FEATURED
A Seattle University law professor made the argument that “care and accountability circles work better” than prison for those who have committed rape or other sex crimes, according to a video clip recently unearthed by a Manhattan Institute investigator.
The clips from the interview, published by Stu Smith on X, feature criminology scholar Sarah Lamble of the Birkbeck University of London and law Professor Dean Spade of Seattle University.
In one of the opening statements of the X video, Spade addressed the question of whether prison abolition should apply to rapists and other sex offenders.
The professor claimed that “care and accountability circles work better than punishing people who have engaged in sexual harm to make them stop.”
According to the Duke University “Social Movements” project, the goal of the prison abolitionist movement is “to reduce and eliminate prisons and the wider carceral system” and “replace the punitive justice system with alternative modes of dealing with issues of harm and injustice…”
Spade’s comments were part of a larger discussion, published on YouTube on Aug. 10, about Lamble’s new book, “Unsafe: The carceral roots of the anti-trans backlash.”
The book claims the “fiercest battles over gender today [are] … about punishment, fear, and control,” and “carceral [imprisonment] approaches to safety fail to address root causes of harm, ultimately deepening social divisions and legitimizing new forms of violence and control.”
At one point in the interview, Lamble said that people have a legitimate fear of sexual violence but many have wrongly connected that fear to transgender people. That is “incorrect and wrong, but … just telling them that doesn’t work,” she said.
Spade also talked about how the “incarceral context,” or cultural acceptance of prisons, that “we live in has set up a story about safety, culturally, that’s terrible for all of us.”
“And it’s also set up the same structures internally, that are about getting safe by getting away from people we perceive as bad,” Spade said.
To achieve the goals of abolitionism and the transgender movement, Spade also argued that abolitionists should welcome individuals whom society has placed in “extreme, sexualized, stigmatized categories — those are our people.” The professor mentioned sex workers as an example.
“… if you take our radical politics and use that as the test, you’re likely to produce spaces that are unwelcoming and too small to be effective,” Spade said.
At another point in the conversation, Spade also said the transgender movement needs to be engaged in a “militant struggle” and gather together a larger movement to help them with “fighting back.”
The College Fix contacted Spade twice recently, asking for a reaction to the video clip, including whether there was any important context to add, but Spade did not respond. The Fix also contacted Lamble via email, but did not receive a response.
In an interview with The Fix, Smith, an investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute, contrasted the historical abolitionist movement with what Spade and Lamble support. Smith’s work frequently exposes videos of professors and other scholars espousing radical ideas.
“Contemporary abolitionists have borrowed the moral authority of the historical abolitionist movement to advance a radically different political agenda, one that ranges from abolishing the police and eliminating prisons to replacing punishment with systems of ‘care’ and ‘accountability,’” he said in a recent email.
“And as we can see with Spade, this ideology has made its way into law schools. Students can now be taught that even serious sexual violence should be met with ‘care and accountability circles’ instead of punishment,” he said.
“When tuition costs $62,558 a year and this is the kind of serious thinking being offered in return, it is little wonder that people are losing faith in higher education,” Smith told The Fix.
Spade has been teaching at Seattle University, a private Catholic institution, since 2008, and has published numerous articles and books on transgender culture and abolition. Two years ago, the professor gave the talk “No Prisons, No Borders, No Cops, No State?” at New York University Law School’s Annual Rose Sheinberg Lecture.
Along with teaching and writing, Spade, a woman who identifies as a transgender man, works “to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice,” according to the professor’s bio.
MORE: Seattle law professor: ‘People are going to need to break a lot of … laws to survive’
