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March 17, 2021
One of my clearest memories of my undergrad days is reading Ursula le Guin's The Dispossessed for an elective anthropology course (yes, even then I was a book nerd). In one scene that relates the protagonist's childhood in an anarchist colony, his preschool teacher tells his parents that the main character has been saying "mine!" and not sharing things a lot.
In this society, there is no property; everything is shared. So nothing the kid claims is "mine!" is actually his.
"We're so sorry," his parents say; "We don't know where he picked this up." "No worries," says the preschool teacher. "They all go through this phase. He'll grow out of it."
Words cannot express how much I love The Dispossessed or how formative it was for me (see: I have clearer memories of reading this book than I have of frosh week, and I don't drink), and I was so excited to pick up Rinaldo Walcott's On Property, as it promised to be a non-fiction exploration of the effects of the concept of property on crime and incarceration and how we could address societal ills by abolishing the concept of property.
It did not live up to my hopes or expectations, and I can't promise that my disappointment is unrelated to how high those hopes and expectations were. I really, really wanted this to be life-changing, and it fell short. It's probably not a fair standard. Still, I have serious concerns with this book.
First of all, Walcott doesn't begin to explore property abolition in any detail until page 86 of a very slim 103 total pages. Up until then, he analyzes race data on crime and incarceration and police brutality. These are critical, obviously, but I've read up on them quite a bit already and didn't want to spend 85 pages going over it all again; I didn't learn anything here that I hadn't already read elsewhere.
Worse, his stance is abolitionist. And I don't say "worse" because I necessarily think that stance is incorrect, but that it is for me deeply triggering and borderline retraumatizing. As a member of an under-incarcerated community, when I read about abolition (of prisons specifically) what I hear is, "these people who abused and violated you, and who have never faced serious consequences for their crimes because of their race/body form & function/class/gender, will forevermore become templates for how we deal with all such crimes. Hurray!" Such arguments typically do a lot of hand-waving and make vague gestures in the direction of transformative justice, but transformative justice doesn't sound all that transformative to me, at least not in the descriptions I've read; it sounds mostly like exactly the same kind of enabling hand-holding patient explanations of harm to psychopaths who view such conversations as an attack worthy of retaliation that I've seen close up already for my entire life, and which has had--clearly--no impact on behaviour.
And there is a lot of such handwaving and gesturing in this short book: violent crimes are rare! We don't need to worry about them! Also, transformative justice!
The ultimate impact of these arguments is to push me farther and farther from prison abolition. I just cannot support eliminating all prisons with a proposal that cannot and will not work with all offenders. ALL. Including the so-called 'rare' violent offenders, which, in a world in which 1/3 women are victims of sexual assault and 86% of Ontario disabled women are victims of SA or domestic violence, isn't fucking rare, Walcott. And those crimes place women in psychological prisons. I find it frankly disturbing that he'd rather women be imprisoned by rape culture than that 'rare' violent offenders be literally imprisoned.
Ultimately I guess such advocates are considering only the criminals who are products of poverty and harm, and don't consider the criminals who are products of power and wealth, and given my own circumstances, it's the latter I have more experience with and I don't want them all wandering around, viewing the world as an endless buffet of women's bodies (or what have you) to exploit and violate, without even the possibility of consequences.
Do you want Harvey Weinstein out of prison? Wouldn't the world be better if Trump were in a cell? Yes, I suppose it would unfortunate for him, but I'd rather put that one man in a cell than see him endlessly constructing cells for refugees etc.
Which ties nicely into the main reason I no longer consider myself an anarchist and strenuously disagree with Walcott's characterization of "small-c communism": it contains no method to constrain the ambitions or activities of psychopaths. In its contention that "most people want to do good," it entirely obscures the fact that you only need a small number of people who believe they are entitled to cause harm to cause an enormous amount of harm (see: 1/3 women are sexually assaulted, but only a small number of men rape). What's happened on a state level, when such ideological proposals are actually enacted, is that psychopaths obtain power very very quickly and there are no mechanisms to hold them in check. Then you get the USSR, China, Korea, and so on. Small c or big C, you need to acknowledge the existence of people who believe that they are above other people and have no empathy, compassion or remorse.
So: Up to page 86, in the seemingly unrelated arguments in favour of prison and police abolition, what you actually have are some arguments leading in the direction of prison and police *reform.* (I haven't got to the police argument yet, where I tend more towards abolition, but even there: what kind of institution would there be that would investigate/deal with, say, hostage taking, homicide, etc.? Yes, it's 'rare,' but it's still going to happen, and someone will have to be empowered to deal with people who are willing and able to use violence and force to achieve their ends. And until you have a police-replacement proposal that DOES work for violent crime, you do not have an argument for abolition, you have an argument for reform.)
Unfortunately, the property arguments were also full of holes (though at least I didn't get panic attacks from reading them, so hurray for that, I guess).
The central argument is that since most crime is crime of property, why not just abolish property? Then property crimes disappear. Also, alternatives to private property, such as communal land management, have other important benefits, particularly for the environment.
And again, it's not that this is wrong, it's just that it's incomplete.
"Property" is never defined in the book, but it sounds to me like he really means all privately owned goods, from real estate and cars right down to socks and underwear. You can see that there is maybe a line in which private ownership makes some sense (do we want to be sharing our undies? How about the tools of your trade?). Even societies in which there was no formal private property had some goods or items that were associated with one person or a small group's entitlement to access and use (eg; a household that makes clothing would 'own' its needles and fibres, whether as formal private property as we have or as a traditional entitlement that amounts to much the same thing).
Even land commons, as he references favourably in the book, aren't a free for all. People have particular entitlements of use and obligations based on class, caste, family, tradition, and so on. Ecologically they can be remarkably effective but they aren't without potential social consequences. This is entirely glossed over.
But mostly: getting rid of the concept of private property, which generally I'm supportive of, doesn't actually eliminate the possibility of using things to harm people. I recall a description Sarah Blaffer Hrdy gave in one of her earlier books about hierarchy among female chimps, in which they would reduce competition for their own offspring by systematically starving low-caste mothers in order to cause their milk to dry up and their babies to starve, and yes, that's chimps, but that's precisely my point: no one OWNS that food, chimps have no concept of theft (or police, prisons, etc), but they can still cause each other a lot of harm through things. If anything, humans are only more inventive. If you don't own the food in your kids' hands, are you allowed to complain if someone comes along and takes it? If not, how do you ensure your kid gets enough to eat? If so, how, and to whom? What is the redress? You still need rules and regulations and enforcement mechanisms, which--because we're human beings and humans often suck--will still be vulnerable to bias and bigotry and escalation.
These are complicated questions, and he barely acknowledges them, let alone tries to resolve them. In a 103 page book that might not be realistic, and it surely doesn't help when you only get to the central thesis on page 86. But the outcome for me is that I ended up annoyed, sleep-deprived from panic attacks, and less convinced of is argument than I was before I read it despite it being an ideal I was wholly prepared to be enthusiastically supportive of.
But it does make me want to reread The Dispossessed.
In this society, there is no property; everything is shared. So nothing the kid claims is "mine!" is actually his.
"We're so sorry," his parents say; "We don't know where he picked this up." "No worries," says the preschool teacher. "They all go through this phase. He'll grow out of it."
Words cannot express how much I love The Dispossessed or how formative it was for me (see: I have clearer memories of reading this book than I have of frosh week, and I don't drink), and I was so excited to pick up Rinaldo Walcott's On Property, as it promised to be a non-fiction exploration of the effects of the concept of property on crime and incarceration and how we could address societal ills by abolishing the concept of property.
It did not live up to my hopes or expectations, and I can't promise that my disappointment is unrelated to how high those hopes and expectations were. I really, really wanted this to be life-changing, and it fell short. It's probably not a fair standard. Still, I have serious concerns with this book.
First of all, Walcott doesn't begin to explore property abolition in any detail until page 86 of a very slim 103 total pages. Up until then, he analyzes race data on crime and incarceration and police brutality. These are critical, obviously, but I've read up on them quite a bit already and didn't want to spend 85 pages going over it all again; I didn't learn anything here that I hadn't already read elsewhere.
Worse, his stance is abolitionist. And I don't say "worse" because I necessarily think that stance is incorrect, but that it is for me deeply triggering and borderline retraumatizing. As a member of an under-incarcerated community, when I read about abolition (of prisons specifically) what I hear is, "these people who abused and violated you, and who have never faced serious consequences for their crimes because of their race/body form & function/class/gender, will forevermore become templates for how we deal with all such crimes. Hurray!" Such arguments typically do a lot of hand-waving and make vague gestures in the direction of transformative justice, but transformative justice doesn't sound all that transformative to me, at least not in the descriptions I've read; it sounds mostly like exactly the same kind of enabling hand-holding patient explanations of harm to psychopaths who view such conversations as an attack worthy of retaliation that I've seen close up already for my entire life, and which has had--clearly--no impact on behaviour.
And there is a lot of such handwaving and gesturing in this short book: violent crimes are rare! We don't need to worry about them! Also, transformative justice!
The ultimate impact of these arguments is to push me farther and farther from prison abolition. I just cannot support eliminating all prisons with a proposal that cannot and will not work with all offenders. ALL. Including the so-called 'rare' violent offenders, which, in a world in which 1/3 women are victims of sexual assault and 86% of Ontario disabled women are victims of SA or domestic violence, isn't fucking rare, Walcott. And those crimes place women in psychological prisons. I find it frankly disturbing that he'd rather women be imprisoned by rape culture than that 'rare' violent offenders be literally imprisoned.
Ultimately I guess such advocates are considering only the criminals who are products of poverty and harm, and don't consider the criminals who are products of power and wealth, and given my own circumstances, it's the latter I have more experience with and I don't want them all wandering around, viewing the world as an endless buffet of women's bodies (or what have you) to exploit and violate, without even the possibility of consequences.
Do you want Harvey Weinstein out of prison? Wouldn't the world be better if Trump were in a cell? Yes, I suppose it would unfortunate for him, but I'd rather put that one man in a cell than see him endlessly constructing cells for refugees etc.
Which ties nicely into the main reason I no longer consider myself an anarchist and strenuously disagree with Walcott's characterization of "small-c communism": it contains no method to constrain the ambitions or activities of psychopaths. In its contention that "most people want to do good," it entirely obscures the fact that you only need a small number of people who believe they are entitled to cause harm to cause an enormous amount of harm (see: 1/3 women are sexually assaulted, but only a small number of men rape). What's happened on a state level, when such ideological proposals are actually enacted, is that psychopaths obtain power very very quickly and there are no mechanisms to hold them in check. Then you get the USSR, China, Korea, and so on. Small c or big C, you need to acknowledge the existence of people who believe that they are above other people and have no empathy, compassion or remorse.
So: Up to page 86, in the seemingly unrelated arguments in favour of prison and police abolition, what you actually have are some arguments leading in the direction of prison and police *reform.* (I haven't got to the police argument yet, where I tend more towards abolition, but even there: what kind of institution would there be that would investigate/deal with, say, hostage taking, homicide, etc.? Yes, it's 'rare,' but it's still going to happen, and someone will have to be empowered to deal with people who are willing and able to use violence and force to achieve their ends. And until you have a police-replacement proposal that DOES work for violent crime, you do not have an argument for abolition, you have an argument for reform.)
Unfortunately, the property arguments were also full of holes (though at least I didn't get panic attacks from reading them, so hurray for that, I guess).
The central argument is that since most crime is crime of property, why not just abolish property? Then property crimes disappear. Also, alternatives to private property, such as communal land management, have other important benefits, particularly for the environment.
And again, it's not that this is wrong, it's just that it's incomplete.
"Property" is never defined in the book, but it sounds to me like he really means all privately owned goods, from real estate and cars right down to socks and underwear. You can see that there is maybe a line in which private ownership makes some sense (do we want to be sharing our undies? How about the tools of your trade?). Even societies in which there was no formal private property had some goods or items that were associated with one person or a small group's entitlement to access and use (eg; a household that makes clothing would 'own' its needles and fibres, whether as formal private property as we have or as a traditional entitlement that amounts to much the same thing).
Even land commons, as he references favourably in the book, aren't a free for all. People have particular entitlements of use and obligations based on class, caste, family, tradition, and so on. Ecologically they can be remarkably effective but they aren't without potential social consequences. This is entirely glossed over.
But mostly: getting rid of the concept of private property, which generally I'm supportive of, doesn't actually eliminate the possibility of using things to harm people. I recall a description Sarah Blaffer Hrdy gave in one of her earlier books about hierarchy among female chimps, in which they would reduce competition for their own offspring by systematically starving low-caste mothers in order to cause their milk to dry up and their babies to starve, and yes, that's chimps, but that's precisely my point: no one OWNS that food, chimps have no concept of theft (or police, prisons, etc), but they can still cause each other a lot of harm through things. If anything, humans are only more inventive. If you don't own the food in your kids' hands, are you allowed to complain if someone comes along and takes it? If not, how do you ensure your kid gets enough to eat? If so, how, and to whom? What is the redress? You still need rules and regulations and enforcement mechanisms, which--because we're human beings and humans often suck--will still be vulnerable to bias and bigotry and escalation.
These are complicated questions, and he barely acknowledges them, let alone tries to resolve them. In a 103 page book that might not be realistic, and it surely doesn't help when you only get to the central thesis on page 86. But the outcome for me is that I ended up annoyed, sleep-deprived from panic attacks, and less convinced of is argument than I was before I read it despite it being an ideal I was wholly prepared to be enthusiastically supportive of.
But it does make me want to reread The Dispossessed.
November 18, 2021
On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition is a non-fiction book written by Rinaldo Walcott. Walcott, a professor of gender studies at the University of Toronto, delivers a clear-eyed assessment of the links between property, policing, and the subjugation of Black people. It has been shortlisted for the 2021 Toronto Book Awards.
Taking inspiration from the Rastafarian example of transformation can happen in the midst of ongoing forms of subjection and suffering, Walcott draws parallels between calls to defund the police in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the 19th-century abolitionist movement, and notes that the earliest specialized police forces were established to police slaves in his native Barbados in the 17th century.
Walcott also claims that the war on drugs in the 1990s gave rise to a prison industrial complex that disproportionately imprisons Black people while providing jobs for whites displaced by deindustrialization. He also asserts that police reform efforts, including hiring more minority officers and establishing outposts in underserved neighborhoods, fail because they only further cement the position policing occupies in our lives.
The answer, Walcott contends, is to redirect resources currently earmarked for caging people to education, health care, and other social programs that have been gutted by neo-liberalism. Though he offers little practical discussion of how to achieve defunding, Walcott's analysis of the ways in which white supremacy is baked into the legal systems of North America is stimulating.
On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition is written and research rather well. Walcott concludes his case by asking for a new ethics of care and economy that does not keep feeding into the incarceration system – a system rigged to continue Black suffering.
All in all, On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition is a thoughtful, wide-ranging, compassionate, and profound dissertation for new ethics on policing.
Taking inspiration from the Rastafarian example of transformation can happen in the midst of ongoing forms of subjection and suffering, Walcott draws parallels between calls to defund the police in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the 19th-century abolitionist movement, and notes that the earliest specialized police forces were established to police slaves in his native Barbados in the 17th century.
Walcott also claims that the war on drugs in the 1990s gave rise to a prison industrial complex that disproportionately imprisons Black people while providing jobs for whites displaced by deindustrialization. He also asserts that police reform efforts, including hiring more minority officers and establishing outposts in underserved neighborhoods, fail because they only further cement the position policing occupies in our lives.
The answer, Walcott contends, is to redirect resources currently earmarked for caging people to education, health care, and other social programs that have been gutted by neo-liberalism. Though he offers little practical discussion of how to achieve defunding, Walcott's analysis of the ways in which white supremacy is baked into the legal systems of North America is stimulating.
On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition is written and research rather well. Walcott concludes his case by asking for a new ethics of care and economy that does not keep feeding into the incarceration system – a system rigged to continue Black suffering.
All in all, On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition is a thoughtful, wide-ranging, compassionate, and profound dissertation for new ethics on policing.
July 22, 2022
I was a bit disappointed by how little time the book spends on property. There's a mention at the beginning about Rastafarian communal ownership, and then nothing until the final 10 pages. The bulk of the book is a perfectly good summary of the abolition (police and prison) movement, complete with lots of name dropping to build a further reading list with. I was also glad that it had a broader North American focus, with many of its examples and statistics coming from Canada (with some mentions of Paris and South Africa, as well). It was a broader focus that I usually get to see.
But I've already read a lot of the books quoted, and what I wanted was a better understanding of how property fits into it. I did get a taste of that at the very end, with some brief mentions of how so many of the crimes that disproportionately affect Black and Indigenous people are property crimes, not violent crimes, and how property crimes are highly correlated with poverty. But the connection from there to changing the way we think about *property* wasn't spelled out in a way I could grasp. To me, the argument lends itself more to saying that we need to rethink how we deal with property crime, and that we need to prevent it altogether by investing in our communities.
One takeaway from the book that will stick with me is the idea that Black people in North America have a different relationship with property, having *been* legally considered property in the recent past. That's an idea I haven't seen spelled out like this before, and I'll be mulling it over.
But I've already read a lot of the books quoted, and what I wanted was a better understanding of how property fits into it. I did get a taste of that at the very end, with some brief mentions of how so many of the crimes that disproportionately affect Black and Indigenous people are property crimes, not violent crimes, and how property crimes are highly correlated with poverty. But the connection from there to changing the way we think about *property* wasn't spelled out in a way I could grasp. To me, the argument lends itself more to saying that we need to rethink how we deal with property crime, and that we need to prevent it altogether by investing in our communities.
One takeaway from the book that will stick with me is the idea that Black people in North America have a different relationship with property, having *been* legally considered property in the recent past. That's an idea I haven't seen spelled out like this before, and I'll be mulling it over.
April 1, 2025
So I'll start with this in case anyone else didn't notice, but this book is quite short! It's an extended essay, roughly a hundred pages long. I think this is a great primer, written in the aftermath of the 2020 protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Rinaldo Walcott makes not only a succinct case for police and prison abolition, but more importantly, demonstrates the connection between policing and property. The notion of property is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, particularly how most of our notions about property - especially here in the U.S. - stems from John Locke, who was a major stakeholder in a Trans-Atlantic slave-trading enterprise. I think about the hypocrisy of that often, that we hold Locke's views in such high regard without considering how compromised his morality was. 400 years later, Walcott articulates where that narrative has wound up today, exposing police for what they really are: the protectors of property for the propertied only. The last thing I'll add is Walcott focuses on his home country and city of Canada and Toronto, but also looks at other countries like the United States and France. Definitely worth the short amount of time it'll take you to read it.
November 18, 2022
This is a great primer on the abolition of policing, prisons, and property. Walcott explains the ideas very clearly and concisely and makes a great case. This isn't my first work from Walcott, I also read and learned from BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom, and this exceeded expectations for me. While this may not be the first book I've read on abolition, this is the first I've read that features a Canadian perspective, and it was great to see some of the ideas I had read about before applied more directly to Canadian life and politics.
I also loved going through his sources, which feature many accessible works online (I read many of the articles linked in the book as I went along), books I've previously read, books I've been wanting to read, and books I hadn't been familiar with before but have a great deal of interest in now.
Overall a great primer, I'm looking forward to spending more time with the sources for a deeper understanding, and I look forward to any future works from Walcott. I definitely recommend it for anyone looking for a primer on abolition, especially Canadian readers.
I also loved going through his sources, which feature many accessible works online (I read many of the articles linked in the book as I went along), books I've previously read, books I've been wanting to read, and books I hadn't been familiar with before but have a great deal of interest in now.
Overall a great primer, I'm looking forward to spending more time with the sources for a deeper understanding, and I look forward to any future works from Walcott. I definitely recommend it for anyone looking for a primer on abolition, especially Canadian readers.
February 4, 2021
Another wise thief calling thief. Look there, how bad! When, in fact, the working people have to pay taxes to build the nice office for Walcott, to hire him with a way above minimal wage. And Walcott expects when he is going to stop working the same poor and exploited to pay their dues to give him a generous pension for not bothering to go to the office, by than hold by another paper pusher. And, in time, Walcott expects to hire also for above minimal wages some nieces and nephews to help him churn more papers and more diplomas and more certificates if possible.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 60 reviews