Beyond Cages
"The animal protection movement is living out an untenable paradox: motivated by a vision of progressive social reform, while relying on regressive social policy. The animal protection movement's enthusiasm for criminal punishment echoes in some surprising quarters. In his Inaugural Address, President Trump described rampant crime as an "American carnage" that threatened the well-being and safety of all Americans. Attorney General Sessions has also "repeatedly hawked a nationwide crime wave," and claimed that the very "safety of the American people [is] at risk" as a justification for more aggressive sentencing and charging practices. Sessions issued a memo in May of 2017 instructing that federal prosecutors are prohibited, in the absence of explicit permission, from pursuing anything other than the "most serious" charges possible in each case. The Brennan Center and numerous civil rights organizations have criticized as anathema to social justice this approach to criminal justice that stokes public fears in order justify ever harsher criminal regimes. Tough on crime polices are a self-fulfilling prophecy because, as one scholar has noted, it is "an experiment that cannot fail-- if crime goes down, prisons gain the credit; but if it goes up, we clearly need more of the same medicine whatever the cost." Moreover, tough on crime policies are oppressive, discriminatory on racial and class lines, unproven as tools of crime reduction, and strikingly lacking in empathy. Yet this same carceral logic - appealing to mainstream persons by exaggerating the risks of crime and the benefits of incarceration - permeates the thinking of activists, organizations and commentators in the animal protection movement"--