University of Richmond senior researches prison abolition
The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with a prison population that has grown nearly 500 percent in the last 50 years, according to The Sentencing Project, a nonpartisan research and advocacy center. Through her Jepson School of Leadership Studies honors thesis, senior Andrea Punishill is researching this phenomenon. She focuses specifically on how the prison system affects offenders and survivors of gender-based violence.
“We take the prison system as a given,” said the leadership studies and gender and sexuality studies major. “But although jails are old, the modern U.S. prison system is historically young. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we began constructing prisons as places to isolate convicts and use them as labor. Jails were designed to cycle people in and out, but prisons were designed for long sentences and often held people far from their communities.”
The first chapter of her thesis explores why society chooses incarceration as a means of punishing offenders. The second offers a brief history of the U.S. prison system. The third examines how the criminal justice system also punishes survivors, sometimes more than the offenders.
The senior credited her thesis faculty mentor, assistant professor of leadership studies and historian Lauren Henley, with providing her with an extensive bibliography for the project and guidance on historical writing. Given Henley's scholarly research on gender and crime, Punishill said she was the obvious choice of a mentor for her thesis. "This is a passion project for both of us," Punishill said.
“I’m looking at Abolition Feminism, which promotes the belief that we can’t have a free, equal society while our current prison system exists,” she continued. “The prison industrial complex is designed not to rehabilitate, but to contain prisoners and use them as labor — a legacy of slavery. Our system shows extreme racial and gender bias. Since the onset of the war on drugs in the late twentieth century, we have seen a 600 percent increase in the number of women being incarcerated.”
In the fourth and final chapter of her thesis, she offers alternative suggestions to mass incarceration.
“A fundamental argument of Abolition Feminism is that most crime is socially produced,” Punishill said. “So, Abolition Feminism supports abolishing the prison system in tandem with increasing social services that address issues like poverty, substance abuse, and mental health. Rather than incarcerate someone who does harm, have them do community service or pay restitution.”
She said she became interested in prison abolition during her sophomore year while researching gender-based violence as a humanities fellow. As a junior, she explored the cultural creation of gender-based violence with Dr. Mariela Méndez, associate professor of Latin American, Latino, and Iberian studies and gender and sexuality studies. She also worked with Méndez on creating a digital archive website that documents gender-based violence activism on college campuses.
But Punishill takes more than an academic interest in gender-based violence. As a peer sexual misconduct advisor at the University of Richmond, she is a confidential peer resource for fellow Spiders and helps plan campus programming about dating violence. This past summer, she completed her Jepson School internship with Take Back the Night Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to ending sexual violence.
“My interest in the #MeToo movement led me to study gender-based violence and the desire to punish the offenders,” she said. “I’ve learned our current system of incarceration doesn’t work. Deterrence is low and crime rates are high. I realized we haven’t always had prisons. We can get rid of them and come up with something better.”
Punishill will present her research on April 17 at the annual Jepson Research Symposium.