Dean Spade, a law professor at Seattle University, has been teaching future lawyers since 2008 that "care and accountability circles work better than punishing people who have engaged in sexual harm to make them stop." That's a direct quote. From a professor. At a law school. That charges $62,558 a year in tuition.
So for the price of a luxury SUV, parents can send their kids to learn that rapists need a talking circle, not a prison cell.
Spade's lecture — delivered as part of a series titled "No Prisons, No Borders, No Cops, No State?" at a private Catholic university, which tells you everything about where Catholic higher education has drifted. In the lecture, published in video form on August 10, Spade argued that the "incarceral context" we live in "has set up a story about safety, culturally, that's terrible for all of us." The system, according to Spade, has created "the same structures internally, that are about getting safe by getting away from people we perceive as bad."
People we "perceive" as bad. We're talking about convicted rapists. Perception isn't doing the heavy lifting there.
Spade also delivered the Rose Sheinberg Lecture at New York University Law School, spreading this framework well beyond Seattle. The argument extends to policing radical communities internally — Spade warned that "if you take our radical politics and use that as the test, you're likely to produce spaces that are unwelcoming and too small to be effective." Translation: don't hold your own allies to your own standards, or nobody will show up.
Criminology scholar Sarah Lamble of Birkbeck University of London offered supporting analysis, arguing that telling offenders their behavior is "incorrect and wrong, but … just telling them that doesn't work." The proposed alternative is conversation-based accountability — circles where offenders process their actions with facilitators and community members instead of serving time behind bars.
Spade is also the author of a book titled "Unsafe: The carceral roots of the anti-trans backlash," which reframes criminal justice opposition through gender ideology. The academic pipeline here runs from Duke University to NYU to Seattle — elite institutions laundering a fringe position into something that looks like scholarship.
Stu Smith, an investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute, cut through the academic fog. "Contemporary abolitionists have borrowed the moral authority of the historical abolitionist movement to advance a radically different political agenda," Smith wrote. Ending slavery and ending prisons for rapists aren't the same cause, no matter how many lectures dress it up.
Smith also pointed to the price tag: "When tuition costs $62,558 a year and this is the kind of serious thinking being offered in return, it is little wonder that people are losing faith in higher education."
This isn't a fringe blog post from an anonymous activist. This is a tenured professor at a Catholic law school, training the attorneys who will one day prosecute — or apparently decline to prosecute — sexual assault cases. The lecture series title alone tells you the destination: no prisons, no borders, no cops, no state. That's not reform. That's abolition wearing a lanyard.
Every parent writing that $62,558 check should ask what their kid is actually learning. Every sexual assault survivor in Washington State should ask whether their future prosecutor sat in that classroom and nodded along.
The accountability circle has one open seat. It's for the people paying tuition to fill it.