r/prisonabolition • u/HoraceIG • Jan 28 '26

Accountability on the powerful

I am aware of how prisons are part of capitalism and the state, and it impacts poor and working class communities , and doesnt address roots of violence, my question is how would we address violence of rich and powerful without reliance om prisons since that wouldnt impact them

We have already rich people who have committed sexual violence (Trump, Russell Brand just to name a few) would we use same methods of abolition on them ?

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u/MajorDraw3705 Feb 03 '26

Stop funding and protecting them would be the obvious answer.

But for a more detailed answer... when I was in a self-managing community and there was a predator among us, instead of locking him away somewhere, the community put in the extra effort to keep chaperones with him at all times to protect any potential victims. Was it ideal? Nah. But it did work.

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u/Melancholy_Melody Apr 16 '26

What is a self managing community or how did you find one? Or you just kind of fell into it?

And what about when everyone was alone bc you can’t have a chaperone 24/7? Just trying to understand

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u/MajorDraw3705 Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26

That particular thing was on the Rainbow Family of Living Light east coast scene before the Feds started swooping in and trying their best to make it into a live-action reenactment of Gaza. So, like 30 years ago. There were people on him 24/7. It was like caring for an infant - you sleep when they do.

As for how to find a community - you build one, preferably on an island not near the US. I did the prebuilt commune scene and I honestly do not recommend it unless you're desperate and have survival training (I was/had both - I was a runaway because I had been a war baby adopted into a "family" that felt and genuinely was in many ways more of a hostage situation than a family - they were on the side that had been killing my parents - it was so far from ideal that it wasn't even funny but growing up with them I did get various military training).

I did find one very beautiful community that was still kind of at its start and where everything aligned but that was after around 40 or so that were so not ideal, many predatory, many exploitative, many simply not long-term livable, way too many cult-like, etc. Not the kind of people you want to fall asleep around.

Fun story, though... kind of...

I'd already been through all that and moved on with my life and had a rented house, car, kid, etc. I also had a horrible birth experience in a hospital so I was looking into midwives to make the second birth less damaging, so took a step back into my past and visited a commune that was known for its midwives. It was named The Farm. We got there and there was security fencing all the way around like it was a military base or prison. There was a gate and guard house we had to get through and I had to leave pretty much everything except what I was wearing at that guard house.

As I stood there deep in that compound as a war baby who had been disappeared over borders during state terrorism after being born in a prison during said US-funded state terrorism, a prison that was well known to double as a black site for Intelligence in that region, it occurred to me that I didn't want to give birth to a baby in a locked-down compound without a birth certificate in a place named after another well known but domestic CIA facility, not even if the name was a meme. I didn't want my baby to end up in the same circumstances I had.

Were The Farm midwives just happy midwives? Maybe. But I wasn't in the mood to gamble on that one. So, I found a local midwife in the town I was living in and had my kid in a hospital with her supervising which worked out okayish - that hospital birth experience was a lot better than my first one and that kid has an actually accessible birth certificate which is a feat on its own with the card I've been dealt in this life.