Look. I am very supportive of the goals of the prison abolition movement, and am not worried about what a post-prison society will look like.
But "let's name our project a very deceptive name that sounds extreme and simple, and then condescend to people when they ask what is up with that" is the very definition of a political own goal.
Like no, there is no praxis that benefits from "refuse to explain what your movement is about and patronize people who even ask." It's just emotional self-indulgence and in-group politics.
Idk, I'd be pretty worried about a society where rapists and murderers had free, unfettered access to new victims because said society prioritized their right to be able to kill and rape more innocents over the safety of the rest of said society from being killed or raped.
Almost every study ever done on the subject shows that potential-criminals are not stopped by harsher penalties, but by higher chance of getting caught.
You do not want more prisons, what you want is more cops.
No, I want prisons to keep proven rapists and murderers away from society. You stop someone from committing a crime by making it impossible, and when someone has proven they are so utterly evil as to kill or rape someone that translates to either life in prison or the death penalty, the latter of which is inherently tyrannical and thus leaves lwop as the only option. Punitive justice isn't entirely without merit but you're right in that it's not the magic fix-all for crime, but this isn't punitive justice in the sense of penalties deterring crime, it's preventative justice in the sense of criminals who've been proven to have done these abominable things being directly prevented from doing so again.
Murderers who go to prison murder people there. Guards who staff them murder people. And societies that don't care about criminal's lives convict a lot of innocent people.
You don't want the murder and rape to stop. You want it over there, away from you.
So your logic to why we shouldn't protect society from murderers is that they're literally unstoppable and that all prison guards are also murderers, which is also a problem that can't be solved?
Amazing. Truly incredible. Anyways, instead of massively inflating the problem and then declaring it impossible, I'd much rather reform prisons to have better oversight and guard training rather so that murderers can't reoffend inside rather than toss them all back among helpless randos and hope that the "literally everyone can be re-socialized" idea is 100% accurate and workable. But lemme guess, my idea's bad and stinky because it doesn't involve tearing something down that offends you.
Let's not forget also, that statistics across various nations and across time reveal that 1% of criminals commit well over half of all crime. Put that tiny minority in prison for decades--or life--and the rest of us can live better, safer lives. You absolutely CAN, in fact, "jail your way to a safer society."
It's just that too many people nowadays don't want to be "mean" to career criminals who will assault, rob, rape, and murder other people repeatedly over decades unless they're forcibly stopped.
