Prison Abolition Is A Good Idea.

Good ideas are rarely perfect, but sometimes a good fight requires making a lot of victories. Here's why we should work towards prison abolition.

Hello, friends,

Last week we talked about why cannabis should be legal.  This week, we’re going to talk about prison abolition.  I have two up-front disclaimers:

1:  I am not an expert on this topic, and,

2:  I’m having a hopefully-minor dental issue with a surgery scheduled for tomorrow (I.E. Friday), so I’m writing this in advance and in some degree of pain, so this will not be as in-depth a thing as I was hoping to produce.

With that said, hey - did you know that even the U.S. Department Of Corrections will cop that we have one of the highest per-capita imprisonment rates in the world?  And that they cop that we - in fact - have the highest total population of imprisoned people?  And why do I keep saying cop, when in this instance we’re not talking about the policing system but rather the imprisonment system?

Because they are connected axes within a system of Human suffering that needs to be dismantled.

What Is Prison Abolition?

To be honest, this article by The Nation does a fantastic job of summarizing the Prison Abolition movement.   But if I were to paraphrase?

Prison Abolition is the belief that our prison system needs to be dismantled as far as logistically possible, and that our system of justice and “correction” needs to be restorative as well as rehabilitative.  That means that instead of locking someone up for minor crimes, they are given a path to provide restitution to their victims.

I know this is going to sound like a “soft on crime” approach, but there’s a fundamental assumption with such terminology that being “soft on crime” is bad in every instance, and it simply is not.  Think back to last week’s proposition about legalizing cannabis.  It wouldn’t just be “soft” on the “crime” of drug possession, it would erase the “crime” in the first place.

That doesn’t mean that people who commit other crimes while associated with cannabis cannot be punished for them.  It doesn’t mean people who have trouble with any substance cannot seek help and receive it.  It just means we don’t throw people in prison over drugs, or at least one specific drug, anymore.

Let’s move on to another type of “crime”:  Homelessness, also known as houselessness because not all homes are houses, and I’m just using the term that the ABA uses.  The American Bar Association has said quite a lot about how we need to decriminalize homelessness.  We’ll talk later about how this would be a positive feedback loop, but suffice to say that if we spent money up front to prevent and alleviate homelessness, we would have less unhoused people ending up in prison over vagrancy laws.

Finally, let’s consider sex worker liberation and legalization.  We here at The Progressive Cafe believe in workers having a significant interest in controlling their own work.  Sex work is stigmatized as being dominated by pimps and violence, and while there’s no doubt a history there, as The Urban Institute points out that sex trafficking is a real problem.  But there might be as many as two million “full service” sex workers in the U.S.  The internet has democratized the nature of sex-work employment, with pornography makers controlling their own content on sites like Onlyfans, and with workers directly connecting with clients (for better or worse) through websites such as Craigslist.  Legalizing sex work means these people can organize their labor in a more self-deterministic manner, and by reducing the amount of incarceration, resources are saved that can be used elsewhere.

Why We Should Work Towards Prison Abolition

First of all, prison is fucking filled with torture.  Concepts such as “Scared Straight” involve demonstrating the horrors of incarceration to potential criminals in order to deter them, but that doesn’t address those already incarcerated.  It’s the use of their suffering to attempt to deter future crime.

Let’s look instead at solitary confinement in a country where over 100,000 people are isolated away from most, if not all Human contact.  According to Erik Ortiz, that’s about 6% of the prison population.  Solitary is known to be excruciatingly harmful under the best of circumstances.  Here in New York, the practice is supposed to be strictly limited - but “corrections” officers have been using it, anyway.

Then there’s the death penalty.  A long time ago in a bedroom somewhat far away, I talked about how the Death Penalty is thoroughly immoral.  Re-watching it, I left a lot of what I wanted to say up to two TV shows that, while both were good, were included in the form of in-video links which Youtube has since discontinued.  Soooo I’m going to have to touch upon it again in video format at some point.  But, yeah, the risk of killing an innocent person is too great to allow the state to have the power to kill someone who isn’t actively threatening others.

And all you have to do is type “police shoot” into Google to get “police shoot unarmed Black man,” which tells you just about all you need to know about the topic of how often the state gets its “actively threatening others” badge accounted for.  We can also infer that this treatment is systematic by looking at the disparity in how many Black and non-white people are imprisoned versus how many white people are.

In case I was unclear:  That means the power of the state is often used inaccurately to kill innocent people who never so much as saw a jury of their peers. 

Then there’s the fact that there’s a gap in our nation’s abolition of it’s horrible practice of slavery. Under the 13th Amendment, what’s called “Slavery or involuntary servitude” is prohibited “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” In other words, enslaving imprisoned people is perfectly legal. Oh, sure, technically prison laborers are paid: Typically about 65 cents per hour, at least in New York.

But maybe you’re fine with punishing criminals with hard labor.

Finally, there’s the chance of landing in prison due to wrongful conviction.  And - surprise surprise - it seems that Black people are the most likely to be wrongly incarcerated.  Gee, it’s almost like this justice system is broken, and needs to be completely rebuilt from the ground up - if rebuilt at all.

But let’s say you’re the type of person who doesn’t care about Human suffering.  All you care about is your own welfare.  You want criminals punished and you want your life safe from crime.

We talked last week about how much it costs to imprison one person per year.  Imagine not having the government carrying those costs for a minute.  That means we can get more resources directed to people who need them.  That, in turn, means less people who are desperate for food are going to need to risk trying to rob someone.  It’s a virtuous cycle:  Less stupid laws means less people incarcerated for minor things, which in turn means more resources for the needy, and so on.

And, if I may, this System Of A Down song “Prison Song” shows this movement is not new, and sheds its own light on the prison system.  To quote it:

“Minor drug offenders fill your prisons you don’t even flinch

All our taxes paying for your wars against the new non-rich”

Why pay for this war against the non-rich?  Against people who are, for the most part, just trying to get by?

Ahhh, but maybe you think I’m naïve.  Let’s touch on the third rail of this topic for a moment.

Is Prison Abolition A Perfect End Goal?

This…Is the question I have been working towards.  I worked within a restorative justice system when I taught high school, and I have to say I loved the results.  Suspensions were rare, and discipline was generally handled well by the school - although I guess I did once have to talk a police officer down from arresting a student in an emotional crisis.

But can restorative justice work in all cases?  The end-goal of prison abolition sounds wonderful, but I know what the naysayers’ endgame is:

“What do we do with terrorists, serial killers, and fraudsters?”

Some people are, by their own control or not, simply dangerous.  This is where I mention whoever the serial killer and/or terrorist du jure is - I guess that’d be the Unabomber, who died on June 10th.

When I asked my friends for information about this topic, I was directed by one wonderful person to the Prison Abolition Syllabus 2.0.  I was hoping to have more time and better health to go through it, because I know that the answer to this question is ultimately the determiner for how far prison abolition can get in the real world.  So I know I am working off incomplete knowledge here, and kind of just guessing at the future and what it might hold.

So this is where my own doubt sets in.

In my heart of hearts, I’ve experienced enough people being cruel to me and my loved ones that I believe some people are - perhaps through no fault of their own! - simply a danger.  They will simply repeat crimes with serious consequences over and over again, and may need to be dealt with.

That’s why I fear that at the end of this movement lies “Prison By Another Name.”

Maybe it takes the form of inpatient mental health programs that “contain” the threatening people, but my father-in-law’s experience in California’s mental health system was atrocity after atrocity.  Granted, mental healthcare has come a long way since the 60’s, but every so often a story bubbles up about abuses at mental health facilities.

But maybe there’s a fundamental flaw in my thinking process.

Prison Abolition Won’t Start With The Endgame.

Maybe it’s not really time to think of the end-game at all.  Maybe right now it’s best to collaborate to our best abilities in order to overthrow the many negatives that the prison system comes with.  We work together on the use of solitary confinement.  We work together on overturning the death penalty. You’ll notice I spared no words on the fate of the prison industrial complex - I do not care who loses their job there, they can go retrain for something more humane.

In order to get to these outcomes, it will require massive legal and public-pressure movements.  I’ve linked to a few different organizations throughout this article, such as the ACLU, and I want to give the Innocence Project a special shout-out for its work in helping people who are wrongly imprisoned get free.

This will, of course, require Congress to step in and change Federal laws.  However, that’s only the Federal end.  This is a state-by-state struggle.  I mentioned a New York law that’s being ineffectively adhered to.  It’s on us New Yorkers to fight against that.  It’s on us to say, “Governor Hochul, crack down on those who are torturing inmates.”

And thus it falls on you to at the very least raise your voice and tell your elected officials (in whatever manner makes you feel comfortable!) that you oppose this system.

We can discuss what, if any parts of it we rebuild after we’ve taken it down. Your ideas are very welcome in the comments.

In Other News

- Clarence Thomas made the argument for prison abolition all the more powerful in a 6-3 ruling regarding habeus corpus and getting exonerated if you’re innocent. He’s a scumbag. The court is nakedly corrupt.

- Texas, known for its sweltering heat, has passed a sort of State Supremacy law that prohibits local jurisdictions from mandating such unproductive things as water breaks. It sounds like just another protest waiting to happen, and we here at The Progressive Cafe support protests.

- We’ve learned that (my very own!) Representative George Santos’ father and aunt put up his bail. Where they got the $500,000 to spring him is another story.

- It appears that Republicans are gearing up for another attempt to kill or cripple Social Security. Sad that they should break their promise to President Biden at his State Of The Union Address, but - hahaha, no, we all knew they would make a play at it. They can go to hell.

- Next week, we talk about Pride Month - and what a month it’s been. How much we’ll talk is based on my health.

Thank you for reading The Progressive Cafe.  If this article has helped you, please consider signing up for our mailing list.  This article is by Jesse Pohlman, a sci-fi/fantasy author from Long Island, New York, whose website you can check out here.