Aftermath by Preti Taneja

Author:Preti Taneja
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Prison;politics;abolition;racism;school-to-prison pipeline;terrorism;Usman Khan;Fishmongers’ Hall;terrorist attack;radicalisation;grief;activism
ISBN: 9781913505479
Publisher: And Other Stories
Published: 2023-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Atiya Husain agrees, saying that terrorist is not an inadvertently racist label that can be peeled off brown men and stuck onto white men. Rather, the racial history and significance of the concept is constitutive of terrorism. The terrorist is a racial, epistemic, ideological and material other.119

Would a different label have kept anyone alive? I think of Jack. And of Saskia, who I never got the chance to know. The violence perpetrated is narrativised almost as an inevitability, which makes it an easy thing to think about more punishment as the only recourse to justice we can imagine.

I am not making an argument for the release of extreme and high-risk violent criminals in this moment now. I know danger is still present in prison and anywhere else. It is a reactive state. But in We Do This ’Til We Free Us, Kaba writes that questions like What about the really dangerous people? are not questions a prison abolitionist must answer in order to insist the prison-industrial complex be undone.

The issue of danger, and of harm, and of the depravity and indignity of prison now, the neglect, the denial of need; the fact they are places of suffering, violence, and death; they hurt and they injure and they destroy lives‌120 and their place in the atro-city are what we must face while we work for better at root. What can be changed now to build a more just world for many?

If the events of Fishmongers’ Hall leave me any way out of loss, it is a recognition that the institutions of the atro-city, from which such violent harms arise, are homegrown, are no place of greater safety. We need new ways of holding ourselves as a society now, real transformations at the point of basic class, racial and gender justice. Restorative justice as a social transformation to heal community divisions caused by scarcities of so many kinds. Until perhaps forms of prison encoded in the curation of society and prison itself are no longer considered a predicate for our ‘civilisation’ to continue.

The irony of calling here on Neil Basu, Britain’s most senior counterterrorism police officer, is not lost on me, as in an interview he said:

Policies that go towards more social inclusion, more social mobility and more education are much more likely to drive down violence … than all the policing and state security apparatus put together. It is much more likely to have a positive effect on society [… ] The prescription for me is around social inclusion – it’s social mobility, it’s education, it’s opportunity.‌121

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