Destabilizing Conceptions of Violence

Abstract

Prison reform policies in recent years have tended to emphasize “non-violent” offenders as more worthy of sentence reconsideration and alternatives to incarceration. This reinforces the distinction between violent and non-violent crime and strengthens negative attitudes and state sanctions against the so-called violent offenders. This chapter problematizes this facile distinction by exploring how violence operates in poor, black communities. In the first section it is argued that violence and dignity are not mutually exclusive. Violence can be understood as an expression of dignity in the state of emergency that obtains in many poor, black communities. In the second section, three types of violence are analyzed: retributive, pre-emptive, and destructive violence. The first two types are often deployed to protect dignity. In the last section, there is a discussion of what it would take to reach a non-violent state in black interstices, one that allows for the promotion and protection of dignity.

Gruen will be referred to in this chapter as P.L.G, Pierce as D.R.E., and Meikle as C.M. P.L.G. has been teaching philosophy to and learning from D.R.E. and C.M. since 2010 in a maximum security prison. The three of them decided to take on this project given their shared interest in and experiences of violence as well as their philosophical interest in dignity .