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In the course of history, punishment has played a central role ever since the emergence of proto-states, and the function of symbolic reprobation has been associated with certain forms of hard treatment. For a long time, public executions were the most conventional symbols of symbolic reprobation. Later on, the prison assumed this role. There is no natural law that can prevent coming changes. Other forms of social reaction to harmful behavior will become conventional expressions of symbolic reprobation in the future. Even if we suppose punishment to persist for a long time to come, one thing is certain: the prison has not been there forever, and it will not be there forever. It is but one form of punishment - and forms of punishment come and go.

== Beyond Prisons and Punishment ==

For most of human history societies did not know prisons - nor did they know punishment as a standard reaction to crime by the state and its legal authorities - and still they succeeded in the task of re-affirming the validity of the norm broken by the perpetrator. What today is called crime was seen as a rupture of the natural order and/or as a wrong done to another person, but not as a crimen laesae maiestatis, an insubordination to the will of the ruler. This is why the dominant mode of "criminal justice" in earlier ages was one that could do without punishment. Justice was procedural and restorative instead of punitive-retributive. To react to crimes was an art that required communicative skills and a profound knowledge of both the respective customs as well as the concerned individuals and families. Conflict regulation needed patience, and the continuous mobilization of good will on the part of all those who were somehow affected by the event. In the end - if everything went well - peace and security were restored, the boundaries of acceptable behaviour were re-affirmed (or slightly re-drawn), and all expressive functions normally attributed to punishment were fulfilled, but without resort to punishment. It is time to remember this almost forgotten fact and to move on to a form of society that is free at least from both capital and prison punishments, and - hopefully - at last also from punishment as such.

Even if we can get rid of prison-as punishment, by finding other forms of social reactions to crime, there would still remain a big question pertaining to the - maybe few - very dangerous criminals. Even if one raised the minimum age of criminal responsibility, found alternatives to prison for women offenders, and de-criminalized large parts of non-violent property offenses there would still be a number of crimes and criminals that would challenge any abolitionist imagination. Supposing the availability of non-custodial alternatives for most or all non-violent delinquents, there would still remain the question of how to deal with cases of extreme horror and/or dangerousness. Similarly to the well-known shanty song with its insistent repetition of the question "What shall we do with the drunken sailor", any abolitionist proposal will invariably be confronted with the same question pertaining to the dangerous few, and that would raise questions like these: What shall we do with the serial killer? What shall we do with the child molester? What shall we do with the roaming rapist? What shall we do wit the genocidical general? What shall we do with the ex-dictators?​ The question that is puzzling all participants in criminal justice reform discussions is therefore completely legitimate: Would societies be less safe without prisons?

If the abolition of the prison-as-punishment is not to fail miserably because of public fears of unsolved safety issues, the ethical, legal, and practical questions involving preventive detention will have to be dealt with in a most serious and exhaustive manner. Questions that will have to be answered will include the following: how many of the present-day prison inmates would need continued confinement because of their dangerousness - and for how long? And how can solid criteria of dangerousness be established in the first place? What about the concept of dangerousness when the behavior in question is not the violation of rights of others, but only an abstract concept (as in the case of drug dealing between consenting adults)? How can the rights of dangerous individuals be protected? In the worst case, all those of today's prison inmates that have been defined by the criminal justice system as dangerous and who are serving prison sentences would continue in confinement even after the abolition of the prison-as-punishment. "Remain" is not quite the right term, though, because the cell prisons would be torn down as inhumane and ineffective, so they would move to other locations not built upon the model of the Quakers' penitentiaries, but on the model of residential living.  

Scholars and practicioners agree that only a minority of the present prison population would need to continue to be locked up for security purposes once prison-as-punishment were to be abolished, with estimates ranging roughly between 30 and 5 or less per cent. A realistic scenario of prison abolition would therefore have to count with a substitution of the prison sentence by a kind of preventive security confinement concerning up to a third of the present-day prison population. Hopefully, of course, a reliable assessment of dangerousness would be able to reduce that percentage, and however large or small the resulting group may be in the end - one thing is certain: that the living conditions of those affected by preventive security confinement would have to be significantly superior to those in today's cell prisons.   

To reduce and to improve the quality of sites of confinement would also significantly reduce - if no eliminate - the much lamented function of imprisonment as an involuntary college of crime where both techniques and attitudes are being passed on from generation to generation, and where latent state of war among and between the groups that make up the specific prison constellation results in hardening pathologies and character deficiencies that are heightening the risk of crime in the communities after the prisoners' release. Therefore, the abolition of the prison-as-punishment will most likely result in a safety gain in communities. Life will be better and safer for all.

Shifting from prison-as-punishment to preventive detention of the dangerous may be dangerous too. It may open a Pandora's box of hitherto unknown reasons for confining people, who have not broken any laws. While criminal law provides some safeguards and guarantees against arbitrary imprisonment, this is not necessarily the case in the field of civil and administrative detentions. It is therefore mandatory to develop a body of restraining principles applicable to coercive preventive endeavour by the state. Here is a good start:  

*"1. In principle, every citizen has the right to be presumed harmless, and this presumption of harmlessness can be rebutted only in exceptional circumstances"....