Can you fix prisons without abolishing them?: Prison abolitionists

The function was the violence

In 1971, Attica’s prisoners took control of D Yard and issued demands: adequate food, one shower a week not ice-cold. Governor Rockefeller sent state police. Thirty-three prisoners and ten hostages died. Every hostage was killed by state gunfire. The institution was not malfunctioning. It was functioning.

We are abolitionists. The word makes people flinch, which is useful, because the flinch reveals the assumption: that prison is a response to harm. It is not. It is a technology for managing surplus populations — communities redlined out of wealth accumulation for three generations and then policed as if poverty were a crime. Ruth Wilson Gilmore mapped this with a geographer’s precision. California built twenty-three prisons between 1984 and 2005 and one university campus.

The reformers want a better cage. Norway’s Halden looks like a campus. Recidivism is low. We dispute the frame. A humane cage is still a cage. You do not reform your way out of 1.9 million.

What would we build? Invest the $80 billion in what actually reduces harm. Mental health infrastructure. Housing. Violence interruption programs like Cure Violence, which reduced shootings 63 percent in Brooklyn without a single arrest. The restorative justice practitioners are doing this on shoestring budgets. Scale their work. Defund ours.

Fewer than three percent of state prisoners are serving time for stranger-violence homicide. The other ninety-seven percent are there for drug offenses, property crimes, and acts of desperation the state itself created.

Where we concede ground: We have not built the alternative at scale. A grandmother in Englewood asks who stops the shooting tonight. We have no answer for tonight.

What would change our mind: A state implements genuine Norwegian-model reform system-wide for fifteen years and recidivism stays above forty percent.

Read the full synthesis: Can you fix prisons without abolishing them?