Disrupting Punishment Logic For Good

I’ve got several thoughts I want to try to connect here today, so please hang in there with me. I have spent the last several weeks working on a report called Rethinking Viral Hepatitis Prevention: Confronting Systems That Create Risk. We will launch it later this week in Ottawa. It’s an effort in reframing hepatitis risk as a result of dangerous physical and policy environments instead of dangerous people, to make the system changes that are needed more logical.

The day I sent it to the printer, Barrie’s mayor announced another harmful and sweeping direct motion (no notice, no proper channels for public input) to address “lawlessness” in Barrie. I can’t link to the motion because it was never made publicly available, but I wrote a letter to the editor about it here. 

I felt like the report I had just written didn’t apply directly as an advocacy tool with our city council, but the framework could likely be adapted. But I also saw a very human, very real instinct playing out, one we hadn’t addressed in the hepatitis report, and I think until we talk about it, we’re going to stay stuck in this conversation about public order and consequences. 

That conversation, I think, is stuck because of a false binary: either you care about people, or you care about public order. Either you support compassion, or you support consequences. But real life isn’t that simple, and communities deserve better than these tired either/or frames.

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