The Need to Abolish the Prison System: an ethical indictment

This essay is an extended argument for the abolition of prisons. Its argument is made on ethical and political rather than sociological grounds. That is, it addresses the logic of prisons and imprisonment, rather than the sociological phenomenon of imprisonment (with all its psychopathic side effects), and demonstrates that logic to be itself criminal, and thus a source of social violence. The essay also addresses how the logic of imprisonment reflects the underlying culture, as the technology of an oppressiveness deep inside that culture. As such, the institutionality of prisons, and of the judicial machine that runs them, is inseparable from a criminality inherent in the structures of economic exploitation, the structures of racialization, an underlying commodification of personhood in the US, wars of aggression, and a general culture of contempt. If structurally, imprisonment can be understood as a form of kidnapping or assault – and I discuss what the concept of "structural" means here – I show how its only means of rationalizing that is through an revenge ethic. And a revenge ethic makes justice impossible. Thus, prisons increase the presence and normativity of violence as a “role model,” by rendering justice a dead issue, and place a criminalizing and dehumanizing force at the core of the culture and the society that finds prisons acceptible. The book explores some of the known forms of restorative justice, and suggests some immediate ways to begin to alleviate the extant injustice that the existence of prisons engenders.