It’s no secret that the criminal justice system in America needs fixing—everyone from Jared Kushner to Cory Booker agrees. And while the
Koch brothers might not go so far as Elizabeth Warren to outright label it “
racist … front to back,” politically speaking, this is one rare issue that seems increasingly bipartisan. Just last week, President Donald Trump held a roundtable with governors, state attorneys general and other officials on the topic of prison reform, and the administration is
reportedly working behind the scenes with congressional leaders to pass sweeping legislation that could touch everything from sentencing reform to helping former inmates get jobs.
It’s an admirable effort to bring together a traditionally tough-on-crime Republican Party with a Democratic Party whose criminal justice platform has in recent years, according to
the Marshall Project, grown to more and more reflect the “fingerprints of the Black Lives Matter movement and Bernie Sanders.”
But for some leftist activists, prison reform is not enough and, in some cases, may even be counterproductive. For these activists, the word “abolish” that has been trending lately with reference to immigration enforcement and the death penalty is a nod to a more ambitious movement that has been building for decades and for which getting rid of ICE would be only the beginning of a far more radical set of changes.
That is the movement to abolish prisons—and more broadly, the entire penal and policing system—in America. Proponents envision a future society in which, rather than having better carceral conditions than we have today, there exist literally no prisons at all.
At first blush, the idea might seem fringe and unreasonable; where, for instance, would all the criminals go? What happens to rapists and murderers? But the movement’s backers counter that it is the only truly humane direction we can head in as a society—that is, if we really aspire to live in a world rid of interpersonal harm and racial inequality. And they might actually be making headway.
I spoke with several advocates for prison abolition—or “abolitionists,” as most simply refer to themselves—and they’re not just
old Marxist philosophers or
Norwegian criminologists but rather a group of young, mostly black lawyers, academics, artists, authors and community organizers. Some have had, or still have, close family members incarcerated; others were incarcerated themselves. They certainly don’t all have the same backgrounds or life experiences, but they’re each resolute about one thing: The criminal justice system as we know it is inherently cruel, perpetuates systemic racism, and must be overhauled completely.
“It's not necessarily about tearing down the prison walls tomorrow,” says Maya Schenwar, who wrote
Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better. “Maybe we’d be better off than we are right now if we did that,” she adds, “but it’s not going to happen.”
‘Abolish Prisons’ Is the New ‘Abolish ICE’
