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→‎The Meaning of Prison Abolition

Woozle

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 Prisons are no way to deal with crime. They are outdated and they are unnecessarily cruel. So they are illegitimate. And should be illegal. So they have to be abolished. Done away with. Wholly. Once and for all. It is clear that prisons are not the way. - But what exactly does it mean to "abolish prisons”?
-The answer to this question is both easy and difficult. It is easy, because, evidently, to abolish prisons means to do away with them wholly. With the buildings (be they called gaols, jails, penitentiaries, prisons, remand centers or correctional facilities) including walls and watchtowers, bricks, barbed wire, steel and concrete. Of course, a few of them might remain and function (like Alcatraz and Auburn already do) as prisons-turned-tourist-sites. To walk through those abandoned prisons will send shudders down the tourists’ spines, and it will make them grateful for living in the contemporary world and not having to suffer through the times neither of the guillotines and scaffolds, nor of the pains of imprisonment.
+To abolish prisons means to abolish the possibility for a criminal court to sentence an accused person to the punishment of imprisonment. Wherever and whenever that is achieved, prisons are  just not needed anymore. Just like the abolition of the death penalty means to abolish the possibility for a criminal court to sentence an accused person to death. Wherever and whenever that is achieved, execution chambers are just not needed anymore.
-It is difficult when we start thinking not of buildings, but of inmates. A serious answer to the question needs some reflection and - above all - differentiation. As a matter of fact, to find out what can and should be done about today’s prison population (and their future equivalents) might require that we first take a step back, calm down, and think about - what it does not mean to abolish prisons.
+The abolition of prisons also means to condemn the penitentiary type of prison buildings with their rows of solitary cells as their basic element to oblivion. The classical cell prison as it had been invented in the United States and exported to Europe (Pentonville), from where the colonial administrations spread it to the remotest corners of the world, has never fulfilled the high moral expectations of its founders and philanthropic friends. As of today, it is safe to say that it is both obsolete and a shameful disgrace. Wherever they stand, prisons make good museums, but they must not be abused by still holding living people in captivity.
+=== What abolition does not mean ===
 First and foremost, to abolish prisons does not mean to abolish all kinds of involuntary confinement.
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 Secondly, what the abolition of prisons does not mean is to keep all those prisoners in prison and only change the name of the institution and its inmates to “hospital/patients”, “treatment center/clients”, or “prevention house/residents”. Fraudulent labelling is a real danger, because it is both seductive (as a kind of subversive resistance open to all those who are part of the system and who are either unable or unwilling to accept a radical de-institutionalization) and sometimes hard to distinguish from a valid label (e.g., a correct risk assessment). It is also a real danger, because today’s prisons are fulfilling a hybrid function of both inflicting pain on inmates because of their past crimes (= deprivation of liberty as a punishment)  and preventing them from committing more crimes in the future (= deprivation of liberty as a preventive measure).
-Hence, to abolish prisons means to abolish the possibility for a criminal court to sentence an accused person to the punishment of imprisonment. Wherever and whenever that is achieved, prisons are  just not needed anymore. Just like the abolition of the death penalty means to abolish the possibility for a criminal court to sentence an accused person to death. Wherever and whenever that is achieved, execution chambers are just not needed anymore.
+=== What about punishment? ===
-The abolition of prisons also means to condemn the penitentiary type of prison buildings with their rows of solitary cells as their basic element to oblivion. The classical cell prison as it had been invented in the United States and exported to Europe (Pentonville), from where the colonial administrations spread it to the remotest corners of the world, has never fulfilled the high moral expectations of its founders and philanthropic friends. As of today, it is safe to say that it is both obsolete and a shameful disgrace. Wherever they stand, prisons make good museums, but they must not be abused by still holding living people in captivity.
 == Strategies for Abolition ==