It's an interesting take, and well worth the long read. Gilmore's thesis, beyond the central idea that incarceration of human beings is a moral wrong, is a kind of epidemiology of prison...
It's an interesting take, and well worth the long read. Gilmore's thesis, beyond the central idea that incarceration of human beings is a moral wrong, is a kind of epidemiology of prison populations. She questions much of the current rhetoric about who is imprisoned and why, with a rigorous attention to understanding the problems of violence and justice, as much as the problem of prison.
The children were primarily Latino, many of them the sons and daughters of farmworkers or other people in the agriculture industry. They ranged in age, but most were middle schoolers: old enough to have strong opinions and to distrust adults. They were frowning at her with their shoulders up and their arms crossed. She didn’t know these kids, but she understood that they were against her.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“We hear you’re a prison abolitionist,” one said. “You want to close prisons?”
Gilmore said that was right; she did want to close prisons.
But why, they asked. And before she could answer, one said, “But what about the people who do something seriously wrong?” Others chimed in. “What about people who hurt other people?” “What about if someone kills someone?”
Whether from tiny farm towns or from public housing around Fresno and Bakersfield, these children, it was obvious to Gilmore, understood innately the harshness of the world and were not going to be easily persuaded.
“I get where you’re coming from,” she said. “But how about this: Instead of asking whether anyone should be locked up or go free, why don’t we think about why we solve problems by repeating the kind of behavior that brought us the problem in the first place?” She was asking them to consider why, as a society, we would choose to model cruelty and vengeance.
Prison abolition, as a movement, sounds provocative and absolute, but what it is as a practice requires subtler understanding. For Gilmore, who has been active in the movement for more than 30 years, it’s both a long-term goal and a practical policy program, calling for government investment in jobs, education, housing, health care — all the elements that are required for a productive and violence-free life. Abolition means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of vital systems of support that many communities lack. Instead of asking how, in a future without prisons, we will deal with so-called violent people, abolitionists ask how we resolve inequalities and get people the resources they need long before the hypothetical moment when, as Gilmore puts it, they “mess up.”
There needs to be more of this type of attitude within the prison system, however I think there will be more resistance than support if people use this mentality to abolish prisons rather than...
There needs to be more of this type of attitude within the prison system, however I think there will be more resistance than support if people use this mentality to abolish prisons rather than state their goal as decreasing the prison population. Tell me the society around the world that was successful without some sort of incarceration for wrongdoing, abolishing is an extreme viewpoint with little evidence to support it. But reducing the prison population by providing more quality social services to at risk families, differentiating between violent and nonviolent crimes, treating addiction and disabilities in appropriate facilities with appropriate funding, yes- we need that.
I don't think no matter how much we improve society that it can preempt all crime, that sounds just as scary as prisons. And sometimes people will not be appropriate for independent living because of their willingness to seriously harm the lives of others. But defining their sentence clearly and helping prison guards understand their role as protectors of safety rather then punishers of wrongdoers would go a long way. What we have now is violent for inmates and guards alike. Stay tuned with preet had a great episode on this with Steve Martin, the prison reformer.
Thanks for the link - that's a great interview. But it doesn't take the step of saying that indefinite imprisonment and separation of prisoners from society is intrinsically ineffective and...
Thanks for the link - that's a great interview. But it doesn't take the step of saying that indefinite imprisonment and separation of prisoners from society is intrinsically ineffective and immoral. While Gilmore concedes that no society has entirely eliminated segregation of the violent, the success of other models, e.g. Norway's prison system, indicates just how wrong the U.S. approach is.
I only added the link because it relates. I'm not trying to make this a Gilmore vs Martin thing or even saying I agree completely with Martin. I agree with you that the US system is terrible and...
I only added the link because it relates. I'm not trying to make this a Gilmore vs Martin thing or even saying I agree completely with Martin. I agree with you that the US system is terrible and that using a restorative justice model would be better.
I'm also saying in a country where we can't eliminate the death penalty that choosing our battles on how to improve prisons and not using phrases like "prison abolitionist" would be beneficial to winning more people to the cause.
It's a long journey, and not likely to be done in my lifetime. I agree that it's worth picking fights, particularly abolition of the death penalty, but that's a tiny fraction of the people who are...
It's a long journey, and not likely to be done in my lifetime. I agree that it's worth picking fights, particularly abolition of the death penalty, but that's a tiny fraction of the people who are being abused and dehumanized. As Gilmore noted, even drug decriminalization and earlier release of "non-violent" offenders won't dent the incarcerated population much.
I'm not sure Gilmore's strategy of blocking new prison construction is sensible or humane in places that already have dire overcrowding problems. I'd like to see a lot more effort on prevention of the conditions that lead to violence, with social interventions from pregnancy to adulthood.
Decriminalization of drugs alone would more or less remove 1/5th of the current prison population. I would call that a dent. This would help ease the need of new prison construction and ideally...
Decriminalization of drugs alone would more or less remove 1/5th of the current prison population. I would call that a dent. This would help ease the need of new prison construction and ideally there could be some repurposed to try more restorative justice models.
Based on recidivist rates would determine which model is most effective and more prisons could begin adopting evidence based practices. These prisons would also have lower rates of violence and higher quality of working conditions for guards. Therefore guards would want to work in these new prisons over older more punitive models. But the catch would be that there would be a higher quality of training and behavior expected by the guards in these prisons vs. what's available now.
In this way being a guard would slowly stop feeling like a prison sentence itself and prisoners would not be treated equally for all crimes making the experience more correctional in nature, rather than just lip servicing the term. This would set a precedent for evidence based practices.
These comparisons should take it to account the populations they are destined at. Norway tops the HDI Quality of Human Development list where US is #13; and the Socioeconomic Sustainability list,...
These comparisons should take it to account the populations they are destined at. Norway tops the HDI Quality of Human Development list where US is #13; and the Socioeconomic Sustainability list, where US is again #13. #13 is not low, but Norway is still a great outlier. It has a population of 5.3 million, roughly 1.6% of that of US' 328 million. Norway is the current epitome of a social democracy, whereas US is a free-for-all capitalist federation which recently elected a racist populist as their president and placed a rapist in their Supreme Court. I'm of the opinion that huge populations are always more prone to these problems that feed into general inequalities and social problems which lead to more crimes which neccesitate judicial systems more different than smaller states; also the problems themselves feed back into the production and implementation of such systems in the first place.
Each country has their own kinds of crimes. The school attacks characteristic of the US are almost unheard of here in Turkey, albeit we're #64 on the listings I linked above. We have a growing epidemic of domestic violence, sexual violence and violence against women. The justice system needs to cater to these variables.
China (1.4B pop), India (1.3B pop), Indonesia (264M pop), Japan (127M pop), Vietnam (95.4M pop), Germany (83M pop), the UK (66M pop), France (67M pop), South Korea (51M pop), and many other large...
I'm of the opinion that huge populations are always more prone to these problems that feed into general inequalities and social problems which lead to more crimes which neccesitate judicial systems more different than smaller states;
China (1.4B pop), India (1.3B pop), Indonesia (264M pop), Japan (127M pop), Vietnam (95.4M pop), Germany (83M pop), the UK (66M pop), France (67M pop), South Korea (51M pop), and many other large population countries don't have high crime or mass incarceration issues. The US is virtually alone in having those problems on such a scale, although Brazil and Russia are close, Turkey is up there in terms of crime, and Thailand is up there in terms of incarceration.
I want to highlight that this is a speculation I made, so I won't defend it further. I may well be misinformed. But I'll also highlight the actual point I was trying to make: different countries...
I want to highlight that this is a speculation I made, so I won't defend it further. I may well be misinformed.
But I'll also highlight the actual point I was trying to make: different countries have differing profiles of crime, regardless of the amount thereof (e.g. Turkey probably has more crime than the US, especially individual, but different kinds of crime are more "popular"), and penal codes need to cater to that. Norway is generally an outlier in all respects that a country can be considered, so while it can be a goalpost, it can't be a good model for what can be done now, for most countries.
It's an interesting take, and well worth the long read. Gilmore's thesis, beyond the central idea that incarceration of human beings is a moral wrong, is a kind of epidemiology of prison populations. She questions much of the current rhetoric about who is imprisoned and why, with a rigorous attention to understanding the problems of violence and justice, as much as the problem of prison.
There needs to be more of this type of attitude within the prison system, however I think there will be more resistance than support if people use this mentality to abolish prisons rather than state their goal as decreasing the prison population. Tell me the society around the world that was successful without some sort of incarceration for wrongdoing, abolishing is an extreme viewpoint with little evidence to support it. But reducing the prison population by providing more quality social services to at risk families, differentiating between violent and nonviolent crimes, treating addiction and disabilities in appropriate facilities with appropriate funding, yes- we need that.
I don't think no matter how much we improve society that it can preempt all crime, that sounds just as scary as prisons. And sometimes people will not be appropriate for independent living because of their willingness to seriously harm the lives of others. But defining their sentence clearly and helping prison guards understand their role as protectors of safety rather then punishers of wrongdoers would go a long way. What we have now is violent for inmates and guards alike. Stay tuned with preet had a great episode on this with Steve Martin, the prison reformer.
Thanks for the link - that's a great interview. But it doesn't take the step of saying that indefinite imprisonment and separation of prisoners from society is intrinsically ineffective and immoral. While Gilmore concedes that no society has entirely eliminated segregation of the violent, the success of other models, e.g. Norway's prison system, indicates just how wrong the U.S. approach is.
I only added the link because it relates. I'm not trying to make this a Gilmore vs Martin thing or even saying I agree completely with Martin. I agree with you that the US system is terrible and that using a restorative justice model would be better.
I'm also saying in a country where we can't eliminate the death penalty that choosing our battles on how to improve prisons and not using phrases like "prison abolitionist" would be beneficial to winning more people to the cause.
It's a long journey, and not likely to be done in my lifetime. I agree that it's worth picking fights, particularly abolition of the death penalty, but that's a tiny fraction of the people who are being abused and dehumanized. As Gilmore noted, even drug decriminalization and earlier release of "non-violent" offenders won't dent the incarcerated population much.
I'm not sure Gilmore's strategy of blocking new prison construction is sensible or humane in places that already have dire overcrowding problems. I'd like to see a lot more effort on prevention of the conditions that lead to violence, with social interventions from pregnancy to adulthood.
Decriminalization of drugs alone would more or less remove 1/5th of the current prison population. I would call that a dent. This would help ease the need of new prison construction and ideally there could be some repurposed to try more restorative justice models.
Based on recidivist rates would determine which model is most effective and more prisons could begin adopting evidence based practices. These prisons would also have lower rates of violence and higher quality of working conditions for guards. Therefore guards would want to work in these new prisons over older more punitive models. But the catch would be that there would be a higher quality of training and behavior expected by the guards in these prisons vs. what's available now.
In this way being a guard would slowly stop feeling like a prison sentence itself and prisoners would not be treated equally for all crimes making the experience more correctional in nature, rather than just lip servicing the term. This would set a precedent for evidence based practices.
These comparisons should take it to account the populations they are destined at. Norway tops the HDI Quality of Human Development list where US is #13; and the Socioeconomic Sustainability list, where US is again #13. #13 is not low, but Norway is still a great outlier. It has a population of 5.3 million, roughly 1.6% of that of US' 328 million. Norway is the current epitome of a social democracy, whereas US is a free-for-all capitalist federation which recently elected a racist populist as their president and placed a rapist in their Supreme Court. I'm of the opinion that huge populations are always more prone to these problems that feed into general inequalities and social problems which lead to more crimes which neccesitate judicial systems more different than smaller states; also the problems themselves feed back into the production and implementation of such systems in the first place.
Each country has their own kinds of crimes. The school attacks characteristic of the US are almost unheard of here in Turkey, albeit we're #64 on the listings I linked above. We have a growing epidemic of domestic violence, sexual violence and violence against women. The justice system needs to cater to these variables.
China (1.4B pop), India (1.3B pop), Indonesia (264M pop), Japan (127M pop), Vietnam (95.4M pop), Germany (83M pop), the UK (66M pop), France (67M pop), South Korea (51M pop), and many other large population countries don't have high crime or mass incarceration issues. The US is virtually alone in having those problems on such a scale, although Brazil and Russia are close, Turkey is up there in terms of crime, and Thailand is up there in terms of incarceration.
I want to highlight that this is a speculation I made, so I won't defend it further. I may well be misinformed.
But I'll also highlight the actual point I was trying to make: different countries have differing profiles of crime, regardless of the amount thereof (e.g. Turkey probably has more crime than the US, especially individual, but different kinds of crime are more "popular"), and penal codes need to cater to that. Norway is generally an outlier in all respects that a country can be considered, so while it can be a goalpost, it can't be a good model for what can be done now, for most countries.