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.”
Abolitionists don’t stop at the prison walls, however: They aim to reshape our society as a whole. We are not doing nearly enough to address the root causes of poverty, addiction, homelessness, and mental-health crises, abolitionists contend, and criminalizing poverty through harsh fines and debt regulation; criminalizing addiction through drug laws; criminalizing homelessness by conducting sweeps of people sleeping in parks; and criminalizing mental illness by turning prisons into de facto psychiatric hospitals is all treating the symptom instead of the disease. This is one of the key differences between reform and abolitionism: The former deals with pain management and the latter with the actual source of the pain.
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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.
The first step, moratorium, is simple: “Stop building cages,” is how Critical Resistance co-founder Rachel Herzing described it. According to a Congressional Research Service report, “the number of state and federal adult correction facilities rose from 1,277 in 1990 to 1,821 in 2005, a 43% increase.” Five hundred and forty-four new facilities in 15 years works out to about one new prison opening every 10 days. (Since the 1970s, there has been at least a 700 percent increase in the state prison populations.) Though prison construction has slowed since, new prisons are still being built, and immigration detention has seen yet another construction boom since Trump took office.
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A bit more complicated is the second step—decarceration—which involves finding ways to get people out of prison. According to abolitionists, a lot of people in prison right now represent no threat to society, and therefore shouldn’t be languishing behind bars. In states that have legalized marijuana, for example, it’s particularly cruel to still be keeping people in prison for possessing marijuana. The Drug Policy Alliance estimates that there have been about 350,000 arrests for marijuana in California in the past 10 years (medical marijuana, meanwhile, has been legal in that state for over two decades, and recreational use is now also legal), and a total of 1 million people have reviewable convictions. The New York Times also recently reported that, despite what seems like a national relaxation of arrests and convictions for marijuana use, black and Hispanic residents of some parts of New York City are arrested at a rate 15 times higher than that of white people—for the same “crime.” Other decarceration strategies include creating review processes to reevaluate sentence terms, recognizing that many people are given long stints for petty crimes—especially under many states’ three-strikes rules.
Excarceration strategies—the third abolitionist pillar—could potentially be the most transformative for society: These involve finding ways to divert people away from the prison-industrial complex in the first place. According to abolitionists, many of the reasons people end up coming into contact with law enforcement can be solved through more humane means. Decriminalizing mental-health episodes, fighting homelessness, or decriminalizing drug use are three clear ways to keep people from getting pipelined towards prison. And for abolitionists, we don’t just stop at decriminalization: Adequately funding mental-health treatment, providing housing for those in need, and offering adequate rehabilitation services for people with substance dependence are all critical. As author Alex Vitale told me, “Housing-first initiatives for homeless people—that is police reform.”
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But what about those acts of extreme violence—what to do with people who have committed rape or murder? How should such truly harmful transgressions be handled in a post-prison world? According to abolitionists, one solution may be a process called restorative justice.
Through restorative justice, offenders are expected, as Vitale describes, “to fully account for their behaviors in dialogue with the individual and communities affected by their actions.… They must then work with those parties to develop actions to try to repair the damage done as much as possible.” The process is restorative because the goal is to restore the victim, their community, and the offender, to how they were before the transgression occurred. As Crispino put it to me, “People who commit violence are hurt by the violence they commit,” and therefore need to be part of any process that seeks to find justice for that violence.
One step further than restorative justice is transformative justice. Crispino defined this concept as asking the offender what in their life has led them to commit the act, and what we all can do to change those conditions. Through either restorative or transformative justice, the systemic analysis takes the place of individual interrogation and punishment.
These processes are hardly new: Abolitionists trace the roots of restorative justice back to a wide variety of indigenous and religious practices such as the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne band council in Canada, which has established a indigenous people’s court according to Mohawk principles. As Bonni Cole, an indigenous prosecutor, explained, “It’s not just looking at penalizing… that’s old thinking—that’s outside thinking.” Likewise, the Jewish practice of Teshuva, or atonement, has been linked not only to punishing the offender but also to a holistic reparation of the relationship between offender and victim. Another Canadian indigenous people, the Mnjikaning, avoid the terms “offender” and “victim” altogether, focusing instead on the behavior of the individuals and how it impacts the community.
Restorative justice is being tried out in some schools as well, with districts from Oakland to Denver adopting some restorative practices, which are already showing promise.
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Even with instances of egregious abuse, as during Guatemala’s long Civil War, restorative justice pushes as much for bringing the offenders to justice—including airing out the crimes through truth-and-reconciliation processes—as for reparations for the victims and their communities. And though the outcome of Guatemalan efforts has been mixed, the restorative-justice model has brought in traditionally ignored voices (promoting women and indigenous lawyers) and has at least spotlighted decades’-old institutional harms that might otherwise have been overlooked or forgotten in sweep-it-under-the-rug amnesty bills. Guatemala’s Commission for Historical Clarification, as well, though slow and with wavering results—such as the nullification of a genocide conviction against the late war criminal Efraín Ríos Montt—has kept the harms of the conflict in the foreground—a key to healing.
It may be hard to imagine a victim of a violent transgression sitting down for a discussion with the perpetrator, but according to Vitale, there are many situations in which the victim or the victim’s family has actually been more fulfilled by a restorative process, or feel they have attained greater justice through restorative-justice models. An obvious benefit of the restorative model is that it takes account not just of the singular event, but the structural problems surrounding and leading up to the offense.