Dean Spade, a law professor at Seattle University, told an audience that "care and accountability circles work better" than prison for people who commit sexual violence. Not petty theft. Not tax fraud. Sexual violence.
This is a person who trains future prosecutors and defense attorneys. At a private Catholic university.
Spade, who has taught at Seattle University since 2008, laid out the argument in a YouTube video published on August 10. The core claim is that the "incarceral context" — that's academic for "putting criminals in jail" — has created problematic cultural narratives about safety. Translation: we've been doing it wrong this whole time by locking up rapists, and the real solution is group conversation.
The professor didn't stop there. Spade described people in what were called "extreme, sexualized, stigmatized categories" as "those are our people." The framing positions convicted sex offenders not as predators who destroyed someone's life, but as members of a community who need support and dialogue.
Spade also delivered a lecture at New York University Law School titled "No Prisons, No Borders, No Cops, No State?" — which at least has the virtue of honesty about where this ideology actually leads. In that lecture, Spade called for "militant struggle" in the transgender movement.
Spade's views don't exist in a vacuum. Criminology scholar Sarah Lamble of Birkbeck University of London, whose book "Unsafe: The carceral roots of the anti-trans backlash" was referenced alongside Spade's work, argues that "carceral approaches to safety fail to address root causes." Lamble claims that the "fiercest battles over gender today" are "about punishment, fear, and control." The academic pipeline feeding this thinking runs from London to Seattle to NYU — and it produces the lawyers and policy advocates who will one day shape sentencing guidelines.
Stu Smith, an investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute, offered the appropriate response. "Contemporary abolitionists have borrowed the moral authority" of historical abolitionists for a "radically different political agenda," Smith said. He also noted: "When tuition costs $62,558 a year and this is the kind of serious thinking" students receive, the product doesn't match the price tag.
That tuition figure is worth sitting with. Parents writing checks for $62,558 a year to Seattle University — a Catholic institution, no less — are funding a legal education that includes a professor arguing rapists belong in healing circles instead of prison cells. One imagines the admissions brochure leaves that part out.
The "root causes" framework sounds sophisticated in a faculty lounge. It sounds different when you explain it to someone whose attacker walked free. The entire argument depends on abstracting sexual violence into a systemic problem rather than an act committed by a specific person against a specific victim. Once it's systemic, individual accountability becomes optional. That's not a bug in the theory. It's the point.
Seattle University describes itself as guided by Jesuit Catholic values. Dean Spade describes convicted sex offenders as "our people" who need circles, not cells.
One of those mission statements is going to have to give.