Voices of Abolition
It's time to stop talking about reforming prisons and to start working for their complete abolition. That means basically three things:
- First, admitting that prisons can't be reformed, since the very nature of prisons requires brutality and contempt for the people imprisoned.
- Second, recognizing that prisons are used mainly to punish poor and working class people, and forcing the courts to give equal justice to all citizens.
- Third, replacing prisons with a variety of alternative programs. We must protect the public from the few really dangerous people who now go to prison. But more important, we must enable all convicted persons to escape the poverty which is the root cause of the crimes the average person fears most: crimes such as robbery, burglary, mugging or rape.
- —Prison Research Project, The Price of Punishment, p. 57
Fervent pleas to abolish prisons collectively present powerful testimony to the necessity of bringing an end to caging:
- The spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me; He has sent me to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
- —Jesus, quoted in Luke 4, 16-30
- That Jesus called for the abolition of prison, comes as no surprise. However, during the past century, there have been constant and unexpected calls for prison abolition. Here we present a few from the wide spectrum of abolitionist voices.
Judge Carter, of Ohio, avowed himself a radical on prison discipline. He favored the abolishment of prisons, and the use of greater efforts for the prevention of crime.
- He believed they would come to that point yet .... Any system of imprisonment or punishment was degradation, and could not reform a man. He would abolish all prison walls, and release all confined within them...
- —Minutes of the 1870 Congress of the American Prison Association/American Correctional Association
There ought to be no jails; and if it were not for the fact that the people on the outside are so grasping and heartless in their dealings with the people on the inside, there would be no such institutions as jails .... The only way in the world to abolish crime and criminals is to abolish the big ones and the little ones together. Make fair conditions of life. Give men a chance to live .... Nobody would steal if he could get something of his own some easier way. Nobody will commit burglary when he has a house full. The only way to cure these conditions is by equality. There should be no jails. They do not accomplish what they pretend to accomplish. If you would wipe them out there would be no more criminals than now. They terrorize nobody. They are a blot upon any civilization, and a jail is an evidence of the lack of charity of the people on the outside who make the jails and fill them with the victims of their greed.
- —Clarence Darrow, An Address to the Prisoners in the Cook County Jail, Chicago, Illinois-1902
The proposal toward which the book points... is...nothing less than that penal imprisonment for crime be abolished.... The author can hardly escape the apprehension that the mass of the public will dismiss this as preposterous and impossible. And yet nothing is more certain in my opinion than that penal imprisonment for crime must cease, and if it be not abolished by statute, it will be by force.
- —Julian Hawthorne, The Subterranean Brotherhood (New York, McBride, Nast, 1914) pp. xii-xiv
We must destroy the prison, root and branch. That will not solve our problem, but it will be a good beginning.... Let us substitute something. Almost anything will be an improvement. It cannot be worse. It cannot be more brutal and more useless.
- —Frank Tannenbaum, Crime and the Community (New York, Ginn, 1938)
The American prison system makes no sense. Prisons have failed as deterrents to crime. They have failed as rehabilitative institutions. What then shall we do? Let us face it! Prisons should be abolished. The prison cannot be reformed. It rests upon false premises. Nothing can improve it. It will never be anything but a graveyard of good intentions. Prison is not just the enemy of the prisoner. It is the enemy of society. This behemoth, this monster error, has nullified every good work. It must be done away with.
- —John Bartlow Martin, Break Down the Walls (New York, Ballantine, 1954) p. 266
The prison, as now tolerated, is a constant threat to everyone's security. An anachronistic relic of medieval concepts of crime and punishment, it not only does not cure the crime problem; it perpetuates and multiplies it. We profess to rely upon the prison for our safety; yet it is directly responsible for much of the damage that society suffers at the hands of offenders. On the basis of my own experience, I am convinced that prisons must be abolished.
- —Ralph Banay, formerly in charge of the psychiatric clinic at Sing Sing Prison, "Should Prisons be Abolished?" New York Times Magazine, January 30, 1955
From: