The Regular Girl Couldn't Come, So I'm Here.

All I care about is art of Fat Women 🌹💘

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psychiatry in its current form as a web of institutions that operates through / for the benefit of race and capital needs to be seriously grappled with if we’re to advance an answer as to what an abolitionist response to psychological / behavioural difference looks like. if we think of “mental illness” as a “real,” “natural,” “neutral” or prediscusive thing such that the only problem (if we even see one) is that too MANY or the WRONG people are getting caught in the net of its institutions (for example I saw someone describe forced institutionalisation as “misuse of mental health resources”)—then we’re not thinking it through adequately. I don’t mean to understate the difficulty of the work of unlearning & reimagining (necessarily occurring in conjunction with work on the ground) that ALL prison abolition does, but I think the naturalisation of mental illness might make this one a particularly hard leap for some people–challenges to the supposedly biological nature of mental illness met with a lot of pushback when some of us started a conversation about it On Here 3-4 years ago, including/especially from mentally ill people.

to that end, some readings connecting psychiatry to race & capital, and connecting prison abolition to deinstitutionalization:

Creating Racism: Psychiatry’s Betrayal

Jonathan M. Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (2010, on libgen) talks about “how race gets written into the definition of mental illness"

An interview with Jonathan Metzl on the book

Liat Ben-Moshe, Genealogies of Resistance to Incarceration: Abolition Politics within Deinstitutionalization and Anti-Prison Activism in the U.S. (2011, dissertation)

– “Deinstitutionalization: A Case Study in Carceral Abolition” (2014)

–, Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (2014, also on libgen)

– “Why prisons are not ‘The New Asylums’” (2017)

–, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (2020)

Emily Thuma, “Against the “Prison/Psychiatric State”: Anti-violence Feminisms and the Politics of Confinement in the 1970s” on how the Coalition to Stop Institutional Violence “forged an understanding of institutional violence that linked the politics of mental health to the repressive punishment of women prisoners’ agency, and the expansion of medicalized incarceration to hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality”

“Kamilah Brock: Woman held in mental health facility because police didn’t believe BMW was hers”

also check out this prison abolition syllabus, notably the “Carceral Intersections” section

Gonna break down this response as clearly as possible. 

The origins of the police are evil. 

It has been shown repeatedly that the police were formed to oppress the working class and (1, 2) and enforce white supremacy (1, 2, 3). In fact, the early U.S. police grew directly out of slavery.

The police aren’t the people you think they are.

The police don’t care about you – they don’t even have a constitutional duty to protect you. They’re allowed to take your property without your consent (the NYPD seizes so much property they can’t even log it in their computers). In fact, cops are more likely to steal your property than burglars are. They commit hundreds of crimes and human rights violations against people like you & me and get away with it because they cover for each other.

Cops tend to be unusually aggressive, authoritarian, and secretive (Greene & Heilbrun, 2011). They are more than twice as likely to commit domestic violence than the rest of the population, and (once again) they cover for each other when doing so. The police are on the side of neo-Nazis (1, 2). In fact, many times the police themselves are the neo-Nazis/klansmen (1, 2, 3). And even besides all this, cops do all kinds of other shady shit – for instance, undercover police are used to instigate fights during protests and rallies.

The police terrorize those of us who are marginalized.

The police disproportionately arrest Black people for drugs even though white people use drugs more often. They disproportionately pull Black people over for traffic stops. The police terrorize people with disabilities.They are viciously anti-indigenous – and always have been. Police terrorize sex workers. There are countless examples of police brutalizing homeless people (1, 2, 3). The police have a lengthy history of brutality against the LGBT community (1, 2). They terrorize women of color and get away with it (1, 2, 3). They kill massive numbers of people each year – and a disproportionate number of their victims are Black and native. On top of that, recent data suggests cops may kill up to twice as many people as we even thought they did. And while police love to defend themselves by saying they have the most dangerous job, that’s not even close to being true.

The police’s best kept secret: We don’t need them! 

A world without the police is completely possible (1, 2, 3, 4). We have resources for resolving violence as communities without the need for state intervention (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 – as some examples). We as communities are better capable of resolving violence than the police are, because we don’t have the vested interest in the status quo that they have. Even if a few cops are well-intentioned here or there, it doesn’t change that the role of the police is to work against the vast majority of us in the interests of the (white) elite few. 

kot - a regular cat

koshka - a regular female cat

kote (internet slang) - a cute chubby little guy, every single cute cat on the internet

kisa -  a pretty, flirtatious, graceful, cranky and haughty lady

kisunya - an extra pretty, flirtatious, graceful, cranky and haughty lady

kis’ - just a dork, controlled by aliens

kotik - a bit more disney version of a regulat cat

koten’ka - cuddly little fella, will purr and knead you to death 

kotofei - usually a big, old, extra fluffy cat, who knows a lot of bed time stories

kotyandra - fast, thin and slinky, we not sure if it’s even a cat 

koshak - a tough street guy, dogs fear him