The best thing about the Hell Site is that prominent media people post passionate missives that can be undercut with 3 seconds of Googling. Actually this is a very bad thing, because prominent media people are constitutionally allergic to admitting they’re wrong. It’s like quality no. 1 in a pundit, especially the online kind who rule over their realm of not very smart fans without a major newsroom to catch inaccuracies.
Here comes old man Cenk Uyger, shaking his fists at ne’er-do-well prison abolitionists who want to free every violent felon and blow up prisons with dynamite.
Where do prison abolitionists propose we put serious, violent criminals? If you're going to do something as extreme as abolishing prisons (which you're not because not one voter agrees with you), surely you have an alternative where they're not allowed to roam the streets, right?
Don't tell me how bad prisons are. That's the most obvious thing in the world. I've fought for 20 years to fix our insane prison system. Tell me what a realistic alternative is. If you say, "put them in a room with their victims to talk it out," you're nuts.
Actually, I was thinking that once we dynamite the prisons, violent felons can be rehabilitated with art therapy. Fingers crossed!
In the early 1970s, serious scholars and legal professionals embraced prison abolition. Here’s a federal judge writing in 1972:
I am persuaded that the institution of prison probably must end. In many respects it is as intolerable within the United States as was the institution of slavery, equally brutalizing to all involved, equally toxic to the social system, equally subversive of the brotherhood of man, even more costly by some standards, and probably less rational.
It’s such a reach to conclude that “prison abolition” means there would literally be no mechanism for keeping murderers and rapists out of the general population until they’ve been rehabilitated.
Let’s look at Halden Prison in Norway. In 2015, the New York Times featured the prison, which is designed to ease re-entry into society.
To anyone familiar with the American correctional system, Halden seems alien. Its modern, cheerful and well-appointed facilities, the relative freedom of movement it offers, its quiet and peaceful atmosphere — these qualities are so out of sync with the forms of imprisonment found in the United States that you could be forgiven for doubting whether Halden is a prison at all. It is, of course, but it is also something more: the physical expression of an entire national philosophy about the relative merits of punishment and forgiveness.
How do they do this?
The treatment of inmates at Halden is wholly focused on helping to prepare them for a life after they get out. Not only is there no death penalty in Norway; there are no life sentences. The maximum sentence for most crimes is 21 years — even for Anders Behring Breivik, who is responsible for probably the deadliest recorded rampage in the world, in which he killed 77 people and injured hundreds more in 2011 by detonating a bomb at a government building in Oslo and then opening fire at a nearby summer camp. Because Breivik was sentenced to “preventive detention,” however, his term can be extended indefinitely for five years at a time, if he is deemed a continuing threat to society by the court. “Better out than in” is an unofficial motto of the Norwegian Correctional Service, which makes a reintegration guarantee to all released inmates. It works with other government agencies to secure a home, a job and access to a supportive social network for each inmate before release; Norway’s social safety net also provides health care, education and a pension to all citizens. With one of the highest per capita gross domestic products of any country in the world, thanks to the profits from oil production in the North Sea, Norway is in a good position to provide all of this, and spending on the Halden prison runs to more than $93,000 per inmate per year, compared with just $31,000 for prisoners in the United States, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization.
If you were to describe how America treats people who get entangled in the criminal system, you literally just replace every verb with its opposite, like a fucked up mad libs. It [doesn’t] work with other government agencies to secure a home, a job and access to a supportive social network for each inmate before release; [America’s] social safety net also [doesn’t] provide health care, education and a pension to all citizens.
Anyway, obviously, America, in its infinite commitment to freedom, has both the death penalty and life without parole. But most sentences are far less than that. The average prison sentence in the US is 12.5 years.
That means regardless of the “toughness” of DAs and other lawmakers, even “the worst of the worst,” whatever that means, will be out in the community at some point. Instead of doing what Norway does, which is treat inmates with humanity, so that they can reenter humanity upon release, we go out of our way to traumatize people behind bars, with disgusting conditions, violence, solitary, sexual assault. Then, when they get out, we drive the point home that they are not fully human by depriving them of the right to vote, education, purposeful work.
When you think about it, the U.S. prison system is closer to the gulag system introduced by the Soviets than the criminal system of Norway. Beyond the forced unpaid labor, there’s the fact that these institutions existed to break people down, physically and mentally.
Well, joke is on the rest of us. While many people go on to live healthy, crime-free lives after prison, there are some who are so broken by the system, they lash out and reoffend.
The suspect in Eliza Fletcher’s murder got a 24 year sentence when he was 16. What if he’d been allowed to finish high school instead of go to prison for two decades?
Perhaps meaningful progress would be made if we first answered the question, what is the purpose of prison? Is it rehabilitation? Is it meant as punishment? Perhaps it's a combination of both? What should it resemble if done correctly? Who is responsible for answering these questions? Institutions relentlessly face the dilemma of ambiguity as societies evolve, what is their teleological principle (oftentimes forgotten), and should it evolve alongside society? A dangerous question with high stakes, since evolution means a possible error in grafting with the environment and therefore death, but stagnation also means the possibility of environmental change without appropriate evolutionary response and therefore death.
Some of this is a naming problem. "Prison abolition" doesn't imply any alternative. I guess "Prison reform" is too loaded? Too overused? Not as catchy? This is why I'm not in marketing.