Rather than resulting in the criminalization of the poor for welfare fraud and the like, if we were truly interested in encouraging people to be “pro-social” and “mindful” of others, criminally low welfare rates should result in the criminalization of those who craft, those who pass, and those who enforce the laws and policies, not those subjected to them. If empowerment was more than rhetoric in most prisons, anti-poverty advocacy would be at the core of any programming initiatives.

Women are now being bashed by those with state authority and resources, as well as by their partners. Rather than address the misogynist backlash, women are being induced and encouraged to abandon any hope that the rule of law and civil society can or will take responsibility for holding individual men or the state accountable. Increasingly, when they seek the protection of the state, they are likely to find themselves facing criminal charges after they call the police. Think of the difference if such a call also resulted in an automatic linkage to feminist anti-violence organizers and advocates versus counter charges and criminalization.

In Canada and Australia, Aboriginal women continue to suffer the shameful and devastating impact of colonization. From residential school, to child welfare seizure, to juvenile and adult detention; Aboriginal women and girls are vastly over-represented in state controlled institutions. Indeed, even as we work to deinstitutionalize and decarcerate, we are fearful that "treatment" will be the next colonial control of choice.

We all know that women are not the cause of the greatest real or perceived risks to others yet we continue to perpetuate the myth by focusing on risk assessments and correctional programs, when it is those responsible for and/or complicit in the destruction of our social safety nets who are in the greatest need of correction. Just as the people had to examine their own actions, inaction and tacit complicity following the genocidal results of German policies and practices in the 1920s through the 1940s, those who fail to address these matters will be faced with the reality that they too could be directly impacted implicitly and possibly explicitly, depending upon their personal, economical and professional circumstances. It is simply not acceptable to merely hide our heads in the sand or re-arrange the proverbial deck chairs on the Titanic as the system becomes more overwhelmed and sinks.

We must instead have the courage and tenacity to challenge the continued creation of laws and policies that effectively criminalize poverty, disabilities and the victims of genocidal legacies of colonization, and then developing classification, assessment and correction tools that pretend that the individual members of those very groups of people who are grabbed, sucked or thrown into the criminal and correctional systems are there because of their planned, voluntary and criminally intended actions?

In the United Kingdom, noted policy leaders such as Pat Carlen and the Howard League are amongst those calling for decarceration and social (re)investment. In the United States, there is the laudable legacy of Jerry Miller’s decarceration of juvenile corrections in Massachusetts, and now, he and many others calling for penal abolition. I commend Angela Davis’ very digestible latest book, Are Prisons Obsolete? Indeed, many others besides Angela have also characterized the push to criminalize the most dispossessed as the present manifestation of enslavement of the most vulnerable and dispossessed. We must resist this trend to control by criminalization and imprisonment, those most marginalized as a consequence of their race, ability, class and gender. We must therefore also examine our fundamental beliefs and notions of whose interests and biases are privileged by our criminal and regulatory laws and social, economic, health and educational policies.