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→‎What abolition does not mean

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 Just think of quarantine for people affected by a severe communicable disease. While extreme cases of quarantine also do raise serious moral and legal issues that have to be dealt with,  there is no question that - as long as there is no less obtrusive way to protect public health - quarantine is a legitimate response to a social necessity. Similarly, the anti-asylum movement of the 1960s and 1970s together with progress in the development of more efficient (especially anti-psychotic) drugs has greatly helped reduce the number of involuntary hospitalizations of persons suffering from mental illness - but still there are cases in which individuals are being subjected to involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital in order to avert dangers to themselves or others.
-As we can see, to abolish prisons does not mean to abolish all kinds of involuntary confinement. Even if we believe it to be possible that societies might one day be able to afford to let their offenders go unpunished, this would certainly not imply the end of all involuntary confinement. There will still will be a need to lock up suspects who otherwise would either evade trial or - worse - continue to be a threat to the community. Some things just have to be prevented from happening, be it the spread of an infectious disease, or be it a serial killer’s hunt for his next victims. Once imprisonment as punishment is abolished, there will still be a need for confinement. But that will be for other reasons - foremost for reasons of security - and it will be a type of confinement that must not be carried out under prison-like conditions, but in well-supervised residential settings instead of a cell prison. There is no need to impose prison conditions or prison-like conditions on anyone on earth.
+As we can see, to abolish prisons-for punishment does not mean to abolish all kinds of involuntary confinement.  There will still will be a need to lock up suspects who otherwise would either evade trial or - worse - continue to be a threat to the community. Some things just have to be prevented from happening, be it the spread of an infectious disease, or be it a serial killer’s hunt for his next victims. Once imprisonment as punishment is abolished, there will still be a need for confinement. But that will be for other reasons - foremost for reasons of security - and it will be a type of confinement that must not be carried out under prison-like conditions, but in well-supervised residential settings instead of a cell prison. There is no need to impose prison conditions or prison-like conditions on anyone on earth. This is really an important point worth repeating. To say that even after prison abolition there will continue to be some form or forms of involuntary confinement is not equal to saying that any of the remaining deprivations of liberty would be allowed to take place in prison-like facilities. With no punishment intended, the living conditions of those affected by spatial separation from the rest of society must not be modeled after the penitentiary. With regard to size and comfort, they should rather resemble a decent middle-class home or at least apartment. Whoever thinks that is exaggerated should halt a minute and consider this: these people are being forced to sacrifice essential parts of their (quality of) life for the life and liberty of others - without necessarily being bad, evil, guilty, or even responsible for the risk they pose. With no reproach involved and no vengeance, those who deprive these individuals of their liberty have good reasons to do everything they can to try and compensate their sufferings the best they can. This can be done by, e.g., an artificially elevated level of comfort in their living conditions. Since they cannot be set free, they should at least live their restricted lives as good as possible, with their living conditions tailored to their needs and individual priorities, as long as that does not endanger the purpose of their confinement.
-This is really an important point worth repeating. To say that even after prison abolition there will continue to be some form or forms of involuntary confinement is not equal to saying that any of the remaining deprivations of liberty would be allowed to take place in prison-like facilities. With no punishment intended, the living conditions of those affected by spatial separation from the rest of society must not be modeled after the penitentiary. With regard to size and comfort, they should rather resemble a decent middle-class home or at least apartment. Whoever thinks that is exaggerated should halt a minute and consider this: these people are being forced to sacrifice essential parts of their (quality of) life for the life and liberty of others - without necessarily being bad, evil, guilty, or even responsible for the risk they pose. With no reproach involved and no vengeance, those who deprive these individuals of their liberty have good reasons to do everything they can to try and compensate their sufferings the best they can. This can be done by, e.g., an artificially elevated level of comfort in their living conditions. Since they cannot be set free, they should at least live their restricted lives as good as possible, with their living conditions tailored to their needs and individual priorities, as long as that does not endanger the purpose of their confinement.
+Secondly, what the abolition of prisons does not mean is that there will be no punishment for crimes.  170). Some day, we may have to abolish preventive detention as well. There can be and should be punishment for crimes. Most people would probably not consider it just if the offenders were to walk out of their preventive confinement without having had to "pay" for what they had done. There is a strong and very widespread emotion that those who committed heinous acts should be responded to by the intentional infliction of retributive harm upon them. One might even say that common sense and jurisprudence both believe in a kind of natural law logic that crimes must be responded to with punishment: crime requires punishment. Not only the reduction of risks. But what exactly is punishment and what are the needs it responds to? First of all, punishment is "the intentional delivery of pain" (Nils Christie), it is a strong affirmation of a negative value judgement concerning the punished person's past violation of an important norm. For the punished person, punishment is - in the words of South African judge Thokozile Masipa uttered at the occasion of the sentencing of Oscar Pistorius in 2016 - "unpleasant, it is inconvenient, it is painful, it is certainly not what you would chose to do.” And that is the very sense of it. By its emphatic negation of the offender's deed and by making the offender suffer for what he did, the court declares in the name of state and society that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated, and that offenders will have to live with the consequences. Punishment sends a strong symbolic message to the offender and to the public, but also to the victims of crime. It is a symbolic response to an event in the past, and a response of sorts to affirm the continuing validity of the broken norm.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.
-Secondly, what the abolition of prisons does not mean is that there will be no punishment for crimes.
 Thirdly, 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).