Interviewer: I’ve never thought about the intersection of policing or abolishing prison, and how that would work with reproductive justice. Could you talk a little bit more about that, please?
Kenyatta Thomas: Yeah, of course. So the definition of reproductive justice: being able to maintain personal bodily autonomy, to have or to not have children, and to raise these children in safe and sustainable communities. That kind of definition and framework is incompatible with a society that has police or a prison system. Starting with the fact that people who are in prison do not have personal bodily autonomy. That starts with the fact that they’re locked in a cage that they don’t have the choice to leave. But also gets into the deeper level of the fact that a lot of people, once they’re put into prison, they lose their personal bodily autonomy on a deeper level, because of how they’re communicated with. I watched a livestream documentary about this, called “Belly of the Beast,” that was about the women’s prison system in California, and how so, so, so many people have been sterilized without their knowledge within these prison systems. Because doctors either hadn’t fully explained the procedure, they kind of just gave them paperwork for them to sign without fully saying what they were going to be doing. This also happened, especially to immigrant women who were detained and who didn’t speak English, so they had no idea what procedure was being done on them. Many of these people didn’t find out until after they had left prison that they had even been sterilized. Then getting into the aspect of having or not having children, and being able to raise these children, when people are put into prison, they are taken away from their children and from their community. If you’re in prison, you don’t have the right to be there to raise your children and to have a voice in how they’re being raised. Then there’s also the fact of thinking about safe and sustainable communities. Police do not create a safe and sustainable community. They are often in communities to cause terror and fear. People can’t raise their children safely in a heavily policed community. Because I know that for a lot of people of color, especially Black people specifically, there’s this fear of having your child go out into the world on their own for the first time, because a lot of people are afraid that their child may not come back home. It could be as simple as, thinking about specific cases that happened, just walking back home with a bag of Skittles [like Trayvon Martin], or playing with a BB gun [like Tamir Rice] like almost every other child does in a public park. Those kids didn’t get to go home, because their community wasn’t safe. Not even just the aspect of them potentially being killed by the police, but them being detained by the police and having to go through the court system at such a young age. That’s another instance where people have their children taken away from them. And just not having to have a choice in how they’re being raised or what’s happening with their care, because they’ve been now forced into the school-to-prison pipeline. It’s just, ultimately a community with prison and policing, it’s incredibly harmful. Especially when we begin to think about the fact that people have been for generations tried and convicted and put in prison for their pregnancy outcomes. People who have had miscarriages, even, being sent to prison because of child neglect. Or having a miscarriage and it being categorized as an abortion and being sent to prison. And the ways in which we criminalize people who use drugs and who also are pregnant. How the punishment lens that we use in our society does nothing to provide care and community to people who need it. People who use drugs and are pregnant, they do not need criminalization and punishment. They need support and care from their community. Prison and policing are just the complete antithesis of reproductive justice. Even if we were to achieve a full world with comprehensive sex education, full access to abortion on demand, full access to birth control on demand, all these different things, we would still have a world of policing and prison. They’re completely preventing people from being able to raise their children however they want. They’re sterilizing people, and taking away their bodily autonomy, and creating communities that are not safe or sustainable but are instead filled with fear and anxiety, and ultimately, communities that are ripped apart because of policing and prisons. So we can’t really get to reproductive justice without also removing the barrier of the prison industrial complex and policing.
