Aubourg and her friends at Youth Against Mass Incarceration (YAMI) in Boston are clearly doing very constructive political work with their efforts to educate themselves, recover their own history, acts of solidarity, and constructing relations among themselves that a healthy society should include.
We believe that capitalism and white supremacy have created a system where most people suffer in order for a few people at the top to benefit. Most crimes committed today occur are greatly a result of the system that we live in. Capitalism, racism, sexism, and homophobia drive people apart. They leave some people with more power than others and cause some people to behave oppressively towards others. In a better world, we wouldn’t need prisons. We would have structures in the community that would hold people accountable. We would develop approaches to justice that would be restorative and transformative and not punitive.
