‘Prison abolition’ doesn’t sound complicated. It’s abolishing prison. Done. Put that shit through a spell check, clock out early, and fly a kite. But it is complicated. Go figure.
I recently saw a Twitter thread on the term ‘prison abolition’. Here’s the background. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote some tweets explaining and defending limits on the prison system, using ‘prison abolition’ as a hook. Carissa Byrne Hessick, a criminal law professor and director of the Prosecutors and Politics Project, responded.
Hessick largely agreed with AOC, but she objected to AOC’s use of ‘prison abolition’. She thought AOC misused the term. Why? Well, AOC doesn’t advocate abolishing all forms of imprisonment or confinement under a judicial system. Rather, she wants to close most prisons and release many prisoners. Since ‘prison abolition’, according to Hessick, means to eliminate all of those things, AOC misused the term. Perhaps in a politically motivated way?
Is Hessick right? I’ll argue she’s not. Or, at least, I think we can build a coherent concept of ‘prison abolition’ that doesn’t abolish all forms of confinement. Whether AOC’s on board with this is a separate issue.
‘Abolition’: An Error Theory
Lots of people responded to Hessick’s Twitter thread with error theories. Those theories answer the question, ‘why did AOC misuse the word ‘abolition’?’ Here’s the gist of those theories. Since no one (or hardly anyone) advocates ending literally all forms of confinement, they must have some other attachment to the label ‘abolition’. In many cases, they’re attached to ‘abolition’ because it’s connected to the anti-slavery movement. Prison abolitionists want to build an analogy between prison and slavery.
For my part, I’ll admit there’s something here. Many prison abolitionists do draw some form of an analogy between prison and slavery. Michelle Alexander uses it, to some degree, in her book The New Jim Crow. In that book, she draws an extended analogy from slavery to Jim Crow to prison. And Ibram X. Kendi uses the analogy in his book Stamped From the Beginning, where he ties this system to evolving ideas of segregationism and assimilationism.
But I think this line of thought quickly hits its limits. For one, it’s an uncharitable reading. Surely people know what ‘abolition’ means, and surely AOC isn’t inclined to distort it for political gain. We could at least give her the benefit of the doubt. And this line of thought doesn’t really accord with how I understand ‘prison abolition’, for whatever that’s worth.
Prison Abolition Groups and Movements
Let’s start with Angela Davis, a well known prison abolitionist. Davis draws the slavery analogy. But I think her views are more complicated than that. She’s worked with prison abolition movements since the 1960s, and she summarized her views in the 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete? Let’s look there.
The fact is she frames her objections to prisons in several ways. At various points in the book, she says she wants to undermine beliefs about the inevitability of prison in our social lives, consider whether the prison is an obsolete institution, and fight against the prison-industrial complex. I’ve teased these out because they’re separate ideas. We can connect them, but not they’re not obviously the same.
Davis co-founded a group called Critical Resistance. While they use language similar to Davis, they get a bit closer to what Hessick calls ‘prison abolition’. Yes, they focus on mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex, which we can tease apart from a stricter kind of abolitionism. But they also call for the elimination of imprisonment and policing.
You’ll find a similar story when you look at other groups. My initial inclinations are probably closest to a group called Community Justice Exchange. They explain their own take in more detail in their pamphlet. And they also very helpfully discuss alternatives to prison and policing.
The ‘Prison’ of ‘Prison Abolition’
As a result of all this, I don’t think prison abolitionists misuse ‘abolition’. In fact, I think we’re looking at precisely the wrong half of the term ‘prison abolition’. I think Hessick and at least some prison abolitionists really disagree about what ‘prison’ means.
Like any other issue, I approach prison as a social system with certain functions and roles, particularly as a builder of social relations serving deeper economic roles. Probably not a shocker for a blog called ‘Base and Superstructure‘. I’m hardly the first person to do so. Foucault more or less started a cottage industry on it with his book Discipline and Punish. And the field of science studies built itself around treating science this way.
That aside, the point is this. Hessick assumes ‘prison’ refers to literally any form of confinement by a judicial system. And probably some prison abolitionists make this move along with her, though I think not many. Why? Because this is, in some sense, too broad. Prison isn’t just any kind of confinement by a judicial system. It’s a particular kind of confinement associated with certain stages of social and technological development. It creates particular social divisions, and it aids the creation of an industrial reserve army in various ways.
Thus, the prison is a peculiar feature of the kind of society that has gone through industrialization. It’s a way to confine people on a large scale as a part of a regime of disciplining the workforce. The kind of prison abolitionism I advocate is the abolition of that. I think about abolitionism in terms of abolishing a particular kind of prison system. Not just any old means of confinement.
One thing I like about Critical Resistance is that they leave the question of what replaces prison fairly open-ended. And that’s as it should be. We need to do a lot of work around looking at community-based forms of justice, but we haven’t yet settled on anything definitive. After we do that work, we can say a lot about what a post-prison society looks like. But we can’t do it prematurely.
Activist Implications
Lack of good prison alternatives severely limits our activism. Whether we like it or not, some people out there do threaten the world around them. We might consider serial rapists largely undeterred by the present system. And we might consider the 1000+ cases each year where police officers kill someone. What about, say, Amber Guyger or Brock Turner? What do we do with these people?
Advocacy groups wrestle with difficult decisions along these lines every day. Particularly anti-sexual assault and racial justice groups. For a good example local to Iowa City, consider the Domestic Violence Intervention Program. Groups like this must decide whether and how to use the criminal justice system to fulfill their mission. Why? Because in most cases, they don’t have good alternatives.
It’s also tough on a personal level to navigate these issues. I don’t think rapists or killer cops should run free, but I also have deep reservations about pushing for them to go to prison or advocating they go to prison. It’s far from clear to me it’s a good idea to, e.g., advocate that judges who give rapists light sentences get recalled, or object to a ‘light’ sentence for a killer cop that would probably be a stiff sentence in an actually fair and equitable society. As a result, I typically remain silent on cases like this. In theory, I think we probably should continue confining (a much smaller number of) people who represent a grave threat to those around them. But in what form, and to what end? Those are much more difficult questions.
The greatest challenge for prison abolitionists, in my view, is this. If we study these issues, and we decide that we need some form of confinement of people dangerous to society, how do we create a form of confinement that is not prison? And should we?
Would you consider a Nordic Prison to be a prison in the ‘abolish prisons’ sense?
I’d have to look much closer into the Nordic prison systems to say for sure. But my general sense is “probably not.” It seems like they don’t involve heavy security theater, they’re genuinely aimed at rehabilitation rather than confinement, and they’re restricted to a small number of people who probably are genuine dangers to those around them at the time they enter.
But, of course, it’s a different story if I’m wrong about any of those assumptions. And even the Nordic system, I suspect, probably operates at the high end of a reasonable number of people held in confinement.
And there is the key. I’m pretty confident that people on Hessick’s side would consider a Nordic Prison to be…a prison.
Because it’s:
1)For people who have committed a crime/are awaiting jail for same
2)The (wo)men are separated from the wider society for a time
3)They cannot just leave whenever the whim takes them
4)It’s not a boarding school, mental hospital* or anything else
Anything that fulfills those four criteria is a prison and what you do *next* is a difference of degree and not of kind.
*And it’s not that those don’t have their own VERY MASSIVE problems; that’s just a different conversation.
I think there’s trouble lurking with the Hessick line, especially with (4) above.
If she really wants to get into ‘all judicial confinement is prison’ territory, then I think she probably has to call mental hospitals prisons, too. I mean, she could define them as ‘not prisons,’ but that would just look arbitrary, since they share all the features that prisons have for her. And like you said, there are problems with mental hospitals. But they’re not prisons, and they should be reformed rather than abolished.
The risk on AOC’s end is that she’s still leaving room for tens of thousands of people to be confined. But the risk on Hessick’s end is that she’d have to abolish lots of things that most people wouldn’t call prisons and ultimately shouldn’t be abolished.
Those four criteria are taken *together*. Things that fulfil all those four are prisons. If it only fulfils some of them then it’s not necessarily a prison. At least 1-3 has to be in place, I think.
Four is probably the least important because Broadmoor is technically a mental health hospital but it’s at the very least prison-adjacent and well, yeah, it’s near *enough* to a prison that if I had to bite the metaphorical bullet on something? Broadmoor springs to mind.
So from Hessick’s end, AOC prison abolition’s risk is that…well…serial killers will be roaming loose free to serial kill because you need a prison to incarcerate them. Nordic prisons are still prisons under Hessick’s schema.
And that assumes that Hessick is for prison abolition, but the smart money is likely on ‘probably wouldn’t identify that way because it sounds so absurd’.
Done correctly though, I think that prisons should be a)all Nordic style ones and b)done as a last resort and not a first option and c)people are sent to prison as THE punishment rather than in order to be punished.
I think Hessick and the like would consider the separation from society to be punitive in and of itself.
But the risk on AOC’s end is also this….
People who know nothing about prison-abolition-the-movement hear ‘prison abolition’ as ‘eliminate all forms of incarceration’ and then they ask the obvious question about rapists and murderers and serial killers and stuff like Angela Davis is recommended which …. is not helpful to people who are asking about serial killers and such things.
Now, yes, serial killers are a miniscule fraction of prisoners but they are the interesting ones re: what laymen-understand-prison abolition to mean.
Better to recommend stuff like the creative toolkit of restorative justice.
That’s because answers to that from the common recommendations basically sound like “I want to replace a system that has 0.7% of them incarcerated with a system that has 0.000000% behind bars. My way is much better!” which is….uhh.. extremely unconvincing, to put it mildly. They also really come across as discussing/ducking/dodging/weaving (around) the question rather than answering it.
I think it’s useful to know what your position looks in the least convenient world. In the least convenient world where prisons are synonymous with torture then obviously, we just accept the half a percent or whatever it is slightly-higher chance of being randomly killed or whatever. That’s not this world because Nordic prisons do exist.
There are other least convenient worlds. Also, if we have guaranteed income, healthcare**, food, drinks & shelter & disability provision and so on that’s actually enforced?
**And that’s including mental healthcare
What does your position look like in the least convenient world where some people choose to do bad things despite those rights being granted?
Those safety nets in place mean that if I was to steal from someone in that society? That’s actually a much bigger deal than stealing in our current society because I’m clearly just being an asshole who takes more than my fair share for no good reason then.
Yes, advocating for restorative justice is a possible alternative presentation. Framing it as ‘ending the prison industry’ or ‘abolish the prison industry’ rather than ‘prison abolition’ could help, too, though that risks creating the perception that the criticism applies only to private prisons. And private prisons, of course, aren’t anywhere near the largest part of the prison system.
Yeah. I think prison abolitionists have a real problem with the curse of knowledge. A lot of people who ask that genuinely think that “abolish prisons” means “never lock anyone up no matter what and don’t have anyone who responds to crimes and investigates murderers no matter what” and that’s kind of understandable given what the words usually mean!
https://xkcd.com/2501/
And then their only objection is what do we do with the rapists and murderers? Wow. And then people avoid the question (because they do want an answer) and people think ‘fuck that; I don’t trust you with armed robbery now.” and stop listening.
If i use the ‘special’ definition like that to a layman, it would be kind of like me claiming to you that we’ve abolished slavery entirely since it’s not directly inherited any more. This is nonsense of course but that’s what abolition sounds like to laymen.
(Lots of sympathetic-but-not-prison-abolitionists people would probably think that you are defining prisons so narrowly as to beg the question.)
So now we’re left with doing a much better job at letting randos know that prison-abolitionists don’t consider the Nordicesque prisons to be prisons.