I applaud this article for challenging the received wisdom in libertarian communities that our prison problems are a function of drug laws -- indeed, if there's one thing this article does well, it's establishing that we cannot solve our problems solely by dealing with nonviolent crime.
That said, this article makes a large number of controversial claims that it fails to support on anything other than a rhetorical level, including:
* The moral crisis in prisons is so severe that effectively any social burden should be borne for it to be fixed.
* In time, the increased public money from eliminating prisons will turn violent felons into peaceful individuals.
* The differences between the US and UK's social situations is a function of our prisons.
Ultimately, this article's vigor outweighs its coherence; it seems to oscillate between making ontological claims and moral claims, between libertarian claims and authoritarian claims (note the advocacy for more CCTV).
It is not inherently authoritarian to have cctvs. It can just as easily be an anarchist or libertarian concept. It really depends on who pays for and controls the cameras, who has access to the recordings, and what punishments can be given to those recorded while committing a crime.
I agree with your other points, but I'd like to point out that there's absolutely nothing wrong with supporting multiple ideas that are usually found in different ideological cages
Wow, very powerful article. I agree that our prison system is America's biggest moral wrong, and I hope that history books in 50 years write about how sad and unjust it is in our time.
That said, does anyone know what proposed solutions are? When the author talks of abolishing the prison system in exchange for higher crime rates (and potentially even more deaths by the state), does he literally mean we should close all prisons (like he seems to say near the end)? I'd love to see more articles / writing about this, and proposed solutions with specifics about how many people could be removed from the prison system, estimates for increases in capital punishment (if arguing we should have more), etc.
The problem presented is very real, but the proposed "solution" is absurd. There are plenty of way functional prison systems. As long as we stop dehumanizing felons and normalizing crimes against them, I see no reason why reform is impossible.
Reasonable prison systems incarcerate much smaller percentages of their populations than the USA one does. Any reform worth contemplating will result in the release of many prisoners, and the closure of prisons in all but the most overcrowded states.
Already in the Prison Treatment Act of 1945, the view was expressed that the deprivation of freedom itself should be regarded as the penal element of a prison sentence and not the actual prison experience itself. Thus, the PTA of 1974
states explicitly that an inmate shall be treated with respect for his or her human dignity. [1]
As ever when I look for an country that I think will be an example of doing something well, I start with the nordics. And I see that Sweden has recently closed 4 prisons because they don't have enough prisoners to fill them any more. [2]
I would love to hear counter points if my cursory reading has missed something - but in general I was once again impressed by the attitudes I see there.
Counterpoint: the Norwegian government is considering hiring capacity in the Netherlands for 700 long term prisoners. Sweden is said to have considered hiring capacity as well but decided against because of the legal minefield surrounding this topic.
The only way to get this fixed (peacefully) is to raise a ruckus and get the public to fight their elected officials into Doing the Right Thing.
You can bet your ass that the number of dollars able to be rallied for this purpose is dwarfed by the incumbent interests. Further, it's trivial to say "Do you want to have your kid growing up next to an evil ~=felon=~?" and sway votes, because people are not rational above family-unit decisions.
So, understanding that it's probably a hopeless cause, the best thing you can do is support ex-felons, help them find work and learn useful skills, and vote whenever possible for anything that helps curtail or curb the police state.
That means voting for legalization of everything, full stop. That means voting for reduced surveillance powers, full stop. That means voting for less defense spending, full stop. That means voting for fewer crimes and smaller police forces, full stop. Anything else is playing into the hands of the oppressors.
Problem is, prisons like all government institutions are controlled by fads and fears and money - Senators don't do anything until votes are at stake or campaigning dollars. So nothing happens for a long time, and then Bang some extreme measure is passed to show that they care or something.
We closed the mental institutions and released folks into the general population, and that didn't work very well. Closing the prisons would be worse, because some of the people in there actually mean to do us harm.
The max-security ones need to be kept. Some people are just bastards and can't be helped. Punishment has no effect on them - what we need is to lock them up for life. But that's maybe 5% or less of the prison population. Legalize drugs, and have a social security system that means no one has to steal and suddenly almost everyone else is out. The remainder need rehabilitation, which probably needs to happen in a prison.
The max-security ones are the ones that are biggest problem. They exacerbate mental problems the person had and often release people back into society unable to function normally. And no, not all the people who are locked there were repeatedly violent.
Well, my uneducated opinion is that an individual either shouldn't be in maximum security or should never be let out except when a team of psychologists says *he's good.
> Some people are just bastards and can't be helped.
I'd say that's a difficult assertion to prove in a system that provides every incentive for recidivism. In addition, how would you (or anyone else) fairly evaluate who falls into this category?
As far as I know, there is no "brainscan for psycopathy." Moreover, I don't think the field of psychology has a very strong record regarding the diagnosis and treatment of prisoners.
> Moreover, I don't think the field of psychology has a very strong record regarding the diagnosis and treatment of prisoners.
Or anyone else, for that matter. Tom Widiger, who served as head of research for DSM-IV, says "There are lots of studies which show that clinicians diagnose most of their patients with one particular disorder and really don't systematically assess for other disorders. They have a bias in reference to the disorder that they are especially interested in treating and believe that most of their patients have."
The reason should be obvious -- unlike medicine, psychological diagnoses rely on assessing symptoms, not the detection and treatment of causes.
Psychiatrists and psychologists who serve on parole boards have a record no better than chance. When they say that a person is no longer a threat and merits release, based on their accuracy and predictive track record, they might as well flip a coin.
"[T]he first question any prison abolitionist needs to answer is what we’re supposed to do with violent criminals. An important part of that answer has to be that we must simply put up with an increased level of risk in our daily lives."
Good luck selling that idea. It drifts off-topic in any case, since up until then the article is mainly about prison reform and (for the most part) non-violent offenders themselves becoming victims of violent inmates. But wholesale release of violent offenders back into the community? It won't happen, and no politician who hopes to get elected will touch that message with a 10-foot pole.
Reading on:
"Prison abolitionists should be ready to advocate a massive expansion of the death penalty if that’s what it takes to move the discussion forward"
So now you're determined to alienate people on both the left and the right, on the dubious notion that violent offenders should be released, but the most violent should be executed?
If you put aside political left and rights, then the arguments seem to be a bit more justifiable. At least, the author isn't sticking to party talking points and making new arguments.
I think what the author is saying is that prisons are, by them selves, a bad way to encourage reasonably low and sustainable crime rates. Wherever possible, criminals should be "punished" by out-of-prison solutions and rehabilitation. The author is pushing the point of executing everyone as an almost rhetorical argument. If you want to imprison so many people, why not simply kill them?
I suppose I'm using left and right as short-hand for progressive and authoritarian, but it's a bit clumsy and not that much shorter.
It's an excellent article, but even if it is just a rhetorical position (re-reading, I accept it could be) I think it poisons the debate to the extent that nobody will engage with it. If you really want to argue in favour of releasing murderers and violent criminals from prison, it will be branded a "murderer's manifesto" and the debate is basically over. So talk about reforming the mostly futile drug laws, three-strike laws, etc, before anything else.
This also links to other resources on the subject, and discusses some of the startling stats in the OP (like that in the US more men are raped than women, because of prison rape).
After reading these two articles, I can't help but wonder if the depiction of prison life in US, as seen in Oz [0], wasn't that far from truth.
I still would want to get some background (and financial interests) on the author. The build-up of the article culminates the third chapter from the end:
Abolishing prisons and releasing all the prisoners would amount to a deregulation of criminal punishment. It would mean letting the private sector determine how best to prevent ourselves from getting robbed. In high finance, the laissez-faire approach has proved to be a disaster; for petty crime, it would be a boon.
So, the antidote to the proposed solution will be more gated communities and private police forces guarding these sanctuaries? Considering that the article avoided pointing at the financial incentives of the prison industrial complex system, I can't shake a feeling there are some other financial interests behind this article.
It's never surprising that the vast majority is wrong. The majority is always wrong by definition. I doubt anyone who has been to prison, even for a tour, thinks it's "too easy."
Our approach to crime here in the US strikes me as the dark underbelly of the myth of meritocratic rugged individualism. If success is individual in nature, failure must be as well, and it's much easier to dehumanize an entire class of "failures" when you believe that the blame lies entirely with them.
The article had me until about 3/4 of the way through.
(still a good article).
We can't, and we won't, abolish the prison system in the foreseeable future. What we can and what we should do is enact some drastic reforms of our criminal justice system. The old guard needs to be removed from it's duties almost to the man. The CJ system in the US has become an expensive, shameful joke and without a doubt, causes far more harm than good to our society.
Lately we've seen a number of well written, compelling articles about reforming the U.S. criminal justice system. There was one not long ago about a woman who moved to a poor inner-city neighborhood for a while and wrote about it. Here is another one.
But these articles always have a missing piece: why are there so many crimes committed? In the above-mentioned article, it was noted that many of the woman's neighbors would never call the police, as to do so would result in a check on possible warrants for their arrest. But with no further explanation, you've just lost the hordes of right-leaning American suburban whites. They'll think, "There are no warrants out for my arrest, because I don't go around committing crimes. Why can't these people do the same?"
Similarly, this article discusses the case of "petty thief" Roderick Johnson, who was used as a sex slave in prison, and raped daily for a year and a half. And then:
> After Johnson got out, he lodged a civil suit against six guards who he said refused to help him. In 2005, a Wichita Falls jury found in favor of the guards. In 2007, after passing a note to a clerk at a gas station that read, “I have 9 mm. Put the money in the bag,” Johnson was arrested again. This time, since Johnson was a repeat offender, he got nineteen years.
And my proverbial suburban white thinks, "If you don't want to be a sex slave, then stop pulling armed robberies of gas stations, ya moron!" And a long overdue discussion has been nipped in the bud.
This issue desperately needs to be addressed. The left isn't going to fix this problem on its own. We need broad societal support. But as it is, half the population of the U.S. has an easy argument allowing them to dismiss proposals from articles like this one.
So prisons do disproportionately imprison the lower classes and far far too many people are put in disgusting prisons to be tortured and treated like subhumans in the US but that doesn't necessarily mean it has caused the big drop in crime.
If you sit on a jury, don't vote to convict on drug "crimes" or other prison-stuffing non-violent offences short of fraud and larceny on an epic scale.
I feel that the core argument of the article is that we cannot fix the problem through non-violent inmates. There are not enough of them. The biggest problem is with violent inmates who none of us really want back out in society; the problem is that the damage caused by imprisoning them is so much larger than the improvement experienced by everyone else.
> the problem is that the damage caused by imprisoning them is so much larger than the improvement experienced by everyone else.
Is it? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the US prison population just 0.00730843528654% of our country's total population? 0.99269156471346% of the US population experiencing lower violent crime is a larger improvement than the crimes suffered in prison. Wouldn't it be more effective if we just decriminalized drug possession and just ended the drug war entirely?
Quote: "According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,266,800 adults were incarcerated in U.S. federal and state prisons, and county jails at year-end 2011 – about 0.94% of adults in the U.S. resident population.[4] Additionally, 4,814,200 adults at year-end 2011 were on probation or on parole.[8] In total, 6,977,700 adults were under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) in 2011 – about 2.9% of adults in the U.S. resident population."
This means your provided figure is (a) wildly exaggerated as to its accuracy, using far more digits than its source can justify, and (b) flat wrong to an astonishing degree.
> Wouldn't it be more effective if we just decriminalized drug possession and just ended the drug war entirely?
Absolutely, many agree including me. But your figures are still wrong.
How is this wrong when even children benefit from keeping violent criminals isolated from the general population? Besides accounting for just adults still doesn't detract from my main point: the vast majority of people in the US benefit from keeping violent felons locked up
I don't know offhand, and I kind of wish that I did.
I imagine that you could probably talk to parole officers or local-nonprofits and ask for more information. If you hear about somebody getting out of the clink, offer to help I guess?
I assume it's basically like trying to setup help for any other underserved demographic. Identify them, identify their needs, and see if you have or know something worth contributing.
This seems like such an obvious solution and, with the advent of things like MOOCs, something that needn't be particularly costly. (Setting aside the fact that even 'costly' but effective rehabilitation is demonstrably cheaper in the long-run.)
As well as the obvious benefits of equipping offenders with skills that will make them more employable upon release it seems intuitively true that the struggle for self-improvement would make them all-round 'better people'. For those who argue that self-study isn't enough, another component could be pairing up inmates of differing attainment levels and having effectively having them teach one another -- again, the act of teaching and helping a stranger has got to be a positive experience.
Is there a big problem with any of this? Have studies been conducted that indicate my intuitions are incorrect? Have I massively underestimated the difficulties and costs associated with such a scheme? ...Or is it simply a combination of lack of imagination on the side of the administration, coupled with a strong urge for punitive justice on the side of the electorate?
If I recall right, education for education sake did not lowered recidivism much. It made prisoners better behaved while in prison (e.g. there was less violence and less problems in prison).
I suspect that part of the problem with practical education for prisoners is that everybody else have to pay for it. So, law abiding (or not caught yet) citizens get all jealous about the perk they are not getting.
Why not make prison more humane instead of abolishing it? Prosecute crimes against inmates, allow independent observers inside, etc. That would also take a lot of political courage, though.
And in the "crimes against inmates" it has to be pointed out that many of them are committed by the jailers themselves. Those crimes need to be punished with severe penalties.
Short of removing the executive branch's monopoly on criminal prosecution, I don't see how it can be done, and there's all kinds of problems doing that (for one thing, unless you also abandon protections against double jeopardy, you invite sham prosecutions to protect the guilty.)
One of the things i think is missed in the proposed solution (do away with prisons) is the problem of mob violence in general, and "mob justice" in particular.
If people don't believe the government will punish people for crimes, they will do it themselves. Would that result in less hyper-hell?
The prevailing system of government in the world at present is a mix of socialism, capitalism, welfarism and the philosophically unchampioned realpolitik practices that were picked up and spread over the years.
In any case, Europe has a philosophical heritage of socialism. It's different flavors at different times in different places. There is also conservatism, capitalist liberalism. All sorts. But socialism is not a bad word in Europe. It's not like flying a swastika. It's part of the political heritage of many parties & people of the political centre.
In any case, I think that socialism including Marx's own writings read in its 1840s political context contain valuable perspectives. That is, you can think of the world as a self organizing playground for heroic, creative individuals as Ayn Rand does. I dig that perspective. You can view the economy as a mechanical ecosystem as many "modern" economists do (including Milton Friedmanesque monetarism, Keynes, and to a lesser extent Austrian School). That's valuable perspective too too, though far less poetic and invigorating.
Back to socialism, it's an important part of our heritage. The history of political, moral and philosophical thought. At the heart of it is class. Class struggle. Class Consciousness. Just thinking about societal dynamics in terms of classes.
The majority of incarcerated Americans are members of certain classes where incarceration is common. Americans, with their allergic reactions to socialist language avoid this construct or paradigm. Instead they think of it as culture, or "socio-economics" a watered down Marxist paradigm without much of the richness.
Prisons, prison complexes and such have always been a class issue. Avoiding this perspective is avoiding the clearest historical perspective of the problem. The whole modern idea of prisons is not that old. People were not incarcerated for decades in the 1600s. Modern prisons, correctional institutions came into being with the industrial age to deal with the class instability of that period. The lowest classes (beneath the working class majority) were prone to crime, drunkenness and generally antisocial lifestyle.
Public sadism solutions (public executions and torture) gave way to forced labour Forced labour gave way to public prisons. These were enabled by Bigger Government (to use an americanism) and a vernal super-sizing of public institution. Along the way, exile (eg Australian & American prison colonies) was tried and some other solutions. But it was always and still is a way of dealing with the underclass problem. Those poor bastards who get the worst of any societal system from Feudalism to Capitalism to Nordic Social Democracy.
Whenever I see American underclass issues bubble to an overflowing boil, from my removed location I see class. I see people growing up in a sector of society with certain norms and expectations. Their part of the economy and the society is mostly defined by class. The encouragement of outliers breaking out of this fate is admirable, but it does not change the realities of class. As people, we continue societies that we are born into for the most part. We also break out and rebel and redefine paradigms. But, classes are sticky. People follow the paths laid out for them from birth.
TLDR: Americans, get over your socialism allergy. Read Marx & Trotsky. Read it in context. Pay attention to the parts about classes in society and their role in history. Discard the bad parts, but read it first before you determine which parts are good and which are bad.
Don't attribute the gentleness of European customs to Marxism. Explicitly Marxist countries had the highest incarceration rates in history, because incarceration was used for class warfare with no pretense of "punishing" people for "crimes". I grew up in one of those countries, and I want to weep every time I see a Westerner advising someone to read Marx and Trotsky.
Marxism had a broad impact beyond "explicitly Marxist countries", and all of the latter were actually explicitly Leninist, which, despite claiming continuity with Marx, rejected core elements of Marx's theory of the necessary conditions for socialism and substituted them with top-down paternalistic vanguardism. (This was a general theme, even before Lenin, in Russian "Marxism" -- and certainly includes Trotsky, though.)
Let's not overcomplicate things. Marx believed in class struggle and had a favored side in that struggle. That's quite enough. If a government believes in class struggle and has a favored side, it's obvious that atrocities will follow. Same as with a government that believes in a master race.
> Yeah, that sounds exactly like the hedging that I've heard, "no true Marxism".
There are lots of things that draw on some parts of Marxism, but, in fact, there's no pure Marxism that's been implemented (not that I think there should be such a thing, either, but there hasn't, in fact.) The main Marxist-influenced things that have been influenced are:
1) Systems deriving, through Leninism, from the both Marxism and what's often called "Russian Marxism" (which, while influenced by actual Marxism, didn't so much follow it as arise roughly contemporaneously and interact with Marxism), which reject Marx's preconditions in favor of vanguardism and are implemented in societies which don't meet Marx's preconditions -- that is, Soviet Communism and its Maoist, etc., descendants
2) Systems which build from Marx's preconditions in societies which meet them, and apply large portions of the program Marx and Engels lay out in the Communist Manifesto (but omit other key portions of it), which -- because they are implemented in democratic societies where there is no absolute conformity among the decision-making parties -- are full of compromises, lack a strong coherent ideological commitment either in terms of goals or mechanisms (even if part of the society is explicitly Marxist), and which retain the broad outline of the capitalism (though the resulting system is very different from the thing 19th Century socialists branded "capitalism" because of the elements of socialism, including elements specifically drawn from Marxism, implemented) -- that is, the mixed economies of the modern West.
Neither of these is purely Marxist. The former pays more lip service to Marxism. The latter likes to call the former "Marxism" and distinguish itself as the opposition to Marxism, but actually more closely follows Marx's model than the former.
> Marx believed in class struggle and had a favored side in that struggle. That's quite enough.
That's a rather cartoonish description which has no utility beyond "rah! rah!" cheerleading for the not-Marxist team in a dualistic worldview that, like the more extreme interpretations of Marxism (as seen in "Marxist criticism", and very much akin to extreme "feminist criticism") sees all the world divided between two warring camps but, instead of social class, views them as polar Marxist and not-Marxist ideologies.
Every government picks a side in the class struggle. Saudi America and the USA pick the rich to various degrees. Denmark chooses the lower middle class. Comparing the two it seems like choosing the rich causes far more atrocities their just less visible.
Unemployed to long, well sorry we no longer count you. Had your stuff stolen at a homeless shelter well sorry we don't count you. Got picked up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, well feel free to tell that to the jury. Spending a year in prison awaiting trial, sorry your right to a speedy trial ends well before your actual trial. Prison rape? Sorry just another deterrent. Great you got out after a mere 10 years, best of luck finding a job!
PS: Atrocity's are on an absolute scale. Just because country your not as evil as the Khmer Rouge does not make everything ok.
>Spending a year in prison awaiting trial, sorry your right to a speedy trial ends well before your actual trial.
...Can you point me in the direction of these abuses? I was under the impression that most defendants usually declined the speedy trial option. I'd be interested to learn more.
"In one murder case, for example, a federal appeals court upheld the finding that a 16-month delay between arrest and trial didn’t violate the speedy-trial right. (Amos v. Thornton, 646 F.3d 199 (5th Cir. 2011).) The court in that case observed that the delay between accusation and trial becomes “presumptively prejudicial” near the one-year mark. It found no compelling reasons for the delay and noted that the defendant promptly asserted his speedy-trial right while the proceedings were pending. But the defendant couldn’t show that the delay compromised his defense, and that inability doomed his claim." http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/the-right-speedy-tria...
Some states have a 6 month test for non Murder cases. Generally up to 1 year is considered reasonable in the US with a fairly large number of people waiting longer than that.
> Comparing the two it seems like choosing the rich causes far more atrocities their just less visible.
> US examples: Unemployed to long, well sorry we no longer count you. Had your stuff stolen at a homeless shelter well sorry we don't count you. Spending a year in prison awaiting trial, sorry your right to a speedy trial ends well before your actual trial.
These are your examples of atrocities which are supposed to be comparable to those in communist countries? Seriously?
Note, I specifically chose two liberal, wealthy, and modern governments and your counter argument relies on several countries that where both poor and for the most part no longer exist. If you want to compare the darker parts of history then let's look at the genocide of the American Indian, hundreds of years of brutal slavery, frequent overthrow of governments in south America and the middle east, use of biological, chemical and nuclear warfare, firebombing civilian populations, etc etc. However, as most of that took place in a vastly different economic and cultural environment it's irrelevant.
But more to the point. This was an attempt to follow just one person as they fall though the cracks not highlights of the worst things America has ever done. We systematically destroy people's lives in ways that will get ignored by history simply because there are no mass graves.
"Seriously?" was not my argument. My argument was that there have been far worse atrocities in communist countries than the problems described in the US. I didn't really think I needed to be specific, because it's common knowledge... but if you insist, here's your history lesson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...
It does not necessarily follow that commnist/marxist ideology on its own was the cause of the atrocities. In fact, i'd say there's a good argument that they were ultimately caused by ignorant power-seekers misapplying the ideology for their own benefit.
That doesn't matter. I don't think Objectivism is true. But, I do think it's an interesting and enlightening perspective, a lens through which some things can be better understood. I think trying to actually apply it as the political basis of a country would be a terrible idea.
The bottom line is that class and class dynamics are real i societies. Avoiding that lens entirely is avoiding reality, to an extent.
High income engineers are members of a certain a class. Most of the prison population are members of a different class. This is obviously true.
All I am saying is that when you look at something like the role of prison, you should probably look at it from that perspective.
It's not just about class here in America, but also about racism. A poor black or Latino person is "way below" in treatment by society than a white person of similar economic means, though they might be in the same economic "class". They're unlikely to mingle and thus form reform movements either. Politicians like it this way and even the few that may not take advantage of these racial divisions to push policies that hurt the poor in general and the non-white in particular. While the US could certainly fare better with more socialist policies for public warfare, they are generally not enacted because politicians and their constituents absolutely hate to see help going to non-whites. Things haven't changed that much in the last half-century.
Also, expecting Americans to read or admit they're wrong or uninformed, while a noble idea, is an idealistic idea that ignores the basic facts that most Americans don't read, prefer ignorance, and hate to admit they're wrong even when provided with incontrovertible evidence.
Are there any resources to help alleviate this problem? A very close associate of mine has just been put away for a white collar offense to a private prison black hole, and I hope that noone has to suffer like he has
That said, this article makes a large number of controversial claims that it fails to support on anything other than a rhetorical level, including:
* The moral crisis in prisons is so severe that effectively any social burden should be borne for it to be fixed.
* In time, the increased public money from eliminating prisons will turn violent felons into peaceful individuals.
* The differences between the US and UK's social situations is a function of our prisons.
Ultimately, this article's vigor outweighs its coherence; it seems to oscillate between making ontological claims and moral claims, between libertarian claims and authoritarian claims (note the advocacy for more CCTV).