What Is Prison Abolition?

[Uncle Joe]

It’s difficult to fully capture the negative repercussions of keeping millions of people—overwhelmingly black, brown, or poor—in jail, prison, or under some form of “correctional supervision.” How do you calculate, for example, the impact on families and communities across our country when almost half of all black adult women in America have a family member locked up? Or that at least 80,000 people are, at any given time, resigned to some form of solitary confinement? Or that the aggregate cost of total incarceration in the United States (including costs borne by the families of those incarcerated, lost wages, and health impacts) is, by some estimates, about $1 trillion a year? A trillion dollars, the break-up of families, the destruction of lives, and little to show in the way of rehabilitative effects—and yet this system is just a part of life?

(snip)

For a hundred years, at least since Emma Goldman quoted Dostoyevsky to call prison hell on earth, a variety of community groups and prisoner activists have been working not only to reform the prison-industrial complex, but to dismantle it entirely. Now, as critiques of the inherent racism and classism—and transcendent harm—of our criminal-justice system have gained attention, a growing collection of activists and writers have not only been working to humanize the cages, and not only to tear down the cages, but to build a more equitable society in which we don’t need to rely on cages at all. This is the prison-abolition movement.

(snip)

Abolitionists believe that incarceration, in any form, harms society more than it helps. As Angela Davis argues, prisons are an obsolete institution because they exacerbate societal harms instead of fixing them. “Are we willing to relegate ever larger numbers of people from racially oppressed communities to an isolated existence marked by authoritarian regimes, violence, disease, and technologies of seclusion that produce severe mental instability?” Davis has written. Even if we were to greatly diminish the current prison population, even if we were to cut it in half but keep the prison complex intact, we would still be consigning millions of people to isolation and violence—and that’s a form of inhumanity that abolitionists can’t abide. Moreover, Davis contends, mass imprisonment “reproduce[s] the very conditions that lead people to prison.”

(snip)

The three pillars of abolitionism—or the “Attrition Model” as the Prison Research Education Action Project called it in their 1976 pamphlet, “Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists”—are: moratorium, decarceration, and excarceration.

(snip)

https://www.thenation.com/article/what-is-prison-abolition/

This is a fascinating and thought provoking read.

[unblock]

1. One thing's for sure, our current system has many, many failings.

Unfortunately, getting public support for even slightly less repression is really challenging. It's so easy for opponents to demagogue, they just call you soft on crime or worse, they blame you for the next rape or murder.

[Judi Lynn]

2. This is a tremendous article from a great source. Prison population increased over 700% in 50 years.

Who WOULDN'T recognize it's time for change?

It's impossibly wrong to just keep doing the wrong thing, so wrong.

Thanks for the thread, Uncle Joe.

[JayhawkSD]

3. What this approach fails to recognize.

Many of the laws calling for harsh prison sentencing are not passed by legislators, but are the result of "initiatives" passed directly by the voters.

The infamous "three strikes law" of California is a case in point. This law imprisons a person for life upon conviction of a third felony, regardless of how minor any or all of those felonies may have been. The California legislature failed to pass this law, so it was introduced as one of California's pernicious "Propositions" and was passed by a fairly wide margin.

The original Prop 36 in 2012, required that the third felony be a "serious or violent offense," but that provision has been weakened quite a lot in the years since passage.

The public has been sold on the theory, entirely false theory, that harsh sentencing guidelines reduce crime. The theory continues to be promoted even in the face of empirical evidence that such sentencing actually increases crime.