The Need to Abolish the Prison System

About a new book
On The Need to Abolish the Prison System:
an ethical indictment
By Steve Martinot

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/446752

This book is an extended argument for the abolition of prisons. Its argument is made on ethical and political rather than sociological grounds. It addresses the logic of prisons themselves as criminal, and thus a source of social violence, rather than simply demonstrate that prisons fail in their allegedly intended purpose to deter crime or alleviate social violence. It is the ethical and political principles on which imprisonment itself is based that serve to augment social violence. In short, the prison as a means and instrumentality by which society seeks to attain the goals of justice, democracy, and social tranquillity renders those goals impossible in principle.

Though justice is its stated goal, the underlying motive for imprisonment is actually a revenge ethic. The purpose of punishment is to do something to a transgressor in response to the person having transgressed. Yet the act of imprisonment is ethically a criminal act because it is an act of violence. As revenge, it doubles the social violence it seeks to alleviate. Thus it doubles the criminality. To take a piece of a robbers life for having robbed a person is to commit a robbery. To execute a person who kills is to add the state to the list of killers. In addition to which, prison serves as a role model for violence, for criminality, and for how to resolve personal problems. This is aside from its inevitably serving to school certain individuals in violence. On a social level, its existence prioritizes control over others rather than dialogue and cooperation with them.

But what is being avenged with imprisonment? The victims of transgressions? They are being made accessory to the doubling of violence, the doubling of criminality, since imprisonment is done in their name. And in their name, the law at the same time de-criminalizes the violence of its criminalization and vengeance against the transgressor.

When someone is punished for committing a victimless crime (drug use, for instance), who is being avenged? No one had been harmed. Thus, the one convicted becomes the victim of a victimless crime law. 70% of all prisoners in the US today are there for victimless crimes. Prison then reveals itself to be an institution of victimization, beyond its pretense to vengeance. If a society that relies on imprisonment (rather than alternatives, such as restorative justice, or treating addiction as a medical condition) defines an act as a crime, it is because that society, through its legislative bodies, desires the victimization that prison will provide.

And as an ethics, what does imprisonment portend? If the idea of justice means to heal the rifts in society resulting from transgressions, then to respond to crime with more crime is the antithesis of justice. The revenge ethic makes justice impossible.

Ethically, the act of imprisonment is a form of kidnapping, and captivity is a form of torture. These acts are in inherent part of our historical tradition. That inherence assumes an acceptibility, to the point where only an ethical argument will reveal what is wrong with them.

Thus, an ethical critique is at the core of this book’s abolitionist position. It proposes that we as a society must look at who we are, who we have been made to be by our acceptance of imprisonment as legitimate. The book does not present solutions of pragmatic nature, such as “what do we do about such-and-such, or so-and-so?” A cultural transformation will be necessary before those questions can be asked, and answered, in a positive and humane way. First, we have to recognize that there are alternatives to imprisonment, to its culture of revenge, and that some a profound cultural transformation must be initiated, something the civil rights movements taught us how to do.

But first, we must eliminate the role models. These role models come not only from the prison, but from police brutality and military adventures of intervention or invasion of other countries. The “role model” does not say that violence is permissible; but it signifies that violence is not impermissible. The force of the "role model" inverts the paradigm that prisons are a response to crime by suggesting that prisons are responsible for a norm of criminality throughout society. In short, violent crime is augmented in this society by the institutions that proclaim themselves dedicated to alleviating it.

In addition, the institutionalization of human rights denial presents a “role model” for social contempt that perfuses society as a cultural environment. This produces a commodification of persons through the concept of “paying a debt to society.” That commodification, as an objectification of those named transgressors, leaves real life out of the account. The book gives an alternative vision of what a judiciary would look like if those narratives were included.

Beyond this general form of ethical critique of imprisonment, the book also addresses some of the specifics of the United States case, stemming from its history and culture. These include its birth as a colonial state, its original corporate structure, the evolution of whiteness (in Virginia) as a cultural identity from which the modern concept of race was derived, the persistence of the slave system after the revolution, the underlying commodification of persons that this instilled in US culture, and this country’s continued dependence on structures of racialization as a form of social order. While slavery is generally seen as rendering humans a form of property (most slaves did not see themselves as that), it is more properly understood as a massive socially embodied form of prison labor.

Today, the traditions this history implicates are reflected in the fact that the US has the largest prison system in the world, in which 75% of its prisoner are people of color. There are 2.5 million prisoners in the US. With 5% of the world’s population, the US holds 25% of the world’s prisoners. What accompanies this institutional tradition is a cultural of contempt. We see this contempt (as an extension of the revenge ethic) in the judiciary’s demand for long sentences, the vindictiveness of maximum sentences given to those who refuse a plea bargain and plead not guilty, and police impunity that feeds the process of mass incarceration.

Along with some discussion of alternatives, the book does suggest some immediate steps that can be taken, though emptying the prisons overnight is certainly not an option. For instance, all those imprisoned for victimless crimes should be released (and the victimless crime laws repealed).

But in general, in light of the self-contradictory character of imprisonment, entirely new concepts of law, crime, and judicial procedure need to be developed that will facilitate the healing of the torn fabric of the community resulting from the confluence of individual crime and the institutional crime committed as punishment. The book suggests some directions to follow in that endeavor. But we need a form of healing that does not require committing a second crime in the process.