The prison abolition movement seeks to eliminate the use of prisons and the prison system and instead emphasize alternative forms of justice and accountability, such as restorative justice. The movement is critical of mass incarceration and the institutional and systemic racism that disproportionately affects people of color and other marginalized populations. The prison abolition movement seeks to create a society free of oppression and unjust systems of punishment.
The concept of prison abolition in America is a challenging and complex one with a history that goes back to the American revolution but has been gaining more traction in recent years. Many activists and scholars have come to recognize the prison system’s ineffectiveness, inhumane practices, and damaging impacts on oppressed communities including BIPOC, Queer and Trans folks, and those experiencing poverty and homelessness.
Prison abolition calls for a shift away from the punitive approach to criminal justice, and instead focuses on addressing the root causes of harm and working towards restorative justice. However, the average citizen cannot begin to fathom, let alone imagine, a society without imprisonment and punitive punishment. This way of addressing crime and criminal justice is ingrained into our culture through media, policy, and status quo.
Like everything in our capitalist American society, there are people making money off this inhumane system. And, when people are making money off something, there is usually a lot of propaganda that goes into making the public believe that it is the right way to do it.
As Angela Davis (2003) explains, “as the U.S. prison system expanded, so did corporate involvement in construction, provision of goods and services, and use of prison labor. Because of the extent to which prison building and operation began to attract vast amounts of capital […] we began to refer to a “prison industrial complex.” The U.S. would not let a vital part of its economy fail because of a violation of human rights and oppression of the American population.
Moreover, American culture trains us to ignore, or even embrace, the atrocities of prison and how we treat fellow humans in order to feel secure and a sense of justice after a crime is committed. If someone serves enough time in these conditions and have their rights taken away from them, then most people feel better about it and feel like justice was served. “The computability of state punishment in terms of time—days, months, years—resonates with the role of labor-time as the basis for computing the value of capitalist commodities” (Davis, 2003). Americans view time spent and money earned as a basis of value, hence the phrase “time is money”.
The profitability of the P the oppression easier t considers himself a ha the law. This is also directly rela people of color have hi for white Americans to abolitionists argue that justice and locking oth will not solve the root o in community. Imprisonment is simply people away from the s education, and ability t factors like low wages, and systemic racism in
So, what should be done by the people that want to make change? Anyone can be an abolitionist.
People tend to be held up by the basic question of what to do with all the incarcerated people America holds today if prisons were gone tomorrow. But abolitionists want people to imagine a world beyond that question. Davis (2003) says to ask instead what it would mean to have a system where punishment does not create corporate profit, where punishment is not determined by race and class or even used as a tool of justice.
Abolitionists want to decarcerate and find alternatives to prison such as the “demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance” (Davis, 2003). With these changes, the use of prisons would eventually shrink and resources that once were used to spring up thousands of new prisons in a short period of time can go into social sectors and transform the system from the ground up.
We also must work to change how we think about what crime means and how we think about people who have committed criminalized acts.
This work is not easy. instincts and feelings th about crime and punis change unless a chang about incarceration e it and why that is. We m not only think about pe especially ones that dif subject to the overt rac society. Once you have begun the movement is callin from the organization 8
There are many alternative models of justice that could be employed in place of the traditional prison system. Restorative justice, for example, focuses on repairing the harm caused by a crime, by addressing the underlying causes and providing meaningful reparation to the victim. Therapeutic interventions, such as counseling and rehabilitation programs, can also be used to address the root causes of criminal behavior. Additionally, community-based alternatives, such as community service and mediation, can be used to address minor offenses without resorting to incarceration.
Although these alternative models of justice have great potential, achieving true prison abolition is a complex and challenging process. Many of the current policies and institutions of the criminal justice system are designed to perpetuate the status quo, and therefore, it will take significant effort to dismantle and replace them.
There will also be resistance from those who benefit from the current system, as well as from those who are accustomed to the punitive approach. Implementing new models of justice will not be cheap either.
Prison abolition is an important and necessary goal, as the current system is ineffective, inhumane, and perpetuates injustice. As such, it is vital that advocates for prison abolition continue to push for reform and work to create a truly equitable criminal justice system.
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#JusticeReformNow -- Federal Prisons Of America -- Free The Nation! (2016). Courtesy of the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery. https://jstor.org/stable/community.21542648
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