Summary: The Prison Abolition Movement

The prison abolition movement is a movement that seeks to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with more humane and effective systems. It is distinct from prison reform, which is the attempt to improve conditions inside prisons; however, relying on prisons less could improve their conditions by reducing overcrowding.Some organizations such as the Anarchist Black Cross seek total abolishment of the prison system, not intending to replace it with other government-controlled systems. Many anarchist organizations believe that the best form of justice arises naturally out of social contracts. Other supporters for prison abolition work toward non-reformist reforms, such as ending solitary confinement and the death penalty,

stopping construction of new prisons, and the eradication of cash bail.
Prominent social activist Angela Davis, outspoken critic of the prison-industrial complex, openly supports prison abolition. Mass incarceration is not a solution to unemployment, nor is it a solution to the vast array of social problems that are hidden away in a rapidly growing network of prisons and jails. However, the great majority of people have been tricked into believing in the efficacy of imprisonment, even though the historical record clearly demonstrates that prisons do not work. Her relevancy in this movement is attested by her close involvement with groups moving to abolish the Prison-Industrial Complex (PIC). Critical Resistance, co-founded by Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, is an American organization working towards an "international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe." Other similarly motivated groups such as the Prison Activist Resource Center (PARC), a group "committed to exposing and challenging all forms of institutionalized racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, and classism, specifically within the Prison Industrial Complex, and Black & Pink, an abolitionist organization that focuses around LGBTQ rights, all broadly advocate for prison abolition.] Furthermore, names such as the Human Rights Coalition, a 2001 group that aims to abolish prisons, and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a grassroots organization dedicated to dismantling the PIC, can all be added to the long list of organizations that desire a different form of justice system. Every other year after Ruth Morris organized the first one in Toronto in 1983, The International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA) gathers activists, academics, journalists, and "others from across the world who are working towards the abolition of imprisonment, the penal system, carceral controls and the prison industrial complex (PIC), to discuss three important questions surrounding the reality of prison abolition ICOPA was one of the first penal abolitionist conference movements, similar to Critical Resistance in America, but "with an explicitly international scope and agenda-setting ambition.
Anarchists wish to eliminate all forms of state control, of which imprisonment is seen as one of the more obvious examples.

Anarchists also oppose prisons because a significant number of inmates are non-violent offenders. Numbers show incarceration rates affect mainly poor people and ethnic minorities, and do not generally rehabilitate criminals, in many cases making them worse. As a result, the prison abolition movement often is associated with humanistic socialism, anarchism and anti-authoritarianism. In October 2015, members at a plenary session of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) released and adopted a resolution in favor of prison

abolition.

“The California Prison Moratorium Project seeks to stop all public and private prison construction in California. The money saved from California's prison construction budget should be used to fund and actively pursue alternatives to imprisonment for as many people as possible. As a result, communities will have the power to examine the reasons people break the law, and seek alternatives to prison. Most people who are being put in prison do not need to be removed from society and could effectively be diverted into community-based programs. Since the majority of people are being sent to prison for non-violent drug-related or economic crimes, we believe these people should have access to drug treatment and/or economic assistance (such as education, affordable childcare, job training and placement, or welfare) instead of prison terms. Even the diminishing percentage of people convicted of violent offenses can be helped outside the prison system, through programs that address aggressive behavior and abusive relationships, and drug and alcohol treatment. We consider prisons to be a form of environmental injustice. They are normally built in economically depressed communities that eagerly anticipate economic prosperity. Like any toxic industry, prisons affect the quality of local schools, roads, water, air, land, and natural habitats. We join forces with other groups working for environmental justice. Believe that prisons do not make our communities more secure, and that alternatives will work. As long as prison construction continues, viable alternatives will not be utilized to their fullest potential.

The article presents the author's views on the need to end race discrimination in the U.S. as of October 2016. Topics include the penal system, colonization, slavery, the social construction of race, and the impact of prison abolition on the criminal justice system. Also discussed are the role of mass media in racial discrimination and humans' contributions in encouraging discrimination against colored people. “identifying to whom justice should be ‘fair,’ how exactly it should be ‘done,’ or by what standards fairness or ‘justice”’ are measured. But who can truly be the arbiter of justice or fairness when the process of formulating punishment is patently subjective? The same ideology that drove colonizers to think that they somehow knew more than their native counterparts, thus devaluing and subsequently denying their humanity and right to live whether by slavery or death, is the same treacherous sort of thinking that is pervasive in the U.S. penal system. In his criticism of America's use of solitary confinement Charles Dickens, whose 1842 account is included in Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete?, concludes, “no man has a right to inflict ... this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain ... worse than any torture.”
Prison abolition and what I will call a "prison abolitionist ethic.

Prisons and punitive policing produce tremendous brutality, violence, racial stratification, ideological rigidity, despair, and waste. Meanwhile, incarceration and prison-backed policing neither redress nor repair the very sorts of harms they are supposed to address--interpersonal violence, addiction, mental illness, and sexual abuse, among others. Yet despite persistent and increasing recognition of the deep problems that attend U.S. incarceration and prison backed policing, criminal law scholarship has largely failed to consider how the goals of criminal law--principally deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retributive justice--might be pursued by means entirely apart from criminal law enforcement. (McLeod, pg.1) Abandoning prison-backed punishment and punitive policing remains generally unfathomable. This Article argues that the general reluctance to engage seriously an abolitionist framework represents a failure of moral, legal, and political imagination. If abolition is understood to entail simply the immediate tearing down of all prison walls, then it is easy to dismiss abolition as unthinkable. But if abolition consists instead of an aspirational ethic and a framework of gradual decarceration, which entails a positive substitution of other regulatory forms for criminal regulation, then the inattention to abolition in criminal law scholarship and reformist discourse comes into focus as a

more troubling absence. Although violent crime prevention and proportional punishment of wrongdoing purportedly justify imprisonment, this Article illuminates how the ends of criminal law might be accomplished in large measure through institutions aside from criminal law administration. More specifically, this