Prison abolition movement


The prison abolition movement is a network of groups and activists that seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation that do not place a focus on punishment and government institutionalization. The prison abolitionist movement is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is the attempt to improve conditions inside prisons.
Supporters of decarceration and prison abolition also work to end solitary confinement, the death penalty, and the construction of new prisons through non-reformist reform. Others support book-to-prisoner projects and defend the rights of prisoners to have access to information and library services. Some organizations, such as the Anarchist Black Cross, seek total abolishment of the prison system, without any intention to replace it with other government-controlled systems. Many anarchist organizations believe that the best form of justice arises naturally out of social contracts or restorative justice.

Definition

Scholar Dorothy Roberts takes the prison abolition movement in the United States to endorse three basic theses:
  1. "oday’s carceral punishment system can be traced back to slavery and the racial capitalist regime it relied on and sustained."
  2. "he expanding criminal punishment system functions to oppress black people and other politically marginalized groups in order to maintain a racial capitalist regime."
  3. "e can imagine and build a more humane and democratic society that no longer relies on caging people to meet human needs and solve social problems."
Thus, Roberts situates the theory of prison abolition within an intellectual tradition including scholars such as Cedric Robinson, who developed the concept of racial capitalism, and characterizes the movement as a response to a long history of oppressive treatment of black people in the United States.
Legal scholar Allegra McLeod notes that prison abolition is not merely a negative project of "opening … prison doors," but rather "may be understood instead as a gradual project of decarceration, in which radically different legal and institutional regulatory forms supplant criminal law enforcement." Prison abolition, in McLeod's view, involves a positive agenda that reimagines how societies might deal with social problems in the absence of prisons, using techniques such as decriminalization and improved welfare provision.
Like Roberts, McLeod sees the contemporary theory of prison abolition as linked to theories regarding the abolition of slavery. McLeod notes that W. E. B. Du Bois—particularly in his Black Reconstruction in America—saw abolitionism not only as a movement to end the legal institution of property in human beings, but also as a means of bringing about a "different future" wherein former slaves could enjoy full participation in society. Similarly, on McLeod's view, prison abolition implies broad changes to social institutions: "n abolitionist framework," she writes, "requires positive forms of social integration and collective security that are not organized around criminal law enforcement, confinement, criminal surveillance, punitive policing, or punishment."

Historical development

, as part of his campaign for President of the United States in 1844, included "Abolish the cruel custom of prisons penitentiaries... and let reason and friendship reign over the ruins of ignorance and barbarity; yea, I would, as the universal friend of man, open the prisons, open the eyes, open the ears, and open the hearts of all people, to behold and enjoy freedom—unadulterated freedom..."
Angela Davis traces the roots of contemporary prison abolition theory at least to Thomas Mathiesen's 1974 book The Politics of Abolition, which had been published in the wake of the Attica Prison uprising and unrest in European prisons around the same time. She also cites activist Fay Honey Knopp's 1976 work Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists as a significant in the movement.
Eduardo Bautista Duran and Jonathan Simon point out that George Jackson's 1970 text Soledad Brother drew global attention to the conditions of prisons in the United States and made prison abolition a tenet of the New Left.
Liz Samuels observes that, following the Attica Prison uprising, activists began to coalesce around a vision of abolition, whereas previously they had endorsed a program of reform.

1973 Walpole Prison uprising

In 1973, two years after the Attica Prison uprising, the inmates of Walpole prison formed a prisoners' union to protect themselves from guards, end behavioral modification programs, advocate for the prisoner's right for education and healthcare, gain more visitation rights, work assignments, and to be able to send money to their families.
The union also created a general truce within the prison and race-related violence sharply declined. During the Kwanzaa celebration, black prisoners were placed under lockdown, angering the whole facility and leading to a general strike. Prisoners refused to work or leave their cells for three months, leading to the guards beating prisoners, putting prisoners in solitary confinement, and denying prisoners of medical care and food.
The strike ended in the prisoners' favour as the superintendent of the prison resigned. The prisoners were granted more visitation rights and work programs. Angered by this, the prison guards went on strike and abandoned the prison, hoping that this would create chaos and violence throughout the prison. But the prisoners were able to create an anarchist community where recidivism dropped dramatically and murders and rapes fell to zero. Prisoners volunteered to cook meals. Vietnam veterans who had been trained as medics took charge of the pharmacy and distribution of medication. Decisions were made in community assemblies.
Guards retook the prison after two months, leading to many prison administrators and bureaucrats quitting their jobs and embracing the prison abolition movement.

Advocates of prison abolition

Angela Davis writes: "Mass incarceration is not a solution to unemployment, nor is it a solution to the vast array of social problems that are hidden away in a rapidly growing network of prisons and jails. However, the great majority of people have been tricked into believing in the efficacy of imprisonment, even though the historical record clearly demonstrates that prisons do not work."
Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore co-founded Critical Resistance, which is an organization working to "build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe." Other similarly motivated groups such as the Prison Activist Resource Center, a group "committed to exposing and challenging all forms of institutionalized racism, sexism, able-ism, heterosexism, and classism, specifically within the Prison Industrial Complex," and Black & Pink, an abolitionist organization that focuses around LGBTQ rights, all broadly advocate for prison abolition. Furthermore, the Human Rights Coalition, a 2001 group that aims to abolish prisons, and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a grassroots organization dedicated to dismantling the PIC, can all be added to the long list of organizations that desire a different form of justice system.
Since 1983, the International Conference on Penal Abolition gathers activists, academics, journalists, and "others from across the world who are working towards the abolition of imprisonment, the penal system, carceral controls and the prison industrial complex," to discuss three important questions surrounding the reality of prison abolition ICOPA was one of the first penal abolitionist conference movements, similar to Critical Resistance in America, but "with an explicitly international scope and agenda-setting ambition."
Anarchists wish to eliminate all forms of state control, of which imprisonment is seen as one of the more obvious examples. Anarchists also oppose prisons given that statistics show incarceration rates affect mainly poor people and ethnic minorities, and do not generally rehabilitate criminals, in many cases making them worse. As a result, the prison abolition movement often is associated with humanistic socialism, anarchism and anti-authoritarianism.
In October 2015, members at a plenary session of the National Lawyers Guild released and adopted a resolution in favor of prison abolition.

Mental illness and prison

Prison abolitionists such as Amanda Pustilnik take issue with the fact that prisons are used as a "default asylum" for many individuals with mental illness.

"Why do governmental units choose to spend billions of dollars a year to concentrate people with serious illnesses in a system designed to punish intentional lawbreaking, when doing so matches neither the putative purposes of that system nor most effectively addresses the issues posed by that population?"
To rephrase, if the whole point of the penal system is to rehabilitate and reform individuals who have willingly transgressed, then those who transgress the law for reasons outside their cognitive control don't belong in prison since prisons were never designed nor intended to rehabilitate this population.
In the United States, there are more people with mental illness in prisons than in psychiatric hospitals. This statistic is one of the major pieces of evidence that prison abolitionists claim highlights the depravity of the penal system.
Prison abolitionists contend that prisons violate the Constitutional rights of mentally ill prisoners on the grounds that these individuals will not be receiving the same potential for rehabilitation as the non-mentally ill prison population. This injustice is sufficient grounds to argue for the abolishment of prisons. Prisons were not designed to be used to house the mentally ill, and prison practices like solitary confinement are awful for mental health. Additionally, individuals with mental illnesses have a much higher chance of committing suicide while in prison.

Arguments made for prison abolition

Opponents of the abolition argue that none of the arguments above address the protection of non-criminal population from the effects of crime, and from particularly violent criminals.
Proposals for prison reform and alternatives to prisons differ significantly depending on the political beliefs behind them. Proposals and tactics often include:
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime published a series of handbooks on criminal justice. Among them is which identifies how the overuse of imprisonment impacts fundamental human rights, especially those convicted for lesser crimes.
Social justice and advocacy organizations such as Students Against Mass Incarceration at the University of California, San Diego often look to Scandinavian countries Sweden and Norway for guidance in regard to successful prison reform because both countries have an emphasis on rehabilitation rather than punishment. According to Sweden's Prison and Probation Service Director-General, Nils Öberg, this emphasis is popular among the Swedish because the act of imprisonment is considered punishment enough. This focus on rehabilitation includes an emphasis on promoting normalcy for inmates, a charge lead by experienced criminologists and psychologists. In Norway a focus on preparation for societal re-entry has yielded "one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world at 20%, the US has one of the highest: 76.6% of prisoners are re-arrested within five years". The Scandinavian method of incarceration seems to be successful: the Swedish incarceration rate decreased by 6% between 2011 and 2012.

Abolitionist views

Many prison reform organizations and abolitionists in the United States advocate community accountability practices, such as community-controlled courts, councils, or assemblies as an alternative to the criminal justice system.
Organizations such as INCITE! and Sista II Sista that support women of color who are survivors of interpersonal violence argue that the criminal justice system does not protect marginalized people who are victims in violent relationships. Instead, victims, especially those who are poor, minorities, transgender or gender non-conforming can experience additional violence at the hands of the state. Instead of relying on the criminal justice system, these organizations work to implement community accountability practices, which often involve collectively-run processes of intervention initiated by a survivor of violence to try to hold the person who committed violence accountable by working to meet a set of demands.
For organizations outside the United States see, e.g. Justice Action, Australia.
Some anarchists and socialists contend that a large part of the problem is the way the judicial system deals with prisoners, people, and capital. According to Marxists, in capitalist economies incentives are in place to expand the prison system and increase the prison population. This is evidenced by the creation of private prisons in America and corporations like CoreCivic, formerly known as Correction Corporation of America. Its shareholders benefit from the expansion of prisons and tougher laws on crime. More prisoners is seen as beneficial for business. Some anarchists contend that with the destruction of capitalism, and the development of social structures that would allow for the self-management of communities, property crimes would largely vanish. There would be fewer prisoners, they assert, if society treated people more fairly, regardless of gender, color, ethnic background, sexual orientation, education, etc.
The demand for prison abolition is a feature of anarchist criminology, which argues that prisons encourage recidivism and should be replaced by efforts to rehabilitate offenders and reintegrate them into communities.