The question nobody answers
On September 11, 2007, Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters were murdered in their home in Cheshire, Connecticut. Both men had been released on parole. One had been arrested over twenty times. The system told Dr. William Petit — who survived with a fractured skull — it was managing the risk.
We sat in that courtroom. Some of us literally. Some through the families we work with — mothers, siblings, children who survived someone’s decision to be violent. We do not have the luxury of abstraction.
The abolitionists say prison manages surplus populations. We have met the surplus populations. Some of them killed people. The abolitionist position requires a theory of violence accounting for predation — not desperation, not poverty, but a human who chooses harm for pleasure or power. We are told that category is small. We have sat with the families of that three percent.
Our critique runs opposite the abolitionists’. They say the system incarcerates too many. We say it releases dangerous people without adequate assessment because the same overcrowding produces early releases that put predators back into communities. The prison is full of the wrong people — nonviolent drug offenders taking beds that should hold violent repeat offenders.
The reformers show us Norway. Norway has five million people and a homicide rate of 0.5 per 100,000. America’s is 6.4. Transplanting a garden and ignoring the climate.
Where we concede ground: We have let our grief be weaponized. Tough-on-crime politicians used our stories to justify mandatory minimums that filled prisons with people posing no danger.
What would change our mind: A jurisdiction runs comprehensive non-carceral violent-crime response for ten years and violent crime rates hold or drop.
Read the full synthesis: Can you fix prisons without abolishing them?