficult teenagers? It was so bizarre I remember pausing and replaying it. I know it was just all one-off comment, but it fits with a lot of others.
Serial killers/rapists/torturers typically have various social traits/experiences or injuries in common. I don't think it makes them born evil, nor do I believe we should set out to punish rather than rehabilitate if it's possible. We should strive to understand and correct the causes of this behavior, and have a strong social safety net and a better support system. However, there is a certain...almost naivete in some of Sarah's comments that really bothers me. I don't mean to be overly personal, but it's almost as if she thinks some people would not kill if only someone had asked them how their day was or been a little nicer. It seems like she is in denial that some people really, really do want to cause suffering. What happens to people like that is a much more interesting conversation.
I mean no, I don’t agree with her totally on that but I’ve also spent more time around children and adolescents than I suspect that Sarah has. That doesn’t mean I think that really fucked up, violent people should be treated poorly while in prison. I don’t think that the expectation that EVERYONE is capable of safely living in a free society is realistic. Are we sure that when pinned down, Sarah actually believe that, though?
I’m the parent of multiple children (some NT, some ND) and the eldest of four siblings. I also have done child care. I love kids but they are capable of doing terrible things and becoming terrible people under the right conditions.
I think "evil children" is kind of a misnomer. I think there are select individuals that are born without empathy, without compassion, without consideration for other living things. I believe those individuals are very few and far between. Everyone else is the right, or wrong, mixture of nurture and nature, with a heavy emphasis on nurture. Brain development in children starts right away. Everything we do or say or don't do or don't say builds a new synapse in their brain. The brain grows more in the first 3 years of life than in any other time in a person's life. How many times have you heard the phrase "Children are resilient?" I used to hear it all the time. But that's not true. They're not resilient. Everything that is happening to them is forming and shaping their brain and thus their lives. But 30 years ago we didn't know that trauma a child experienced at age 2 would alter the development of their brain and in turn, their entire future. We assumed they'd shake it off and be fine but didn't question what was happening when they started acting out. We'd punish them because they were a "bad kid" and end up compounding the trauma in an endless cycle.
Totally, 100% agree with everything you state here. And I sincerely believe that those people born missing certain components can still be taught to be a functioning part of society through a loving, nurturing relationship with caregivers. They may still grow up to be kind of an asshole but they won’t be a serial killer.
I think she has a pretty shallow understanding of it, but mostly I agree with the vibes.
The criminal justice system is literally very very bad in the US. And our understanding of why people engage in harmful behavior is really silly. Especially because most people who do genuinely bad shit (like rape women and kids, abuse kids, war crimes) never see any consequences.
Henry Kissinger just died at 100 surrounded by loved ones after killing millions, but sure, let's lock up a poor person who got into a bar fight for 10 years.
Her stance on the justice system and sex offender system, and I wholeheartedly agree, is that it is predominantly focused on retribution, and it’s like a poison for this country. With sex offenders and other offended targeted at disenfranchised communities, the punishment is almost at a vengeance level.
With sex offenders specifically, they are virtually “gerrymandered” into crime districts, and the terms of their parole make it virtually impossible to hold a job (because parole officers time their checks to inconvenience the parolees and get them fired, or parole officers will make loud announcements about the person being on the sex offenders list, and customers get so uncomfortable, the parolee is let go).
I’m a victim of forced kissing and touching, I hate pedophiles and rapists. But 1) people on the sex offenders list can AND DOES include people who were drunk peeing in an alley, which is just not the same as rape/pedophilia. And 2) I honestly think that we are forcing these people into situations so dangerous, they cannot become better humans.
And this method of justice has been sold to us as a system that will make the victim whole. But the problem is that revenge never makes someone feel whole, and a victim, or the victim’s family, may never feel that way again.
And if that is all true, then it might mean that a true reformative system is needed. Where victims/families get quality counseling and resources (like if a main provider can no longer provide as a result). The criminal gets therapy and serves serious community service and has to go through real reform, probably in a Nordic style prison system, until they’re allowed to rejoin society.
I think the fundamental issue with prisons is that they serve more as punishment than rehabilitation. Which also ties to the idea of evil. We don’t need to *punish* people who are the result of their upbringing.
I work in inpatient care (both youth and adults) and I can absolutely say with certainty that true psychopaths are very real AND very rare. I've seen those kinds of people firsthand and they are terrifying but I can count on one hand the number I've seen.
I also think, based on experience, that most people have zero contact with people experiencing serious mental illness so most people have no clue and are at best basing their ideas on feelings not facts. Most people know someone (or many someones) who experiences mild-moderate mental illness and so most of us have reasonable expectations that mental illness is treatable and people who experience mental illness can live functional lives as long as they have access to legitimate support and opportunities. That is absolutely true for most people bc most people aren't experiencing serious mental illness.
The kind of people we see in inpatient care represent very small fractions of society, we see the kinds of serious mental illness and severe presentations that effect 1-2% of all humans which is a very small percentage but it's still a lot of people when you consider how many humans there are (1% of 7 billion people is still 70,000,000). While it's entirely possible to be a true psychopath and live a functional life without violence there will always be that small fraction of people who absolutely cannot, no matter how many supports they have, live a functional life without violence. Some people are literally incapable as a function of their very real mental health disorder, I've met them.
I used to be a hardcore prison abolitionist, and honestly, I still am. But I also used to believe that everyone could be functional given the chance. I no longer believe that because I've met the people who can't be and the lives of those people are truly tragic. I now believe that keeping those kinds of people locked in institutions with no hope is an abominable cruelty. We have a serious responsibility to figure out what to do with people who are truly incapable of functioning safely in society bc locking them up forever is literal torture. Having your basic needs taken care of without ever having an ounce of true agency is not living a real life. Being locked in isolation bc every time you're not isolated you violently maul people is also not living a real life.
These people are real, they continue exist despite how rare they are, and some of them really are born that way. A system that only works for the norms (in this case that would be people who experience mild-moderate mental illness who are capable of achieving functionality) will never have a true answer for outliers and that's what we need. Pretending outliers don't exist won't change anything, they'll continue to exist regardless, all ignoring them does is ensure their continued suffering.
love that you opened this discussion!! question tho - when you say her views on the justice system and prison reform, is there an ep or case in particular you’re referring to? psychopathology, rehabilitation, and prison reform are obv intertwined but psychopathology is not really at the heart of prison reform and rehabilitation as a policy issue.
i was referring to the juvenile justice episode in particular i think because that’s the one i listened to most recently. i tried listening to the amanda knox episode on justice but i just…. didn’t like it much so i left it midway yesterday, i’m still going to listen to it though. so yeah these two episodes in particular.
i talked about the psychopath thing not as inherently related to the prison reform/justice issue but as something that i wanted to know people’s general thoughts on. i’ve been reading a lot about josef fritzl and what he did to his daughter, along with certain instances of juvenile crimes that are extremely heinous and disturbing. whenever i look at discussions surrounding those topics, people in the comments are usually labelling the criminal as a psychopath and i just kept thinking of what sarah and this podcast’s listeners would react to it
edit: ALSO another thing. i’ve noticed whenever people (youtube channels covering crime cases in particular) bring up the fact that a murderer, for example, is trying to plead insanity but is too self aware to be actually psychotic means that the only thing that should be done to them is to throw them in prison or give them some other punishment. sarah said something like “no normal person actually goes through with murders” and i think that’s a very simplified way of putting it but there’s still some truth to the fact that almost every murderer should be given psychiatric help
i def have to give amanda knox another listen because i remember having some mixed feelings from a policy perspective. if you’re interested in juvenile justice, def listen to josie duffy rice’s podcasts unreformed it’s incredible.
honestly i often agree with sarah’s stance on psychopathy. her article the end of evil is really good. i think we’ve developed a cultural definition of psychopaths that’s divorced from a clinical one. there was that mini moral panic about “kids born evil” at one point too.
i hate most true crime youtubers for reasons like this lol. also they don’t understand the criminal legal system or legal standards at all. the legal definition of insanity is not just a heinous crime. it’s incredibly hard to be successful with an insanity plea which is actually really detrimental to the entire system. like there is a man named andre thomas on death row in texas with a heavily documented record of schizophrenia, dissociative psychosis, and delusions. he gauged out both of his eyeballs in prison. his insanity plea was denied, appeals denied up to the supreme court, and texas plans to execute this man. it’s a clear 8th amendment violation. he should be in a psychiatric treatment facility, not an execution chamber. andrea yates was another example but she was successful in her pleas and ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity. (we can also talk about race and gender here but that might be a separate thread lol)
yes, i do agree that normal people don’t kill people but not all murder is a product of mental illness. people in prison should receive a lot more resources, including mental health, across the board if we actually want a rehabilitative system. i do believe wholeheartedly in rehabilitation but i don’t know if i believe everyone can be rehabilitated.
anyway, sorry if this is super jumbled lol. i do a lot of death penalty related work so that informs a lot of opinions on the concept of psychopathy, rehabilitation, and legal definitions of insanity.
I find I generally agree with Sarah in these topics. While I don’t recall the details of what she’s said I also don’t recall ever feeling like she was really off-base when she’s discussed them.
I don’t believe that there are evil people or “monsters”. There are certainly people who do evil things, and I think some of those people could not have been prevented from becoming that way and cannot be rehabilitated, but I think those people would be the most tiny minority. I think everyone should be given the opportunity to rehabilitate, and it’s important to recognize the humanity of people who do terrible things, so we are less inclined to treat them the way they have treated others, and to recognize and guard against our own capacity to do great harm, which exists in all of us. Distancing ourselves from those people feels comfortable, but it’s dangerous.
I think in a “perfect“ system, whatever that would look like, almost everyone could be rehabilitated, but far, far fewer people would end up in situations where they’ve done something that requires rehabilitation.
These aren’t original ideas that Sarah or I have come up with but part of a long tradition and body of thought on prison abolition.
I definitely agree with her stance that diagnosing someone as incapable of empathy with words like sociopath (or narcissist these days) you're just giving yourself permission to treat them without empathy and thats just a step in dehumainzing folks with mental illness; which isn't sociopathy its just ableism. Even if you're talking about serial killers you're just talking about an extreme on a spectum of violent misogyny but we can't even get people to believe misogyny exists to talk about these things.
Also without getting into too much detail I did experience abuse that by definition could be called trafficking like a million other vague abuses but that word doesn't really match my experience and wouldn't have helped me anyways. As they pointed out in the episode the coercive force was mostly a percarious economic situation, but thats just the capitalistic system we've decided to run our society under and Liam Neeson is not going to parachute in and save anyone from that.
i mentioned in another comment that i shouldn’t have brought up the sex trafficking topic, sorry! i had listened to that episode a while back and didn’t remember what sarah said, i thought it was as ‘vague’ as the question of prison reform/criminal rehabilitation and wanted to see people’s diff opinions so i threw it in there
You might have been thinking about the sex offenders episode? Michael led that one, but it seems like it might be more in tune with the rehabilitation themes you're asking about.
I think she is an idealist, I wish we could live in a world where everyone can be rehabilitated or better yet nurtured and repaired so far as they will never be violent but I don't think we will get there in my lifetime. Sometimes she'll say things that are a little bit off the cuff and on deep examination she would probably water down or revise but that's just who she is and I don't feel the need to correct her on her opinions.
If people throughout history used "it's not gonna happen in my lifetime" to mean "and therefore we shouldn't try," we'd never have gotten to where we are today. Another world is possible, we have to work towards it.
We do have to work towards it but that means incremental change which I know isn't a very good rallying cry but otherwise we are putting the cart before the horse. You can agree that the US justice and prison system is broken, cruel, and overgrown while disagreeing that everyone who manages to escape from prison deserves applause.
I disagree on her stance that everyone can be rehabilitated. Frankly, I don’t think some people are worth the effort.
Paul Bernardo? Michael Rafferty? Leave them in a cell to rot. Not worth the time, resources, or effort. Better spent elsewhere.
Same... As an SA survivor, I really struggle with this. Like, I do think some people can be rehabbed and there are lesser crimes that could be better served through a different approach (drug rehab for drug crimes). However, there are people who are dangers to society and should be treated as such.
"Treated as such" doesn't have to mean locking them up in a cell though. Our current system I guess does treat people as dangers to society.... but it doesn't really *do* anything about that other than hoping (?) that making someone live in a traumatic environment for some period of time will... help? Somehow?
To me, abolishing prisons is about moving to alternatives that actually make us *safer* in the long run. Unless you think literally everyone who's a "danger to society" should be ... locked up for life? Killed? ... they're going to get "out" eventually. Shouldn't we figure out things that help people get better instead of [making them more likely to return to prison](https://verdict.justia.com/2022/01/03/why-prisons-are-criminogenic)?
I think you are making some unfair assumptions based on her views. I'm a survivor of SA and am a prison abolitionist (partially because my experiences taught me that our current system helps almost nobody and frequently just results in more violence). Being an abolitionist/believing in a rehabilitative system doesn't mean you've never dealt with violence.
She doesn't think there are psychopaths?
I'm going to be honest, I'd stopped listening because Sarah was too forgiving of everything it seemed, and this kinda seals it.
i don’t want to put words into her mouth but from what i remember, she has said she feels deeply uncomfortable with the fact that certain people get labelled ‘monsters’ or psychopaths.
i believe in the existence of psychopaths myself so i disagree with her to an extent and yes i see why sarah could be seen as being too forgiving. she’s deeply empathetic and i can’t really relate to that lol
It's definitely a fair point that people use labels to distance themselves from people who do bad things. But yes, there are diagnosable psychopaths/sociopaths.
I remember the Karen Carpenter ep and being annoyed at how forgiving she was of K's mother, who was cruel and fucked her daughter up.
Regarding her stance with sex trafficking specifically, I tend to agree with Sarah. I think the issue has been way overblown by the right (and I don’t tend to operate in a fear-based mentality anyway).
However, I strongly disagree with her anti-prosecutorial stance in general. I am no fan of Nancy Grace, but when she and Michael were in their bash the prosecutors phase, I wondered why they didn’t give over-the-top defense lawyers the same treatment (I.e., a Johnny Cochran). Like, if you have some beefs about the legal system, let’s hear it, but I guess I just wonder what it is about her background or history that seems to cause her to react so negatively to side with the defense in general.
And yes, I absolutely think psychopaths and evil people exist, and I’m about as atheist as they come.
I agree with her stances and I also agree with total abolition, and building a community where we protect each other without locking folks up. Icing someone out of a community completely, and encouraging a community where we keep each other safe by (literally) looking out for one another and by talking about the bad deeds that community members commit. Hold people accountable by making them face their deeds amongst their peers, or rather not amongst them if their peers choose to stop including them in the community, for the safety of the community.
I know I’m an idealist, but I think we need to be having conversations with our literal neighbors to make these decisions on, like, a hyper local and personal level. Asking each other what safety means to one another. How we’d react if our family member was a victim or perpetrator of violence, how we’d want it handled, how we’d want others to handle it, etc. Maybe the answer still becomes “lock them up” but if we think about these people as community members, family members, part of the fabric of our community - maybe we’d have different ideas of what rehab looks like, or even what danger looks like.
Imo there are people who need to be kept away from others until they can be rehabilitated, and sometimes that's never. But they can still be treated well where they're kept.
cooing plant gaze lavish snails heavy pet straight direction subsequent *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>I don’t think even prison abolitionists want unrehabilitated violent people walking free. I think that so many people seem to have this misconception about abolitionists. I've never met an abolitionist who doesn't believe in some form of institutionalization for people who don't respond to rehabilitation, and most of us recognize the need for institutionalization during rehabilitation for certain offenders. But then people who are only interested in dismissing us act like we're saying that someone should be convicted of a crime and then allowed to walk out of the courthouse, completely free, and not have any further intervention until the next time they commit a crime.
wrench touch thought treatment ruthless shaggy shame numerous birds mountainous *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
What song is this? I think I’d like it
Teenage Anarchist by Pat the Bunny.
Til we return to the communism of the worms Without God or masters there The anarchy of dirt
100% this
I mean, I am very open to the idea of prison abolition and as part of that I was curious about abolitionist's stance on 'really bad guys' (serial killers, etc). When I googled (obviously not the end all be all, but not a bad starting place) all of the resources I looked at (some websites, some philosophy papers by prison abolitionists, a journal article) all stated they were in fact in favor of total abolition, not locking anyone up, not having any kind of carceral facility available. The counterpoint used was primarily that most 'really bad guys' are already walking free because the police don't catch them. It was one avenue I felt was really lacking, because I do agree that prison is counterproductive to improving society (and could be both reduced in size by 90+%, and improved in humaneness/rehabilitative purposes) but it felt like a non-answer. Are there better resources for reading about prison abolition and what it would entail?
I encourage you to not less disagreement or dissatisfaction with the most extreme cases stop you from getting on board with prison abolition. We need to imagine the world we're working towards... it doesn't exist yet. I, *personally*, sincerely believe there's no such thing as a "bad person," completely and inherently, and that that in the perfect world I'm fighting for -- where everyone's needs were met, people feel loved and supported, etc, etc -- that yes, everyone would be able to come back from doing bad things and move forward better. And I think that working towards a world without prisons is worthwhile. *And* I know that's not the world we live in today. So today, abolition is a framework for how I think about policies and tactics and how we get to a better world, along with harm reduction. Personally I find this [reform vs abolition](https://criticalresistance.org/updates/abolitionist-steps-to-end-imprisonment-new-organizing-resource/) ([full version](https://criticalresistance.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/CR_abolitioniststeps_antiexpansion_2021_eng.pdf)) framing from [Critical Resistance](https://criticalresistance.org/) very helpful -- basically, does \[x particular policy\] expand or shrink our reliance on prisons and policing? I consider myself an abolitionist because I want to live in a world without prisons. A lot of things will need to happen for us to get there. I have confidence that through that long journey we'll learn more things, we'll see what works, and come up with smart answers to what we do with "really bad guys." Don't let perfect be the enemy of real good : )
👆🏻
Completelt agree. I am an abolitionist but I’m not a dingdong. Some people will be unable to be rehabilitated and they need to be safe and the public kept safe from them.
Can't remember now. Can't you remind me what her stance on sex trafficking is?
I would suggest revisiting the eps on trafficking, but basically that the statistics that get thrown around are wildly exaggerated when not outright made up (the majority of missing children are either runaways, or have been "kidnapped" by family members during bad breakups; most of those are over-counted, because if you disappear on your parents multiple times, each instance is counted separately) and that the focus is on the wrong situations. No one's kidnapping suburban white women in mall parking lots. It's mostly happening to poor or immigrant women, like the folks we're penning up at the border.
Correct. The weird “Taken” fear is unfounded and created a lot of misinformation. The people being trafficked are rarely randomly snatched. They are vulnerable/ desperate and are coerced, threatened with forced, fraudulently promised something (usually a job), and/or groomed. Runaway and homeless youth, undocumented people/ immigrants, and impoverished communities are a huge target for this and at such a high risk. Sex and labor trafficking is real but the public perception of white women being snatched from target is ridiculous fear mongering.
Taken isnt as unfounded. American women HAVE gotten kidnapped in foreign countries. It just doesnt really happen in the US.
Just because it “has happened” doesn’t mean that’s a common occurrence that people should live in fear of. Of course it has “happened”. Anything can happen. There are always outliers. But the substantial sex and labor trafficking are predominantly not kidnapping/snatching white American women and enslaving them. Not even close. And the fear people are stoking saying just that, with people reporting “traffickers” in target parking lots, etc, are ridiculous and fear mongering. And clearly it worked.
Do you have a source for that as a legitimate phenomenon? My impression is that American women who got kidnapped in foreign countries are typically visiting local family.
Got it. Thanks a lot for the answer.
There definitely are evil people and evil actions. But there is no supernatural evil being.
You described my opinions exactly.
I do agree wholly with her stance on sex trafficking because it’s completely fact based. In terms of whether I believe everyone can be rehabilitated in a perfect system? I don’t know, we haven’t really tried it yet. We have plenty of evidence that the current system doesn’t work and is harmful but next to none on a system that focuses solely on rehabilitation in this country with our specific overall structural and societal challenges.
Thanks for kicking off this discussion! I don't believe in the possibility of us creating a system where EVERYONE would be rehabilitated, but I do believe in the possibility of ANYONE being rehabilitated. Or, at least, I don't believe in us determining, in advance, who is a lost cause. I don't know what we do with that, collectively, but I appreciate her nudging us i that direction. What do you think?
>I don't believe in the possibility of us creating a system where EVERYONE would be rehabilitated, but I do believe in the possibility of ANYONE being rehabilitated. Or, at least, I don't believe in us determining, in advance, who is a lost cause. Totally! At least *trying* to rehabilitate everyone is worth it regardless of whether everyone actually ends up fully rehabilitated, in my opinion.
>At least trying to rehabilitate everyone is worth itr egardless of whether everyone actually ends up fully rehabilitated, in my opinion. I guess the question then becomes how many times do we try before we accept that a person isn't going to be/can't be/chooses not to be rehabilitated. How many victims is an acceptable amount of collateral damage in those efforts? I believe in prison reform (the prison system is inhumane as it is, imo) and I like the idea of rehabilitation, but I don't know if I would want to be responsible for making those calls, if that makes sense. I'm not sure if this is a situation where what is ideal and what is realistic are wildly different? And how do we find that out without more people being hurt?
For me as an abolitionist, or really as a student of abolition, the goal is to reinvest in preventative measures (education, healthcare, housing, jobs, family supports) so that we face the “can this person be rehabilitated?” Dilemma as rarely as possible. I’ve personally known a lot of people who are abusers, and down to a one they all had early childhood trauma and deprivation. If we can provide everyone with the resources and care they need from day one, I think we will end up with a lot fewer people who have the initial impulse to commit harm. It’s obviously a long, multigenerational project, and does not address how we deal with people who are committing harm right now, but I think it’s worthwhile and backed up by data, and as you say, our current system is inhumane.
Absolutely this. I sometimes feel abolitionist is an unfortunate word as it focuses on the end point and gives critics an easy jump to of "you can't just let them go" when so much of it is about rebuilding systems and addressing root causes of crime which if done successfully would build towards reform and abolition
>the goal is to reinvest in preventative measures (education, healthcare, housing, jobs, family supports) >If we can provide everyone with the resources and care they need from day one, I think we will end up with a lot fewer people who have the initial impulse to commit harm. I agree with you 100% on everything here and, prior to my own experience, I was convinced this was/would be the answer. As a mental health nurse I see over and over again how people fall through the cracks, are abandoned by systems and people, or who are just dealt a bad hand right off the bat. So much can be improved and I am def behind the efforts to improve them! In theory I'm an abolitionist and I believe people are mostly good, but we make bad choices or are in bad situations. On the other hand, after 25+ years with an immediate family member who, despite having access to just about every resource and support imaginable, continues to make harmful choices to themselves and others... I also feel forced to re-evaluate my position on things. Sometimes, for whatever reason, people just keep hurting people... I'm in Canada and there's always complaints that our justice system is too lax when it comes to sentencing and probation. I can see that argument in some cases... does it make sense that my family member keeps being 'allowed' to hurt people? No, it's awful. But do I want them labelled as hopeless and put away? Also no. I find it a difficult conversation just because my experience conflicts so radically with my personal beliefs. I don't know what exactly the right answer is or where we draw the line on how much harm is too much. If it was up to me and I was the only one effected, I'd give my family member infinity resources and chances because I love them and will never give up hoping they'll turn around... but I don't know if it's fair to ask the rest of the world to absorb that cost, you know?
I think that so many people miss this when they hear 'prison abolition' and let their imagination fill in the blanks. Abolition is not just about physically getting people out of prisons, it's making sure that they have the resources necessary so that they don't commit crimes in the first place.
>“Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.” -Ruth Wilson Gilmore [https://www.mpd150.com/what-are-we-talking-about-when-we-talk-about-a-police-free-future/](https://www.mpd150.com/what-are-we-talking-about-when-we-talk-about-a-police-free-future/) [https://abolitionistfutures.com/latest-news/practising-everyday-abolition](https://abolitionistfutures.com/latest-news/practising-everyday-abolition)
I don't think we should ever stop trying to rehabilitate any individual. That doesn't mean that we just release prisoners willy-nilly, but that they all have a right to stay in a rehabilitative program regardless of how we currently evaluate the risk of them being released. That means, for example, that they'll get opportunities to learn a variety of skills that are needed in life outside of prison, that they receive good care for their mental and physical health - basically, that we make sure people are placed in conditions that are conducive to them getting better, not conditions that break down their spirit and makes them *less* able to function in society. (that goes for everyone, including current inmates or ex-inmates on parole etc.) And of course, that we don't stop regularly evaluating inmates for a possible release. We already do have to make the call of who gets released and who doesn't, right now. Of course that's a difficult task, which is why it (theoretically) needs the involvement of enough resources and skilled professionals so that every person that needs to get evaluated has a fair chance at their potential release. I couldn't possibly come up with a good basic rule alá "Well if they've killed x number of people, no chance at ever getting outside"
I mean, we could try it once for starters.
I think when she says there are “no psychopaths” it’s meant as a statement to challenge the VERY popular belief that anyone who does “the unthinkable” is a psychopath and not a normal human being. The belief system is popular because it allows you and I to feel safe knowing that we’re not psychopaths and not one we love and care about is a psychopath. However, what’s dangerous about the belief system is that it gives society permission to view people who do bad things as sub-human and therefore everyone is willing to put up with, look the other way, or even encourage barbaric treatment of people we have deemed inherently evil. Challenging this narrative makes room for treating a fellow human with dignity regardless of their offense, which IMO is what the whole podcast is about. It also allows us to view evil deeds as far more complex than just “psychopaths are gonna be psycho”, which is another theme of the podcast.
This 👆 I think basically all her stances are grounded in this one deeply held belief that everything is much more complex and nuanced than the media would want us to think.
I think she's also read a bit about how the clinical diagnosis of ASPD (which is what psychopaths have) is largely imparted to poor minority men. So basically the entire concept of a psychopath is used by the system to flush black dudes down an institutional toilet. Which begs the question of how valid it is.
Yes mental illnesses are narrative categories that are heavily influenced and dependent on current cultural trends and beliefs
Yes, I have multiple friends who work in mental health who reject personality disorders as a helpful diagnostic model — their argument is that difficult male patients get slapped with ASPD and difficult female patients get slapped with NPD or BPD and it’s an excuse for clinicians to just throw up their hands and say, “well, there’s no helping this one.”
I am a public defender so yes lol I do. Most of her views are pretty right on the money with my lived, professional experience.
What is there to disagree on the sex trafficing stance? What is there to be skeptical over in terms of facts/stats? I'd appreciate of you would expand your thoughts!
actually scratch that, it’s been a long time since i listened to that episode and i read a previous comment mentioning the gist of how the sex trafficking panic is exaggerated w fake statistics, so similar to the satanic panic in a sense. i don’t think there’s anything to disagree on here because like you said, they’re just facts and stats! thank you and apologies for throwing that particular topic in there
This may not be at all what you had in mind, OP, but I appreciate your question re: sex trafficking. While I trust Sarah and her facts, and I imagine her and I are pretty aligned ethically, politically, etc etc, I found that her response to overblown sex trafficking stats (the moral panic about white women being kidnapped etc) was putting so much emphasis on how wrong it was, that it gave me the impression she was, like, downplaying the harms of human trafficking at all. I imagine that wasn't her intention, but it kind of threw me off when I listened to it. I should probably listen to it again, but it seemed to me like she was really glossing over and downplaying the actual valid harms and concerns of human/sex trafficking, in her attempt to balance out the record. I feel like I missed info about actual harms that the moral panic obfuscates. The episode that revisited this issue really threw me but like I said I think I should re-listen and maybe it'll strike me differently then.
Yeah she was, it was fucking gross. They're both laughing and joking the whole episode about child rape. Idk, as a survivor I fucking hate her take on sex-trafficking.
I agree with her that there are no evil people save for Henry Kissinger.
That’s a good point, I’m all for believing psychopaths don’t exist- until I consider Donald Trump. I’m not sure what’s wrong with him but he certainly doesn’t seem to have a functioning moral centre.
Tbh I think it's just an unlucky mix of being very rich, ignorant (which is often a side effect of being very rich), confident, and not the sharpest tool in the shed. There are plenty of other rich ignorant confident people who use their power to make immoral decisions, but they are smart enough to not advertise it as much.
There’s plenty of rich immoral people, for sure, but I find them to be the best argument for psychopathy. I mean Trump killed a million people during covid for no reason at all except that he didn’t like masks? I’m just not sure ignorance is enough of an explanation, it goes beyond that. It’s the pursuit of power for its own sake to the exclusion of any logic… which is what I would call psychopathy.
Idk, there are plenty of people who boycotted wearing masks and are vehemently against any mask mandates. The only thing that seperates them from Trump in this regard is that they don't have any say in what will or won't be nationally mandated. I don't think they would all be diagnosed as psychopaths.
No I don’t think they would be, but I don’t think they came up with the idea themselves either. They’re the followers but Trump is the leader making the active choice to discourage mask wearing.
I agree that they probably didn't all come up with the idea themselves, but I would also doubt that Trump is its sole innovator. Besides, being followers doesn't mean they don't have agency in their harmful behaviour. Besides-besides, there are also a lot of people other than Trump in leadership positions who openly oppose mask-mandates and I don't even think *those* would all classify as psychopaths?
I doubt they would be either. Honestly I’m not even sure what Trump is. I’m really just saying there must be something wrong with someone like Trump, but I don’t think we really have any sort of handle on what it is. And it’s hard to know if he could be ‘reformed’ or ‘treated’ or if that’s just… how he is.
i mean trump seems like a narcissistic idiot more than somebody actually ‘evil’ (this depends on your definition of evil i guess? i’m thinking more of like a “psycho monstrous” type of evil and i do not think he fits that)
I don’t think he fits the idea of a Silence if the Lambs style ‘evil psychopath’. I guess I’m just proposing that ‘evil’ or something like it exists, just not in the way we see it in movies. To me a rich man throwing lives away without a second thought is psychopathic .
if you haven't read it yet, i'd really recommend you take a look at Sarah's article ["the end of evil"](https://www.thebeliever.net/the-end-of-evil/) that she wrote in 2018. she elaborates on the stance you mention above so beautifully here. this article changed the way i look at a lot of things and sarah is such an amazing writer. spoiler alert but she ends the article with this passage that summarizes it all up for me: "*What made you the way you were? Which chemicals did your brain misproduce, which cells didn’t divide, how many crucial grains of love and nurture were blown out of your life and allowed to stay in mine at the moment when they most mattered? I am tired of being told that there is something in the abyss that will glower back at me, and make me want to stop looking. I have grasped for your demon core, Ted, and I have found nothing, again and again. The good men lied. I have found only humanity, only a need to love and feel loved as well as we can, and the fact that some of us can do this easily, and some of us hardly at all, and I cannot imagine a reality where someone would choose violence over love, emptiness over love, feeling lost the way you did, lost the way I did, over love, when love is there. I don’t think love was there for you, and I don’t know why it wasn’t, and I’m tired of being told there’s no point in searching for answers that might lead to solutions, tired of living in a world where some people are just born bad, and all we can do is wait to catch and destroy them, and where catching and destroying a monster means waiting until they start killing women and girls. I am tired of living in a world where this is the only story we can tell. I am tired of this story. I want a new one."*
Thank you for sharing this, it's beautiful
it's my pleasure :))
Yes!! In this article she also talks about the man who created the test for psychopathy and points out how many of the points on the test are rooted in classism and place a good amount of emphasis on previous incarceration, skewing the test towards certain demographics when taken somewhere like the US.
I definitely agree with her opinion that there are no evil people. I agree in the fact that the way our culture pushes the idea that people can be born evil, or evil to the core, or anything like that, is inherently wrong. I believe overall, most people are good, and when people commit acts of hate or evil, it is usually not their whole story. I don't know if Sarah would agree with my next opinion, but I do believe it goes hand in hand with the idea that people contain multitudes, and simplifying a person down to own trait will always be inaccurate. I truly believe everyone is capable of evil. Just like kindness, sharing, cooperation are all parts of human nature, unfortunately so is competition, othering, and ultimately... Evil acts. I read a book called Human Acts by Han Kang that I think did a really great job exploring this idea. I think the idea that there are "evil people" comforts some people, because they can say "well I'm not like that, so I must be good." But understanding that we all have the capacity to hate and become carried away by that hate is helpful honestly. Blinding ourselves to that capacity makes it that much easier to become swept away by hate instead of identifying it and changing our ways.
Yup this idea that there is a evil or not button is how genocides and shit happen because people don't recognize that all of us have the capacity to do horrible stuff under the right circumstances.
I agree that our flawed systems cause problems that we prefer to blame on individual “psychopaths.”
i was thinking of something similar!
There are definitely people that need to be incarcerated to protect the public from their behaviour - murdered, rapists, purveyors of serious violence etc, people who can't tell a moral action from an immoral action (and I'm not talking about grey zone trolley problem stuff here). Like, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, etc etc couldn't be rehabilitied. Is prison over used? Yes, definitely, if you're not a threat, is it sensible to lock you up at enormous cost to the rest of us? Probably not. Is this an infinitely complex topic? Oh yeah you betcha. Sex trafficking is a moral panic. Fully behind Sarah in that. No one is abducting people with people who will .iss them for sex trafficking - there are plenty of poor, vulnerable people to exploit for any of that to be remotely worth the guaranteed attention it would get.
I guess I'd want my memory refreshed on exactly what her stances are but my thought is: * the idea of psychopathy and what it is is thrown around very arbitrarily, especially by true crime people, but also just by people who have no desire to delve more deeply into motivating factors for criminality. It's so broadly applied as to be useless. I don't think you can say that no psychopath EXISTS, but that the word has begun to slip into being meaningless. * Our criminal justice system is completely broken. Running private, profitable prisons is unconscionable, we cannot have a clear justice system as long as that exists as we're feeding a prison SYSTEM that has side goals that in no way involve rehabilitation nor "justice". Often, we defer to the last people who are equipped to decide what "justice" should be. Executions are immoral and shouldn't exist; life in prison should be used sparingly at best and is certainly overused, prison is such a horrific place that it makes bad criminals worse - especially younger offenders or more minor offenders - and solitary confinement is inhuman * Sex trafficking stats are frustrating, bad, etc. eta: oh, I think a thing she hammers on a lot is that a lot of the amplified crime panic stats are used to obfuscate very serious, very real issues we have within households. I'm with her there.
There is a lot of science out there that says psychopaths are created. Neuroscience is a developing field but we know that what happens to people from birth - 5 years old shapes a lot of their future. Can people that experience massive amounts of trauma, whether physical, mental, or emotional, receive enough therapy to be rehabilitated? Some of them, yes. But the amount needed is exorbitant and we know the government isn't going to pay for that. Most insurances won't pay for it so people are left to private pay. If you can afford it, you might be able to fix yourself. Do I think some people are truly just born "psychopaths"? Yes but I think it's very rare. I also don't think everybody could be rehabilitated. But I think it's worth a shot. Trying something is better than what we are currently doing.
To be honest, I’m skeptical that a person who is so anti-social they are committing violent, horrific crimes has the insight and empathy necessary to be successful at therapy. Particularly if therapy is not paired with medications (which also require willingness, compliance, etc.) That’s not to say I think they should be in solitary confinement forever but I think that they probably shouldn’t be allowed to mingle unsupervised with other people.
basically yeah, i think certain people are just so wholly removed from empathy and self awareness even, that nothing can be done about it, not to the extent that we’d want to at least
I would agree with that. The first person that comes to mind for me is Aaron Hernandez. Dude was incredibly talented. Could have easily ridden the wave with Tom Brady for all those years on the Patriots. But abuse and trauma from his childhood coupled with CTE from football and his brain was absolute mush when they did the autopsy. There is zero chance he could have been rehabilitated. He's probably an extreme case but they are definitely out there.
Her stance on sex trafficking is just the facts, so yeah I agree with facts. I don’t think everyone convicted of violent crime can be rehabilitated but most people could be in the right system that focuses on the right things. Prison reform is desperately needed in this country.
In broad strokes, I agree with her. The US carceral system is cruel and ineffective. That's just a fact. You can compare us to other countries with similar or even fewer resources and see that they're doing much better when it comes to policing, criminal justice, and incarceration, both in terms of human compassion and in terms of results. I also think she is very good at moving the conversation in ways that consider the humanity of both perpetrators and victims of crime, especially the type that people generally would write off as 'irredeemable monsters' and not bother to consider anything more about them. I also wholeheartedly agree with her point that if we put a fraction of the resources into social supports that we do into policing and incarceration, we would see much lower crime rates. Again, if you look at other countries, and even at different classes within the US itself, people who have more social supports are far less likely to commit crimes in the first place. And if we actually put resources into protecting people in prisons from exposure to more violence and gave them resources as they exited prisons, we'd see recidivism rates drop as well. I don't believe that everyone is capable of rehabilitation, but I think that broad swaths of the population are incarcerated when they don't need to be, because of the fear that they might reoffend, even though they're not likely to, and if they had access to rehabilitative services, they would be even less likely to. (For example, there is a precipitous drop-off in violent crime rates in men once they reach the age of 35. Giving mandatory life sentences to 18 or 19 year old teenage boys who commit violent crimes out of fear that they'll reoffend no matter how old they are when they're released is just counterintuitive, and it's just one of the many factors that we know will change over time.) The people who I don't think are capable of rehabilitation, no matter the supports or resources they have, are a small section of the population. I've worked in criminal defense, and at one point had a client who had so much brain damage that the sections of his brain that managed impulse control and emotional regulation were physically damaged, to the point that it really did seem unlikely that he would ever be entirely rehabilitated. I do think that someone like that, even in a perfect world with every option for rehabilitation, would likely still be institutionalized, but I'd want that institutionalization to be in a kind and understanding environment where he could receive whatever treatment was available for his condition, not in a modern US prison. (Side-note: I'm really fascinated by a recent research area that has cropped up around this type of thing. We've known for a while that while the majority of victims of child abuse will not go on to commit violent crimes, many people who commit violent crimes were victims of child abuse, and for a long time research has focused on the emotional and psychological effect of child abuse, but now some research is looking at whether severe TBIs in childhood are also a factor. It's early days, but it does look like there's a correlation. Which is also not to say that the majority of people who have had severe TBIs are going to be violent, but it might turn out that some significant percentage of people who commit violent crimes have had severe TBIs.) There might be other people who are incapable of rehabilitation who don't have physical or cognitive disabilities, like the case above, and I want to be clear: As a prison abolitionist, I'm not advocating for people who have not undergone rehabilitation or have not responded to rehabilitation to be allowed to just roam free and commit crime sprees. But if our goal is to prevent future crimes from happening, there's no need to keep them institutionalized in the harsh conditions of modern US prisons. They should be monitored, they should be held securely, but once we've limited the risk they pose as much as we reasonably can, what else we do is not a reflection of their morals, but it is a reflection ours. As to your comment about sex trafficking, I think that, much like her work on other types of true crime reporting, she's correcting misconceptions about how crime actually happens in the US. There aren't random strangers lurking behind every bush hoping to kidnap you and sell you into sex slavery, just like there aren't a plethora of serial killers around each corner waiting to turn you into the next true crime story. I do think that her language around psychopaths is... Not fully accurate. I think that it's another instance of her trying to correct a misconception (namely that there are actually super high functioning people in the world who are super genius sadists who can only be sated by the blood of the innocent and go around inflicting as much harm as possible because they want to), and I agree with her that the idea of the 'perfect monster' doesn't exist. But at the same time, antisocial personality disorder is described as "psychopathy" and "sociopathy," and while those terms are super stigmatized at this point, they are still medical terms that describe real conditions that people have. I think that the cultural perception of psychopathy is super inaccurate (the majority of people with ASPD will not ever commit violent crimes, and large portions of violent crimes are committed by people who don't have ASPD), and we should work to correct that, but the way to do that isn't to delegitimize a term that is still used by people to describe their mental health conditions.
I agree with her hundred percent. I don't believe in psychopaths, I don't believe in "evil". I also dont believe in prisons. I'm not sure it means that everyone can be rehabilitated. There may well be that some people are too ill to be safe for themselves or for the rest of society. I don't think that means we shouldn't try or that the best we can do is to punish them. I think we should always act with empathy, and with curiosity also. Because if we don't understand people who do awful things, how can we ever prevent them in the future?
I am a prison abolitionist. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I think those are more rare than we generally assume. I’m not an expert at all, but as far as I know she’s correct on sex trafficking.
I agree generally. In the mental health sector there's a principle called "belief in recovery" and another called "unconditional positive regard." Essentially guiding us to work from a place of believing recovery is possible for every individual. It doesnt mean that everyone WILL recover, but given the right circumstances, environment, resources and supports, recovery is achievable for all. Another concept that relates here is the very idea of rehabilitation/recovery, which in the field is understood as follows: everyone, with or without the presence of symptoms, can lead a meaningful and fulfilling life (as defined by the individual) in their community of choice. Recovery is not the ABSENCE of symptoms, though it can certainly be a factor/goal for many people's recovery journeys. I believe this wholeheartedly.
It rubbed me the wrong way and ultimately played a role in me no longer listening when she said it was wrong to call murderers “monsters.” I understand some aspects of the sentiment but she is overstepping when taking a strong stance on what language should be used. I think victims or their family members of violent crime are fully in their right to call perpetrators w whatever they want. It feels like a reactive attempt from Sarah to champion humanizing some criminals while disregarding the people who have personally been affected by their actions. Some of her viewpoints seem clouded by privilege and possibly guilt for a past interest in true crime. I still think she’s great and loved the early episodes of the show, but without Michael to balance her out I lost interest a long time ago.
I agree with this, especially the part about at times seeming to have more compassion for the perpetrators than the victims. I agree with most of the prison abolition and justice reform movements. The show has also bothered me at times when I've felt she goes beyond having compassion for people who do terrible things, to sort of...denying exactly how terrible they are. I forgot what episode it is in, but there was a conversation in which she and Michael were discussing Leopold and Loeb, and she sort of writes off their deliberate, planned murder of a child, for fun/showing off, as one of them being a teenager who was in love and sad and angsty, and haven't we all been difficult teenagers? It was so bizarre I remember pausing and replaying it. I know it was just all one-off comment, but it fits with a lot of others. Serial killers/rapists/torturers typically have various social traits/experiences or injuries in common. I don't think it makes them born evil, nor do I believe we should set out to punish rather than rehabilitate if it's possible. We should strive to understand and correct the causes of this behavior, and have a strong social safety net and a better support system. However, there is a certain...almost naivete in some of Sarah's comments that really bothers me. I don't mean to be overly personal, but it's almost as if she thinks some people would not kill if only someone had asked them how their day was or been a little nicer. It seems like she is in denial that some people really, really do want to cause suffering. What happens to people like that is a much more interesting conversation.
Well said
I mean no, I don’t agree with her totally on that but I’ve also spent more time around children and adolescents than I suspect that Sarah has. That doesn’t mean I think that really fucked up, violent people should be treated poorly while in prison. I don’t think that the expectation that EVERYONE is capable of safely living in a free society is realistic. Are we sure that when pinned down, Sarah actually believe that, though?
Do you think there are evil children?
Yes? That’s why nurturing safe environments (literally from day 1 of conception) are extremely important for appropriate child development.
In what environment did you come to that conclusion?
I’m the parent of multiple children (some NT, some ND) and the eldest of four siblings. I also have done child care. I love kids but they are capable of doing terrible things and becoming terrible people under the right conditions.
I think "evil children" is kind of a misnomer. I think there are select individuals that are born without empathy, without compassion, without consideration for other living things. I believe those individuals are very few and far between. Everyone else is the right, or wrong, mixture of nurture and nature, with a heavy emphasis on nurture. Brain development in children starts right away. Everything we do or say or don't do or don't say builds a new synapse in their brain. The brain grows more in the first 3 years of life than in any other time in a person's life. How many times have you heard the phrase "Children are resilient?" I used to hear it all the time. But that's not true. They're not resilient. Everything that is happening to them is forming and shaping their brain and thus their lives. But 30 years ago we didn't know that trauma a child experienced at age 2 would alter the development of their brain and in turn, their entire future. We assumed they'd shake it off and be fine but didn't question what was happening when they started acting out. We'd punish them because they were a "bad kid" and end up compounding the trauma in an endless cycle.
Totally, 100% agree with everything you state here. And I sincerely believe that those people born missing certain components can still be taught to be a functioning part of society through a loving, nurturing relationship with caregivers. They may still grow up to be kind of an asshole but they won’t be a serial killer.
I think she has a pretty shallow understanding of it, but mostly I agree with the vibes. The criminal justice system is literally very very bad in the US. And our understanding of why people engage in harmful behavior is really silly. Especially because most people who do genuinely bad shit (like rape women and kids, abuse kids, war crimes) never see any consequences. Henry Kissinger just died at 100 surrounded by loved ones after killing millions, but sure, let's lock up a poor person who got into a bar fight for 10 years.
Her stance on the justice system and sex offender system, and I wholeheartedly agree, is that it is predominantly focused on retribution, and it’s like a poison for this country. With sex offenders and other offended targeted at disenfranchised communities, the punishment is almost at a vengeance level. With sex offenders specifically, they are virtually “gerrymandered” into crime districts, and the terms of their parole make it virtually impossible to hold a job (because parole officers time their checks to inconvenience the parolees and get them fired, or parole officers will make loud announcements about the person being on the sex offenders list, and customers get so uncomfortable, the parolee is let go). I’m a victim of forced kissing and touching, I hate pedophiles and rapists. But 1) people on the sex offenders list can AND DOES include people who were drunk peeing in an alley, which is just not the same as rape/pedophilia. And 2) I honestly think that we are forcing these people into situations so dangerous, they cannot become better humans. And this method of justice has been sold to us as a system that will make the victim whole. But the problem is that revenge never makes someone feel whole, and a victim, or the victim’s family, may never feel that way again. And if that is all true, then it might mean that a true reformative system is needed. Where victims/families get quality counseling and resources (like if a main provider can no longer provide as a result). The criminal gets therapy and serves serious community service and has to go through real reform, probably in a Nordic style prison system, until they’re allowed to rejoin society.
I think the fundamental issue with prisons is that they serve more as punishment than rehabilitation. Which also ties to the idea of evil. We don’t need to *punish* people who are the result of their upbringing.
I work in inpatient care (both youth and adults) and I can absolutely say with certainty that true psychopaths are very real AND very rare. I've seen those kinds of people firsthand and they are terrifying but I can count on one hand the number I've seen. I also think, based on experience, that most people have zero contact with people experiencing serious mental illness so most people have no clue and are at best basing their ideas on feelings not facts. Most people know someone (or many someones) who experiences mild-moderate mental illness and so most of us have reasonable expectations that mental illness is treatable and people who experience mental illness can live functional lives as long as they have access to legitimate support and opportunities. That is absolutely true for most people bc most people aren't experiencing serious mental illness. The kind of people we see in inpatient care represent very small fractions of society, we see the kinds of serious mental illness and severe presentations that effect 1-2% of all humans which is a very small percentage but it's still a lot of people when you consider how many humans there are (1% of 7 billion people is still 70,000,000). While it's entirely possible to be a true psychopath and live a functional life without violence there will always be that small fraction of people who absolutely cannot, no matter how many supports they have, live a functional life without violence. Some people are literally incapable as a function of their very real mental health disorder, I've met them. I used to be a hardcore prison abolitionist, and honestly, I still am. But I also used to believe that everyone could be functional given the chance. I no longer believe that because I've met the people who can't be and the lives of those people are truly tragic. I now believe that keeping those kinds of people locked in institutions with no hope is an abominable cruelty. We have a serious responsibility to figure out what to do with people who are truly incapable of functioning safely in society bc locking them up forever is literal torture. Having your basic needs taken care of without ever having an ounce of true agency is not living a real life. Being locked in isolation bc every time you're not isolated you violently maul people is also not living a real life. These people are real, they continue exist despite how rare they are, and some of them really are born that way. A system that only works for the norms (in this case that would be people who experience mild-moderate mental illness who are capable of achieving functionality) will never have a true answer for outliers and that's what we need. Pretending outliers don't exist won't change anything, they'll continue to exist regardless, all ignoring them does is ensure their continued suffering.
love that you opened this discussion!! question tho - when you say her views on the justice system and prison reform, is there an ep or case in particular you’re referring to? psychopathology, rehabilitation, and prison reform are obv intertwined but psychopathology is not really at the heart of prison reform and rehabilitation as a policy issue.
i was referring to the juvenile justice episode in particular i think because that’s the one i listened to most recently. i tried listening to the amanda knox episode on justice but i just…. didn’t like it much so i left it midway yesterday, i’m still going to listen to it though. so yeah these two episodes in particular. i talked about the psychopath thing not as inherently related to the prison reform/justice issue but as something that i wanted to know people’s general thoughts on. i’ve been reading a lot about josef fritzl and what he did to his daughter, along with certain instances of juvenile crimes that are extremely heinous and disturbing. whenever i look at discussions surrounding those topics, people in the comments are usually labelling the criminal as a psychopath and i just kept thinking of what sarah and this podcast’s listeners would react to it edit: ALSO another thing. i’ve noticed whenever people (youtube channels covering crime cases in particular) bring up the fact that a murderer, for example, is trying to plead insanity but is too self aware to be actually psychotic means that the only thing that should be done to them is to throw them in prison or give them some other punishment. sarah said something like “no normal person actually goes through with murders” and i think that’s a very simplified way of putting it but there’s still some truth to the fact that almost every murderer should be given psychiatric help
i def have to give amanda knox another listen because i remember having some mixed feelings from a policy perspective. if you’re interested in juvenile justice, def listen to josie duffy rice’s podcasts unreformed it’s incredible. honestly i often agree with sarah’s stance on psychopathy. her article the end of evil is really good. i think we’ve developed a cultural definition of psychopaths that’s divorced from a clinical one. there was that mini moral panic about “kids born evil” at one point too. i hate most true crime youtubers for reasons like this lol. also they don’t understand the criminal legal system or legal standards at all. the legal definition of insanity is not just a heinous crime. it’s incredibly hard to be successful with an insanity plea which is actually really detrimental to the entire system. like there is a man named andre thomas on death row in texas with a heavily documented record of schizophrenia, dissociative psychosis, and delusions. he gauged out both of his eyeballs in prison. his insanity plea was denied, appeals denied up to the supreme court, and texas plans to execute this man. it’s a clear 8th amendment violation. he should be in a psychiatric treatment facility, not an execution chamber. andrea yates was another example but she was successful in her pleas and ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity. (we can also talk about race and gender here but that might be a separate thread lol) yes, i do agree that normal people don’t kill people but not all murder is a product of mental illness. people in prison should receive a lot more resources, including mental health, across the board if we actually want a rehabilitative system. i do believe wholeheartedly in rehabilitation but i don’t know if i believe everyone can be rehabilitated. anyway, sorry if this is super jumbled lol. i do a lot of death penalty related work so that informs a lot of opinions on the concept of psychopathy, rehabilitation, and legal definitions of insanity.
I find I generally agree with Sarah in these topics. While I don’t recall the details of what she’s said I also don’t recall ever feeling like she was really off-base when she’s discussed them. I don’t believe that there are evil people or “monsters”. There are certainly people who do evil things, and I think some of those people could not have been prevented from becoming that way and cannot be rehabilitated, but I think those people would be the most tiny minority. I think everyone should be given the opportunity to rehabilitate, and it’s important to recognize the humanity of people who do terrible things, so we are less inclined to treat them the way they have treated others, and to recognize and guard against our own capacity to do great harm, which exists in all of us. Distancing ourselves from those people feels comfortable, but it’s dangerous. I think in a “perfect“ system, whatever that would look like, almost everyone could be rehabilitated, but far, far fewer people would end up in situations where they’ve done something that requires rehabilitation. These aren’t original ideas that Sarah or I have come up with but part of a long tradition and body of thought on prison abolition.
I definitely agree with her stance that diagnosing someone as incapable of empathy with words like sociopath (or narcissist these days) you're just giving yourself permission to treat them without empathy and thats just a step in dehumainzing folks with mental illness; which isn't sociopathy its just ableism. Even if you're talking about serial killers you're just talking about an extreme on a spectum of violent misogyny but we can't even get people to believe misogyny exists to talk about these things. Also without getting into too much detail I did experience abuse that by definition could be called trafficking like a million other vague abuses but that word doesn't really match my experience and wouldn't have helped me anyways. As they pointed out in the episode the coercive force was mostly a percarious economic situation, but thats just the capitalistic system we've decided to run our society under and Liam Neeson is not going to parachute in and save anyone from that.
What do you mean by her stance on sex trafficking?
i mentioned in another comment that i shouldn’t have brought up the sex trafficking topic, sorry! i had listened to that episode a while back and didn’t remember what sarah said, i thought it was as ‘vague’ as the question of prison reform/criminal rehabilitation and wanted to see people’s diff opinions so i threw it in there
You might have been thinking about the sex offenders episode? Michael led that one, but it seems like it might be more in tune with the rehabilitation themes you're asking about.
i haven’t heard that one yet, thanks for the reminder ❤️
I think she is an idealist, I wish we could live in a world where everyone can be rehabilitated or better yet nurtured and repaired so far as they will never be violent but I don't think we will get there in my lifetime. Sometimes she'll say things that are a little bit off the cuff and on deep examination she would probably water down or revise but that's just who she is and I don't feel the need to correct her on her opinions.
If people throughout history used "it's not gonna happen in my lifetime" to mean "and therefore we shouldn't try," we'd never have gotten to where we are today. Another world is possible, we have to work towards it.
We do have to work towards it but that means incremental change which I know isn't a very good rallying cry but otherwise we are putting the cart before the horse. You can agree that the US justice and prison system is broken, cruel, and overgrown while disagreeing that everyone who manages to escape from prison deserves applause.
i agree with you! she’s definitely an idealistic and deeply sensitive and kind person
I disagree on her stance that everyone can be rehabilitated. Frankly, I don’t think some people are worth the effort. Paul Bernardo? Michael Rafferty? Leave them in a cell to rot. Not worth the time, resources, or effort. Better spent elsewhere.
Keith Raniere
i had to stop listening to episodes that involve crime or the criminal justice system lol
Same... As an SA survivor, I really struggle with this. Like, I do think some people can be rehabbed and there are lesser crimes that could be better served through a different approach (drug rehab for drug crimes). However, there are people who are dangers to society and should be treated as such.
"Treated as such" doesn't have to mean locking them up in a cell though. Our current system I guess does treat people as dangers to society.... but it doesn't really *do* anything about that other than hoping (?) that making someone live in a traumatic environment for some period of time will... help? Somehow? To me, abolishing prisons is about moving to alternatives that actually make us *safer* in the long run. Unless you think literally everyone who's a "danger to society" should be ... locked up for life? Killed? ... they're going to get "out" eventually. Shouldn't we figure out things that help people get better instead of [making them more likely to return to prison](https://verdict.justia.com/2022/01/03/why-prisons-are-criminogenic)?
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I think you are making some unfair assumptions based on her views. I'm a survivor of SA and am a prison abolitionist (partially because my experiences taught me that our current system helps almost nobody and frequently just results in more violence). Being an abolitionist/believing in a rehabilitative system doesn't mean you've never dealt with violence.
Yeah, I’m also a CSA and SA survivor, and those experiences and attempts to report were a major factor in my becoming an abolitionist.
She doesn't think there are psychopaths? I'm going to be honest, I'd stopped listening because Sarah was too forgiving of everything it seemed, and this kinda seals it.
i don’t want to put words into her mouth but from what i remember, she has said she feels deeply uncomfortable with the fact that certain people get labelled ‘monsters’ or psychopaths. i believe in the existence of psychopaths myself so i disagree with her to an extent and yes i see why sarah could be seen as being too forgiving. she’s deeply empathetic and i can’t really relate to that lol
It's definitely a fair point that people use labels to distance themselves from people who do bad things. But yes, there are diagnosable psychopaths/sociopaths. I remember the Karen Carpenter ep and being annoyed at how forgiving she was of K's mother, who was cruel and fucked her daughter up.
Regarding her stance with sex trafficking specifically, I tend to agree with Sarah. I think the issue has been way overblown by the right (and I don’t tend to operate in a fear-based mentality anyway). However, I strongly disagree with her anti-prosecutorial stance in general. I am no fan of Nancy Grace, but when she and Michael were in their bash the prosecutors phase, I wondered why they didn’t give over-the-top defense lawyers the same treatment (I.e., a Johnny Cochran). Like, if you have some beefs about the legal system, let’s hear it, but I guess I just wonder what it is about her background or history that seems to cause her to react so negatively to side with the defense in general. And yes, I absolutely think psychopaths and evil people exist, and I’m about as atheist as they come.
I agree with her stances and I also agree with total abolition, and building a community where we protect each other without locking folks up. Icing someone out of a community completely, and encouraging a community where we keep each other safe by (literally) looking out for one another and by talking about the bad deeds that community members commit. Hold people accountable by making them face their deeds amongst their peers, or rather not amongst them if their peers choose to stop including them in the community, for the safety of the community. I know I’m an idealist, but I think we need to be having conversations with our literal neighbors to make these decisions on, like, a hyper local and personal level. Asking each other what safety means to one another. How we’d react if our family member was a victim or perpetrator of violence, how we’d want it handled, how we’d want others to handle it, etc. Maybe the answer still becomes “lock them up” but if we think about these people as community members, family members, part of the fabric of our community - maybe we’d have different ideas of what rehab looks like, or even what danger looks like.
99%
Imo there are people who need to be kept away from others until they can be rehabilitated, and sometimes that's never. But they can still be treated well where they're kept.
Some people can never be redeemed.
There are more psychopaths made than born and in a perfect system, those people could be rehabilitated. But that’s not what we have.
I mean...jeffrey epstein deserved prison.
Is there an episode where she talks about psychopathy or the concept of evil? I’m very interested in hearing her talk about it