Reforms create social energy for broader abolitionist movements – alt alone fails.

Meanwhile, the Left is divided over how to imagine and advocate for our goals. Prison abolitionism has gathered steam among some activists, although it shows little sign of winning over the wider public. With evangelical zeal, abolitionists insist that we must choose between abolition and reform, while discounting reform as a viable option. The history of the prison system, they say, is a history of reform — and look where that has gotten us. I have tried to show here what’s wrong with this argument. Iit is remarkably innocent of history. In fact, the history of reform was interrupted some time around 1973 and what we have had instead for the past five decades is a history of counter-reform. The unconscionable conditions we see today are not inevitable byproducts of the prison; they are the results of the punitive turn. Abolitionists base their approach on an analogy between the prison system and chattel slavery. This is a strained analogy at best, and it only appears convincing in light of the oversized and unusually cruel American penal system. Slavery was an institution for the extraction of unfree labor over a person’s (and his or her children’s) lifetime; the prison is an institution that imposes unfreedom for a set period of time as punishment for serious infractions — historically with the express bargain that at least theoretically the lawbreaker was to be improved and reintegrated into society. The better analogy might be with other disciplinary institutions, which also to varying degrees curb freedoms in the name of personal and social good: the school, the hospital, the psychiatric institution. Abolitionists usually respond to the obvious criticism — “but every country has prisons” — by citing Angela Davis’s polemical work, Are Prisons Obsolete? Slavery, too, was once universal, they point out; it required the abolitionists’ utopian vision to put an end to that unjust institution. But this, too, misstates history. By the time American abolitionism got fully underway in the 1830s, much of Europe and parts of Latin American had already partially or wholly abolished slavery. The Haitian Revolution had dealt the institution a major blow, and slavery was imploding in parts of the Caribbean. A world without slavery was scarcely unthinkable. The same cannot be said of prisons: all signs suggest that the public — and not only in the United States — believes that prisons are legitimate. Abolitionist arguments usually gesture at restorative justice, imagining that some sorts of community institutions will oversee non-penal forms of restitution. But here, we are very far out on a limb. Such models might more or less work in small-scale, face-to-face indigenous or religious communities. But, in modern cities, it is implausible to think that families, kinship networks, neighborhood organizations, and the like can adjudicate reconciliation in a fair, consistent manner. In short, abolitionism promises a heaven-on-earth that will never come to pass. What we really need to do is fight for measures that have already proven humane, effective, and consistent with social and criminal justice. Consider Finland. In the 1950s, it had high crime rates and a punitive penal system with high incarceration rates and terrible prison conditions. In these regards Finland then was much like the United States today. After decades of humanitarian and social-democratic reforms, the country now has less than one-tenth the rate of incarceration as the United States. Its prisons resemble dormitories with high-quality health care, counseling services, and educational opportunities. Not coincidentally, its prison system does not breed anger, resentment, and recidivism. Finland’s system aligns with that of other Nordic and Northern European nations, all of whom remained continuously on the path of reform. There, small-scale penal institutions are insulated from public opinion, with its periodic rages against lawbreakers, and prioritize genuine criminological expertise. They have expressly rehabilitative aims, working not only to punish but also to repair the person and restore him to society. Penalties top out at around twenty years, consistent with the finding that longer sentences have neither a rehabilitative nor a deterring effect. Many Scandinavian prisons have no walls and allow prisoners to leave during the day for jobs or shopping. Bedrooms have windows, not bars. Kitchens and common areas resemble Ikea displays. Rather than call for the complete abolition of prisons — a policy unlikely to win broad public support — the American left should fight to introduce these conditions into our penal system. We should strive not for pie-in-the-sky imaginings but for working models already achieved in Scandinavian and other social democracies. We should demand dramatically better prison conditions, the release of nonviolent first offenders under other forms of supervision, discretionary parole for violent offenders who provide evidence of rehabilitation, decriminalization of simple drug possession, and a broad revision of sentencing laws. Such demands would attract support from a number of prominent social movements, creating a strong base from which we can begin to build a stronger, universal safety net. Institutions become “obsolete” only when more effective and more progressive alternatives become available. The poorhouse disappeared when its functions were replaced by social security, public assistance, health care clinics, and mental and psychiatric hospitals. We see no such emergent institutions on the horizon today that might render prisons a thing of the past. What we see instead are examples of criminal justice systems that have continued reforming, modulating, humanizing, shrinking, and decentralizing the functions of the prison. Creating just such a correctional system, based on genuinely rehabilitative goals consistent with our view of social justice, should be a main task of socialists today.