Safety and Sacrifice

ABSTRACT

This paper critically investigates a possible tension between beliefs about the usefulness of police and prisons and awareness of the harms some communities face at the hands of criminal justice systems. If a person feels well-served by police and prison systems but becomes aware of the ways they are endangering some communities, they may feel they have a responsibility to work to transform or dismantle criminal justice systems, potentially sacrificing the safety they have gained from them. This paper considers more closely the understanding of safety underlying such a perceived ‘responsibility to sacrifice’. It clarifies an understanding of safety motivating both current systems of policing and incarceration and the idea of a responsibility to sacrifice: namely, the idea that safety is an exchangeable good, that is, that one person’s safety could be guaranteed by compromising another’s. It considers an available alternative understanding of safety as a shared good. The paper concludes by arguing that individuals do not have a ‘responsibility to sacrifice’ but instead have responsibilities to (a) understand that feelings of/beliefs about safety are deeply racialized, (b) cultivate habits and practices that build capacity for responding to harm, danger, and our perceptions of harm and danger; and (c) transform the realities of structural racism that protect white people and endanger others.

KEYWORDS:

• Safety
• transformative justice
• policing
• prisons
• criminal justice
• vulnerability
• relationality

Acknowledgements

For helpful feedback at multiple stages, I thank an anonymous reviewer for Ethics and Social Welfare, Christine Koggel, Michael Doan, Barrett Emerick, Matt Whitt, Lauren Woomer, Amy McKiernan, and audiences at the Society for Women in Philosophy (Eastern Division) meeting in April 2016 and the North American Society for Social Philosophy meeting in July 2016.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In addition to first-hand experience, Rosenbaum et al. (2005) found that vicarious experiences (i.e. hearing of another person’s positive or negative interaction with the police) can significantly influence attitudes toward criminal justice systems.

2. Singh’s overall project is to track how the racialized economy of the US shaped the development of policing, and how policing developed in and through racial differentiation. As Singh notes, ‘the meaning of racial differentiation was immediately and concretely realized through minute gradations in the ordering of punishments’ (2014, 1094) – for example, race made a difference to whether someone caught by a slave patrol would be assumed to be a slave, or whether a slave or servant found guilty of a minor offence would be allowed to remain clothed during a beating. By the beginning of the 1900s, blackness was a way of defining a being ‘whose relationship to contract was untrustworthy and unstable and at worst null and void, requiring permanent supervision and when necessary direct domination’ (Singh 2014, 1095).