Re your last rb, my friends and I read Are Prisons Obsolete? last year for our book club. What I remember of our discussion is that we agreed the answer was “yes!” but we weren’t sure what it actually looked like in practice, especially around (e.g.) murder or sexual crimes. What are some of the recommendations from the prison abolitionist movement?
I am also planning to check out some of the linked books, but this has always been a challenge for me to wrap my head around!
The first thing you have to let go of when you're imagining this is the idea that anywhere near this number of people in prison is normal or okay in most Earth societies. And to do that, you have to understand why people in prison are in prison.
Like half of them are there for probation or parole violations. That means it's hard to tell why exactly they're there, but, looking at the breakdown of probation and parole violations I've defended, it's actually not super likely that this is because of a new crime conviction. People get dinged on probation/parole violations for stuff that's legal for other people to do, including marijuana and alcohol, or not calling the probation officer enough, or being homeless, or not having a job because you got fired because of your probation meetings.
Next, the bulk of people in and out of local jails are there for honestly just stupid nonsense. Misdemeanor assaults, trespasses, drug possessions. There's compelling evidence that these short stays in jail increase recidivism, which, if you think about it, makes a lot of sense -- imagine your live being interrupted by an abrupt few months in jail. If you have family support, they might be able to retrieve your stuff from your place before your landlord leaves it all on a curb. You get an eviction on your record. You're fired. You might lose all your important documents if no one was available to get them from your apartment. And then you're spat back out with nothing, an overdrawn bank account, zero possessions except what you were arrested with, and told "now get a job or you're going back to jail."
Then there's mid-level cases that are felonies. Most people think felonies are Serious Business. They are -- in terms of consequences. The crimes that are felonies are defined in ways that are often absurd and ass-backwards. It's very hard to explain what I mean without just providing an example, so here goes.
In my state, there's a crime of "shooting at an occupied dwelling" (something clearly intended to be a law against drive-by shootings, which I would like to note were ALREADY ILLEGAL, it being illegal to attempt murder on people and to recklessly handle firearms etc., so the law was arguably totally unnecessary, but I digress). There is also a crime of discharging a firearm inside an occupied dwelling. This is not as bad of a crime as shooting at an occupied dwelling.
There is a notable case where a prosecutor chose to prosecute someone who shot inside a dwelling under the shooting at a dwelling law. Why? Because worser penalty is why. The higher Court, after appeal, ruled that a shooting done inside a dwelling is by default at a dwelling, since the dwelling is in fact in every direction from the shooter. Thus, every shooting in an occupied dwelling must be a shooting at an occupied dwelling. The less serious law is thus effectively nullified by the court.
I'll take it one step further. The law about shooting at an occupied dwelling also says that it doesn't have to be a gun, it can be a "missile." There's some language in there about how it has to cause significant risk of death or bodily harm. Despite that language, my most notable case under this law was the following facts:
One thirteen-year-old shot another thirteen-year-old with an Orbeez gun in a living room.
The judge refused to dismiss the charge. "Those things can put an eye out," she said. And thus the child was subject to felony liability for the drive-by shooting law for A FUCKING ORBEEZ GUN I SWEAR TO GOD I COULD NOT MAKE THIS UP IF I TRIED okay maybe I'm still a little mad
But the discussion on prison abolition tends to center not on these INCREDIBLY VAST MAJORITIES OF CASES where the law is stretched to fit the facts, where people weren't really hurt, where the police even generated the crime themselves perhaps by responding to a mental health crisis and provoking the situation until there are felony assault & battery on law enforcement charges.
Prison abolition discussions are all about what to do with murderers. Rapists. Abusers. Sex offenders.
To be clear, I believe there are some situations where a person will keep doing societal harm and will not stop. These situations are so shocking because they are so rare.
The first murderer I ever met was this guy who freely admitted what he did: he said he killed the guy who raped his daughter. He managed to get an incredibly low sentence out of the jury that heard the case. He was willing to pay the price of prison. He was honestly pretty interesting and willing to talk my visiting law student clinic through a lot of what had happened.
The first murder case I had, the client killed because of a sincerely held belief that he was in danger. The fact that this sincerely held belief was from an intense delusional psychosis makes it a deep tragedy.
Different places report different figures, but anywhere from half to 90% of the women in prison for murder are there for murdering an abusive spouse. Women don't fit under traditional definitions of self-defense, see; they don't wait until someone is coming at them ready to kill. Women shoot when the man is asleep. Women want to survive.
So even when you think of 'murder,' question this: why is heat-of-passion murder less bad in our system than premeditated murder? Premeditated murder, apart from serial killers, is a one-and-done thing. It's also much more common for female murderers to fall into the category of premeditation and for masculine to fall into heat of passion. People who murder when they're angry are an ongoing danger to society.
Prison abolition says: everything about this is wrong. Looking for an "alternative" is in many ways the trap question -- the wrong question. It's not about finding a different, better way to punish people. Maybe we still do need 1 in 100 of our current prisons to confine people who won't stop hurting others. Maybe a mental health system that's a tiny bit less pathetically anemic could help handle the load.
Prison abolition says: there's no reason to take this person out of society for x years, all of them at 100k/year expense to the taxpayers, subject to cruelty and dehumanization, in the interests of punishment, because it does too much harm. One year, nine months for possession of a meth pipe with residue? Go to a drug program, for god's sake. Two years, one month for larceny? Why spend more on locking the person up than they stole? Why lock them up where they can't pay restitution?
I can imagine a lot of ways it would look. Maybe prison abolition looks a lot like what we already have, except we have actual money available for other things. I think the point of books like Are Prisons Obsolete? is to start people thinking outside the box they've lived in their whole lives. Busting down that box is hard. It's super cool that y'all are reading that, btw. Hell yeah!
