
Is Prison Necessary? - charlescearl
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html
======
jillesvangurp
Dutch prisons are currently leasing space to Belgium because of low occupancy
rates. This low occupancy is the result of various policies to cut costs.
Prisons are not cheap so cutting sentences a bit and using alternative
punishments for lighter offenses helps keep cost down. People still get caught
doing stuff they are not supposed to. Locking them up is one of the
punishments and it's used if needed. But it is used in moderation.
Occasionally this is unpopular when high profile criminals end up back on the
streets a bit sooner than people would like. Particularly when it involves
e.g. sex offenders. But mostly this works out fine. This has not resulted in a
massive crime wave and most people in prison are neither sex offenders nor
psychopathic murderers.

The US is a great example of how prisons don't help prevent crime. It has the
largest prison population per capita in the world and crime and murder rates
to sustain that (i.e. notably much higher than other countries and also much
more violent). Locking up people in the US apparently does not seem to lower
crime rates. If anything, prisons actually help perpetuate this problem. The
people who come out of them are likely to end up coming back. That's why it is
important to keep young offenders out of prisons. Locking them up all but
guarantees they come back for more. Locking them up for really minor offenses
is simply counter productive and just locks them into a life of crime.

Part of the problem in the US is of course that prisons are big business. Big
as in trading on Wall Street. E.g. CoreCivic is worth about 2.5B $:
[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CXW/](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CXW/)

I used to regard movies from the eighties like Robocop as pure satire but you
have to admit that this company, it's name, and it's sameless corporatism and
hollow marketing makes it look like OCP quite a bit. Straight from their
website: "CoreCivic's effective, high-quality reentry programs are at the
center of our mission to reduce recidivism and help better the public good.".
Yeah, right. Comes with a photo of a friendly smiling prisoner (black,
naturally).

~~~
wahern
> Part of the problem in the US is of course that prisons are big business.

This is directly debunked in the article: "By now it has become almost
conventional wisdom to think that private prisons are the 'real' problem with
mass incarceration. But anyone seriously engaged with the subject knows that
this is not the case. Even a cursory glance at numbers proves it: Ninety-two
percent of people locked inside American prisons are held in publicly run,
publicly funded facilities, and 99 percent of those in jail are in public
jails."

~~~
jillesvangurp
We're still talking about well over a 120K individuals:
[https://www.criminaljusticeprograms.com/articles/private-
pri...](https://www.criminaljusticeprograms.com/articles/private-prisons-vs-
public-prisons/)

For reference, I believe Germany has a prison population of about 75K (on a
population of 80M).

Those publicly funded prisons provide plenty of cheap labor to corporations
and they make use of contractors and suppliers. We're not talking about civil
servants here. The bottom line is that there plenty of corporate interests in
perpetuating the status quo.

This system indeed sucks up a lot of public funding as well. That's kind of
the point: tax payers are funding this and corporations cream off the profits
through contracting, prison labor, or indeed privately run prisons. Some of
these are multi billion dollar companies even.

------
Fjolsvith
A sad but true story:

I spent about 6 years in federal prison, and at my last prison location, I
made a really good friend, Jeff. He could play guitar as good as Slash (he ran
the prison music room), he was funny, and could run a D&D game like the best
DM's out there. I knew him about 19 months before I release d to the halfway
house. He was supposed to release about a year after me.

He had gone into the Army when he was 18. Because he could play the guitar, he
got into a band unit, and they would march in parades and such. He molested
his first victim for which he was caught while in the Army, and they gave him
a hard 20 (20 years with no parole or probation). They also never ordered him
into sex offender treatment. He spent most of his prison time in the military
brig, but was eventually transferred into the Federal Prison system for being
a troublemaker (brewing alcohol, getting drunk and fighting). That's how I met
him.

I always wanted to be his friend after we got out of prison. I never expected
him to re-offend, after knowing him pretty closely for a year and a half. When
I asked my Supervision Officer if I could write to him while he was still in
prison, I was ordered to not have any contact with any former prison
acquaintances while on probation. I though, "Okay, I'll just wait until I
finish my probation. No problem."

A few years after my release, I thought I would at least check up on him
without contacting him. When I found out what he had done after he got out of
prison, it was like I had been punched in the gut. I was in a state of numb
disbelief for days.

Here are a couple of articles about Jeff:

[https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-
courts/police-...](https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-
courts/police-missing--year-old-girl-from-poplar-bluff-
mo/article_7862c855-eb03-5833-b3fa-f5748dde0173.html)

[https://www.kfvs12.com/story/19996812/jeffrey-dean-
shelton-f...](https://www.kfvs12.com/story/19996812/jeffrey-dean-shelton-faes-
additional-kidnapping-charges/)

[https://www.courthousenews.com/child-molester-
gets-120-years...](https://www.courthousenews.com/child-molester-
gets-120-years/)

Prison is the best place for him.

~~~
Faaak
If he would've been correctly re-integrated, this would've maybe never
happened.

This proves it: all this prison time alone, without good programs in place,
was just "vengeance" and it didn't work.

~~~
_pmf_
Homosexual conversion therapy does not work, but pedophilia conversion therapy
magically works?

~~~
ramblerman
If we follow your analogy, that these 2 things are similar. Then we should
also accept the premise that pedophiles are probably born that way.

Which would make identifying them, before they commit a crime, hugely
beneficial. Treating it as a disease, might lower the stigma, and allow these
people to self identify themselves.

~~~
adrianN
There actually are programs like that. I've seen posters saying something like
"Do you like children more than you like? Contact ..."

------
kstenerud
The article largely mirrors how European countries deal with crime: low
sentences and extensive re-integration programs.

The goal in Europe is integration and eliminating recidivism, whereas the goal
in America is vengeance and isolation. You won't see any progress until that
overarching goal changes.

~~~
nullwasamistake
IMO the biggest problem with American penal system is how crazy the
punishments are for non-violent crimes. Get caught smoking crack a few times?
You might be in prison for many years.

Another issue is how the government + private industry is allowed to punish
you for life even though you've supposedly "done your time". Employers can and
regularly do discriminate even for things that would have no affect on job
performance. Oh also housing and loans. You're basically pushed to the fringes
of society unless you manage to make it big with your own business.

Oh and if you commit a drug crime you're cut off from school financial aid for
life. And if you have any felony the army probably won't even take you. Have
fun trying to turn your life around when your own government slams the door.

I'm okay with long prison sentences for really nasty stuff like murder. Not
such a big deal if an ex-con steals some shit again, pretty bad if he goes
back to killing people.

------
chr1
The article doesn't propose any practical ways of reducing the number
prisoners. Simply letting everyone out and hoping for the best doesn't seem to
be a good plan.

One thing that could work for non-violent crimes, would be a bracelet that
records all conversations and all movements of wearer, making recidivism very
hard. Of course attempts to destroy the bracelet should be punished by real
prison terms.

------
Grustaf
Maybe it’s just me but I couldn’t find an actual argument. Unless it’s that
the murderer’s life is just as valuable so it’s bad to steal part of it from
him by putting him in prison. I don’t think anyone outside academia values the
lives of murderers very much, is there another argument in there somewhere?

~~~
wahern
Because Gilmore isn't trying to make an argument about specific approaches.
She's trying to change the narrative--the way to reduce violence in society is
to address the root causes of violence, not react to it after the fact as if
both violence and violent people are inevitable.

Does she actually believe that prison would never be necessary for anyone if
we could enact the ideal set of societal changes? It's not clear to me that
she actually believes that.[1] I'm particularly doubtful that she thinks we
can just turn loose existing violent offenders. If you read between the lines
what she seems to believe is that the abolition movement as she understands it
is more a _process_ than a goal, and it's largely prospective. Note that she's
quite critical of the motives of other reformists.

[1] In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if she thought both the question and the
answer irrelevant. We see an elephant in the room and she's saying, "there is
no elephant". That is, if you presuppose an elephant you're going to end up
creating one.

~~~
roca
> It's not clear to me that she actually believes that.

It's unfortunate that a long, in-depth, sympathetic article titled "Is Prison
Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind" didn't make it clear to
you whether Ruth Wilson Gilmore believes prison is necessary.

Personally I have taken prison abolitionists at their word, that they actually
do want to abolish prisons. I have long been genuinely curious how they would
handle serious crime in the complete absence of prisons. I expect this is the
first thing most people would want to know about their program. It's
surprising and disappointing that the article (and other articles I've read on
this subject) fails to answer that question.

~~~
wahern
Does anybody believe that perfect equality (of wealth, of opportunity, of
w'ever) is possible? Does that mean we as a society shouldn't bother
establishing equality as goal?

In a large election a single vote doesn't matter. And yet if we permitted that
fact to dissuade us from voting nobody would vote and democracy as we practice
it would be impossible.

I haven't read Gilmore's writings, and I'm basing my interpretations off the
article author's gloss--their selected quotations and elaborations--but
applying the rule of lenity and in light of some of her very cogent points
(that private prisons aren't a big problem, that the vast majority of
prisoners are in fact violent offenders) it would seem that she's applying the
same principles as Plato and MLK. Specifically, that society can only achieve
and will only reap that which it orders itself around.

Whether irrepressibly violent people will always exist is beside the point. If
we build a system directed toward the management of such people, then those
are the people we're going to get, above and beyond whatever genetically
predetermined base rate we might otherwise find in the population.

How does Gilmore translate her abolitionist position into specific policy
prescriptions? I don't know. Maybe they're contentious; maybe I'd disagree
with them altogether. But at least superficially I don't see abolitionism
particularly inconsistent. I doubt you feel compelled to demand that a Get Out
the Vote volunteer explain to you why voting matters, or demand that a "Why
Voting Matters" article provide a concrete proof for why it matters. It's more
intuitive that voting could only matter in so far as enough people have
internalized the notion that it matters and act accordingly. Americans, I
think, lack that intuition and suspension of disbelief when it comes to
violence and crime. Some things are self-fulfilling prophecies--if we believe
or don't believe, that's what we'll get. How societies manage to shift from
one set of expectations to the polar opposite... that's still something of a
mystery, but surely it involves being open to advocates like Gilmore.

~~~
Grustaf
I don’t follow your argument, are you saying that if we just “reorient” our
society away from violence by not using violence to punish criminals, they
will stop committing crimes?

Yes I agree we should strive for a society were fewer crimes are committed, ,
but I don’t see how that somehow implies that we should abolish prisons. We
only imprison people who actually commit crimes.

Besides, prisons have many uses, apart from curing the criminal. The first is
to stop blood feuds, if society does not punish crime then relatives of the
victim will, and this leads to never ending spirals of violence. Crime victims
generally are more concerned with justice than rehabilitation.

Another important reason is to keep criminals off the streets. No matter what
happens once they get out, we can be sure that the streets are safe from them
while they’re in prison. And since most violent criminals are young men, if we
put them away until their testosterone has calmed down about in their
thirties, they should be much safer to have around.

Then there’s of course the deterring effect of a potential prison sentence. I
for one believe that if crime goes unpunished then we’d see more of it, not
less.

I’m not saying that the american prison system isn’t terrible, but that is no
reason not to have prisons at all.

------
galfarragem
Prisons might not help prevent crime but surely help prevent retaliations.

Victims that support keeping their offenders out of jail might exist but I'm
not aware of such cases.

~~~
zacherates
Here's a statement from someone robbed at gunpoint doing exactly that (arguing
to keep the perpetrator out of prison):
[https://twitter.com/stainerson/status/1125956097997774850](https://twitter.com/stainerson/status/1125956097997774850)

