Cops in Culture #5: The Police and Prisons in our Picture Books
Fig no.1 Greenham, A., (2021) Excuse Me, What Are You Doing Here?
The picture books that we read with our children don’t exist in a vacuum. As well as entertain, they help young people grow their understanding of people as social beings. Class, gender, race, status and social systems are all communicated in subtle ways. A sparkly pink cover, a roaring lion, a man in a police uniform. These artefacts aren’t just symbols of storytelling. They are pieces of a puzzle that children use to make sense of the world around them. They communicate to children who has status, who nurtures, who is heroic, who punishes, who is shameful, and who is irredeemable.
I’m an author and illustrator of children’s picturebooks, and I’m an abolitionist. I don’t think that prisons and carceral punishment will bring about the peace and safety in our communities that so many of us want. And because we have to start where we are, I am asking the question: What about picture books? What might the stories we tell our children actually be communicating, and does it matter?
Fig no.2 Roberts, R., Build Homes Not Prisons.
Abolition and Curiosity
Why do we live in a world with prisons? Mariame Kaba reminds us that it is not a natural system, although this is how it feels (Kaba, 2018). A system of violent imprisonment is not inevitable. Oonagh Ryder tells us how recent the logic of the carceral state is in the UK, as recent as ‘the late 1700s and early 1800s’. (Ryder, 2018)
But it doesn’t work. Imprisoning people for past harm does not protect us from future harm. It only creates more harm.
Do we genuinely want to prevent violence and trauma? Do we want to open ourselves up to hearing and validating the pain of others, even when we may be complicit in the causes? Or do we only want the catharsis of retribution, even when this replicates or intensifies the very harm we’re responding to? (Ryder, 2018)
Fig no.3 Abolitionist Futures (2018) Image from Instagram
When we put people in prison, we are marking ourselves as Good People, and those people in prison as Bad People. We don’t need to waste another moment thinking about it. It doesn’t matter that prison doesn’t keep us safe, because it makes us ‘feel’ safe, and that’s all we want. In this way, prison is fulfilling its purpose. Anxiety is transformed to certainty.
In children’s books we find a literature awash with the delicious certainties of Good and Bad. The logic of prisons is the stuff of children’s fantasies writ large across our societies, not solving anything, but soothing our anxieties and hiding our own complicity in harm.
Abolitionist thought seeks to break down ideas of Good people and Bad people, us, them. It doesn’t seek to minimise the seriousness of past individual harms, but it does look to systemic causes of harm, and tries to imagine better systemic solutions within the community. Abolition is curious and creative.
Good and Bad, Certainty and Anxiety
Why are we so uncomfortable around uncertainty? To answer this question, I looked to people who know about behaviour and feelings, and thinking.
Phil Stokoe is a psychoanalyst, and was Clinical Director of the Adult Department of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. In his podcast essay ‘The Impact Of Power On The Mind Of The Politician’ with consultant psychotherapist Dr David Morgan, he builds up a portrait of how childhood anxiety can influence adult behaviour.
For toddlers and infants, every feeling is felt for the first time, every sight fresh. It is a time of wonder, but also of painful raw emotion and anxiety. Ultimately, this anxiety is about help, care, and survival. The anxiety we feel as very small children, says something like this:
‘I cannot get through life on my own and I need help’
Fig no.4 Haughton, C., (2011) Illustration from A Bit Lost. A significant amount of children’s literature deals with separation anxiety, helping little ones feel these uncomfortable feelings in a safe way.
This anxiety is unbearable, and as small children we feel it as an existential danger.
Am I safe? Am I good? Am I bad?
Stokoe explains that our young minds crave certainty to relieve us of survival anxiety. Gradually, we learn how to think through uncertainty. But any serious blow of anxiety can quickly and viscerally hurtle us back to this anxious childlike state where we desire absolute certainty. This certainty can come at the cost of sitting in uncomfortable uncertainty, not knowing, and thinking. We jump to certainties that have not been thought through;
Either you’re with us or you’re against us, I’m right and you’re wrong, if I’m good then you must be bad.
Polarised black and white thinking, rigid and fragile and lacking in curiosity. Stokoe says, ‘Sudden anxiety is always experienced as anxiety of survival’.
Fig no. 5 & 6 Ungerer, T., (1998) Illustrations from Moon Man. Ungerer draws on his childhood memories of Nazi occupied France to satirise a ‘fundamentalist’ way of thinking, opening up conversational opportunities. These Generals think they are Good.
When we feel suddenly threatened and anxious, whether those threats are real or perceived, we are all at risk of jumping over uncomfortable uncertainty, to ‘facts’ that may not be all that thought through. As a society we side-step uncertainty, and project ‘Badness’ onto those we deem ‘different’ as we try to claw our way back to stability.
This badness is usually projected on to People of Colour, the Roma and Traveller Community, LGBTQIA people, the poor, disabled, and the working class.
And what do we do with Bad People? We send them away.
But if we learn the skills to sit in uncertainty, as we can with growing maturity throughout our childhood, we have the opportunity to become resilient to the pull of fundamentalist thinking. We can learn ways of transforming anxiety not to certainty, but to curiosity. We can sit in uncertainty for long enough to think. We can say:
‘I don’t know, but I’d like to find out’.
I think that Stokoe’s descriptions of rigid and fluid thought patterns are relevant to picture book making, and also to abolitionist thought, two things that seem very separate, but are fundamentally linked.
Abolitionism in its broadest sense asks why the world is ordered one way and not another. And often in children’s books, we create new worlds and societies for our characters, play with new ways of interacting, new ways of describing and explaining the world. Both are exercises in imagination, creativity, care and love.
Survival Anxiety and the Fear of Being Sent Away
It’s inevitable that we want to simplify the world for a young audience. The world is complex, and to explain it we simplify it. But maybe there are some ideas that are so simplified, delivered to us at such a young age, and so soothing to the primal survival anxiety, that they come to feel natural and right. Maybe they become self-fulfilling.
What does it mean to tell a child that there are Good and Bad people, that we send the Bad people away?
Fig. No 7. Donaldson, J., Monks, L., 2009. Illustration from What the Ladybird Heard. There is an unintended violence in this image, is this what we want to communicate?
Children are learning the order of the world every day, from interactions with the people and world around them, through peer play, and through the TV and books they read.
What does it mean to have friendly neighbourhood police as a natural presence in our books?
Fig. no. 8 Scarry, R., (1999) Illustration from Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever. It’s possible to love a book and also question the logic of world building decisions here. Maybe it’s a conversation starter?
Children who go to a school in a poor area, who are on free school meals, are from particular ethnic minorities and who have a special need or disability are all more likely to be excluded. (Jeraj, 2020)
What is it to tell a child at heightened risk of school exclusion, that there are prisons, criminals, judges, police?
What does it do to their expectations, their self-image? What does it do to their teachers’ expectations, their classmates’? What does it tell children about who belongs?
Being sent away amounts to an existential threat, and can elicit a strong feeling of fear, of injustice. Mix this with lived experience of school exclusions that disproportionately effect Black Caribbean, and Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children (Mcintyre, Parveen, Thomas, 2021) of more police in our UK schools, over 680 and counting (Joseph-Salisbury, 2021), of being told by a system that you are going down a path to irredeemability. This constant looming threat of being plucked from your family and loved ones, for being too bad, too much, too noisy, too mad, too quiet, too energetic, deviating too much from gender norms. That is what you are, because the world is simple, because the stories have told you there are Good people and Bad people. The logic becomes as irresistible as it is invisible. We are introduced at such an early age to the possibility of being so irredeemable that we will be sent away from love, at a time when that is a lived reality for some of our children. The stories make that reality more likely, and more normal.
Research by the prisons inspectorate in 2016 revealed that nine out of 10 children in the youth estate had been excluded at some point. According to a 2019 Youth Justice Board report, black children aged 10-17 are four times more likely to be arrested than their white peers. Furthermore, 49 per cent of children and young people in custody were black and minority ethnic (BAME) – double the proportion ten years ago – despite making up just 18 per cent of the overall population. The disproportionality in exclusion, arrest and incarceration for BAME young people lays bare the racism at work in forging the school to prison pipeline. (Jasiewicz, 2020)
For people with family members who have been 'sent away', whether that's to prison, psychiatric facilities or institutional care, there is a constant reminder and threat, this could happen to you too. The slightest transgression and this could be you.
Fig no 9. Scarry, R., (2015) Illustration from Busy Busy World. Of course there is a police maintaining order and being natural and necessary as air. At least our robber rabbit gets to come back and make more soup after their punishment.
By placing a logic of punishment, of incarceration, or police into a child’s book as neutral or natural, do we help create and reinforce the ‘natural feeling’ of its existence in the real world? For children learning about the world, maybe these presences as natural entities in our stories lead them to understand the world in ways like these:
Discussion and understanding are not the priority of this community.
We value order over a respect of conflicting boundaries.
We are a group of complex individuals, but ultimately order is exerted by force.
Conflict is dangerous, and there's no room for it.
Conflict will be tolerated to a point, but beyond a point of our choosing, you'll be sent away. It will only be your own fault if this happens.
‘Away’ is a place for people who are irredeemable. People can be irredeemable it seems!
If someone is wearing the special clothes of Police or Judge, they have power to send you away.
You can grow up and wear the special clothes, and you can be the special force, and that's good.
Rules make us safe. If you can’t obey the rules, you’re not safe.
You can prioritise force over understanding, if you're in charge.
I'm reminded of my Irish Catholic upbringing, and the contradictions within it. We were told in school and church that God's forgiveness was eternal, and He would always love us no matter what we did. But what we saw as a lived reality was the Catholic tradition of social shame around transgression, a social tradition of unspoken threats. The stories didn't add up to lived reality and we saw that contradiction as children and teens.
Similarly, when a book has a friendly neighbourhood police in it, but a child is beginning to understand that the police are harmful to their family, what does this do to the child's sense of belonging socially? It creates a strange tension:
I am not ideal within this broader society. My family are not ideal. This society is not ordered around me and my family. There is a lie in these books. We are not safe.
Maybe trust is lost, and rightly so.
Picture books, and the worlds we can create
In her Southbank talk in 2020, Angela Davis spoke about the necessity of imagination, that abolition is a creative task. She spoke about the need for artists. (Davis, 2020). My knowledge isn't in the realm of justice or social work or care work. It's in storytelling, and the soft power that is the creation of culture. (Painter, Martin and Unsworth, 2014, pg1)
Fig. no 10. Roberts, R., (2018) Image from Instagram
By the time children are about 4, we know that they understand the order of the gendered world, as a logic of status and power (Spinner et al, 2018). The displeasure of a parent who frowns when their 3 year old son picks up the pink sparkly book, the relieved smile when they play with a train or truck. We tell our children from such an early age who they have to be to remain ideal, and safe.
As a picture book maker, part of my job is to think; what am I telling kids about their hopes, their fears and their belonging, through the stories, worlds and characters that I make. As an abolitionist, part of my job is to think, what about justice? What am I telling young kids about Us and Them? About being sent Away? About power and who gets to wield it, what that looks like and how does it feel?
Children's books are a wide mix of genres, styles and messages. They are sites of anarchy too. Children enjoy boundaried chaos, safe places to cause mayhem.
Fig no 11. Manolessou, K., (2017) Illustration from Look For Ladybird In Plant City. Plant City does not seem to have a police force, and yet everyone is remarkably happy. There is structure to this world, some order, a few rules that are sometimes broken. People play and are silly and they help each other.
There are other ways of visually and narratively representing power in a group, and other ways of showing our priorities in conflict resolution. What if our priorities are understanding and respect of boundaries? What if our priorities are showing conflict is ok, safe, and something we can plot a course through to mutual understanding, by discussion and learning and care?
Fig. No.12. McCardie, A. and Rubbino, S., 2015. Illustration from A Book of Feelings.
What if paradoxes are ok, actually? What if our priorities are showing that transgression from social norms don't lead to expulsion from the group? What if our priorities aren't veiled threats to fall in line, but invitations to belong within our differences? What does that look like?
Art forms help us feel what we can’t yet say. They are integral to the act of love and creation that is trying to build together an anti-racist world. (Davis, 2020)
Fig. no 13. Shearing, M., (2018) Illustration from Anna and Otis. We can move through anxiety to curiosity and understanding.
No children's book will ever be perfect, not the books I write, or the books on my shelf. That’s not the point. I'll try to interrogate how I construct my stories, and who I populate my stories with. And when I'm reading stories to little ones, we can look at a wide range of picturebooks, and we can use them as starting points of conversations. Maybe those conversations will be silly and nonsensical, but maybe they will open the world up a little bit for us both.
The retributive part of us, the part that wants to say 'You're the bad one', that part starts to be formed very early. Our culture has a profound effect on us from an early age. We like to say 'you're the bad one', 'you belong in jail'. It makes us feel temporarily good and safe and omnipotent. It's a nice order. But it's all made up, really. And it's rooted in that fear that we'll be the ones abandoned, left behind, put away, be deemed irretrievably bad. That childhood existential fear.
But we don’t have to pass that on to our kids. We can give them something much richer, nuanced, and more complex. We can foster resilience to anxiety, and help grow curiosity.
Stokoe says that the way out of rigid rule-based fundamentalism is through practicing a resilience to uncertainty. I definitely recognise that there’ve been times over the last year when I’ve felt an overwhelming urge to create certainty from uncomfortable anxiety, and you probably have too. And certainty is great, as long as we don’t bypass the thinking and curiosity that can get us there.
Strong anxiety pushes all of us into a fundamentalist state of mind, and it’s only the knowledge that this will happen, along with a strong internal sense of identity and the ability to welcome help from outside that rescues us from becoming trapped in that fundamentalist state. (Stokoe, 2016)
We need to find and encourage and live ways of holding conflict, discomfort, and uncertainty, to show that these are safe, actually. We need to raise the social status of giving and receiving help. These are tools we can learn, value and teach. They help protect us from the shock of anxiety, and the decline into rigid fundamentalism, us and them, good and bad.
We are going to have to build it together, and that means we're going to have to argue over stuff. That means we're going to have to create new norms together for how we treat each other when harm occurs. That's going to take everyone. (Kaba, 2020)
Fig no.14 Greenham, A., (2021) We Keep Each Other Safe.
Bibliography
Madden, S., Leeds, S., Carmichael, R,. (2020) ‘I Want Us To Dream A Little Bigger’: Noname and Mariame Kaba On Art And Abolition. Sacramento: Capradio. Available at https://www.capradio.org/news/npr/story?storyid=948005131 Accessed 13/01/2021
Ryder, O., (2018) What Does Justice Look Like Without Prisons? London: Novarra Media. Available At https://novaramedia.com/2018/01/14/what-does-justice-look-like-without-prisons/ Accessed 12/01/2021
Stokoe, P., (2015) ‘The Impact Of Power On The Mind Of The Politician.’ in Morgan, D. Frontier Psychoanalyst. London: Resonance 104.4fm available at [https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/frontier-psychoanalyst-pilot-11-december-2015/] accessed 13/01/21
Davis, A., (2003) Are Prisons Obsolete?’ New York: Seven Stories Press. Available at https://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Angela-Davis-Are_Prisons_Obsolete.pdf Accessed 13/01/2021
Jeraj, S., (2020) “An Extreme Manifestation of the System”: The Link Between School Exclusions and Mental Health’. London: New Statesman Available at https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/healthcare/2020/12/extreme-manifestation-system-link-between-school-exclusions-and-mental Accessed 13/01/2021
Mcintyre, N., Parveen, N., Thomas, T., (2021) “Exclusion rates five times higher for black Caribbean pupils in parts of England’’. London: The Guardian Available at https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/mar/24/exclusion-rates-black-caribbean-pupils-england Accessed 01/07/2021
Joseph-Salisbury, R., (2021) “Having police in schools is emblematic of a society headed in the wrong direction”. London: The Guardian Available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/25/police-in-schools-emblematic-society-wrong-direction Accessed 01/07/2021
Jasiewicz, E., (2020) ‘Reversing The Flow’. London: Red Pepper Available at https://www.redpepper.org.uk/reversing-the-flow/ Accessed 13/01/2021
Davis, A., Louis, B., (2020) ‘An Audience With Angela Davis’. London: SouthBank Centre https://southbankcentre.ticketco.events/uk/en/e/an_audience_with_angela_davis
Painter, C., Martin J.R., Unsworth L., 2014. Reading visual narratives : image analysis of children's picture books. Sheffield: Equinox.
Spinner, L., Cameron, L. and Calogero, R., 2018. Peer Toy Play as a Gateway to Children’s Gender Flexibility: The Effect of (Counter)Stereotypic Portrayals of Peers in Children’s Magazines. Sex Roles, [e-journal] , pp.1-15. 10.1007/s11199-017-0883-3.
Stokoe, P. (2016) ‘Fundamentalism.’ in Morgan, D. Frontier Psychoanalyst. London: Resonance 104.4fm Available at https://m.mixcloud.com/Resonance/frontier-psychoanalyst-11th-january-2016/ Accessed 13/01/2021
Image References
1. Greenham, A., (2021)
2. Roberts, R., Build Homes Not Prisons. Available at https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/142707881920871652/ Accessed 14/01/2021
3. Abolitionist Futures. 2018. Available at https://www.instagram.com/p/Bi4DP8yl8uR/?igshid=1c1klga7gw3r1 Accessed 14/01/2021
4. Haughton, C., 2011. A Bit Lost. London: Walker Books
5&6. Ungerer, T., 1998. Moon Man. Lanham: Roberts Rinehart Publishers
7. Donaldson, J., Monks, L., 2009. What the ladybird heard. London : Macmillan Children's.
8. Scarry, R., 1999. Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever. Racine: Big Little Golden Books
9. Scarry, R., 2015. Busy Busy World Racine: Golden Books
10. Abolitionist Futures. 2018. Available at https://www.instagram.com/p/BjCnSoXFfdt/?igshid=b6k6xgqkebxd Accessed 14/01/2021
11. Manolessou, K., 2017. Look For Ladybird In Plant City. London: Frances Lincoln Children’s Books
12. McCardie, A. and Rubbino, S., 2015. A Book of Feelings. London: Walker Books.
13. Shearing, M., (2018) Anna and Otis. London: Two Hoots.
14. Greenham, A., (2021)