"Should We Abolish Prisons?"
By Wade Lee Hudson
In his July 22, 2024, review of recent books advocating the abolition of prisons, Adam Gopnik argues that the “frequent brutality and ingrained indifference” seen in prisons calls us to “freely imagine alternatives,” but he differs from the abolitionists.
He strongly supports those such as Michelle Alexander who see American incarceration as “a mechanism that preserves racial hierarchy.” Incarceration in her now famous formulation acts as the new Jim Crow.” Black people in New York State, for instance, are fifteen percent of the overall population and almost fifty percent of the prison population.
However, Gopnik rejects the argument that mass incarceration is a product of capitalism, as Angela Davis argues in Are Prisons Obsolete? He points out:
There are, in any event, a great many free-market countries in the world, and very few are marked by overstuffed prisons. Mass incarceration remains a distinctively American problem. On the other hand, plenty of anti-capitalist societies have turned to mass incarceration.
Concerning the “more abstract argument, derived from Michel Foucault and often cited in the new polemics [that] holds that incarceration itself is a capitalist-Enlightenment legacy,” Gopnik concludes that “conceptual genealogy probably won’t dismantle the modern prison.”
According to Gopnik, Davis’s proposed alternative
model of rehabilitation for prisoners caught in the drug wars is the Betty Ford Center, once known as a drying-out clinic for the rich and famous. Her point is rationally made—what is available to the rich ought to be available to the poor as well, and the model we accept when a President’s wife needs rehab should also be offered to an unemployed teenager. This would involve huge public costs, but the public costs of prisons are already formidable, and it is more expensive to lock a man up for thirty years than to send him to rehab for six months.
Danielle Sered’s Common Justice program promotes “restorative justice,” which “seeks to replace trials and prisons with family circles and compassionate understanding, bringing together those injured with those who injured them, in search of a rational bargain with respect to goods and emotions alike.”
Gopnik doubts that this approach will ever completely replace prisons. “Restorative justice may favor better-resourced offenders” who can compensate their victims financially. He argues, “The modern rule of law…aims to reserve retribution for the state, diminishing the crevasse between the people who can pay restitution and those who can’t.”
Nevertheless, restorative justice for the crimes of well-heeled white collar criminals who can compensate their victims seems “a far saner alternative” than incarceration. Nevertheless, criticizing the incarceration of these criminals is “unpopular among the same people who are inclined to be sympathetic” to incarcerated low-income people. They want to lock up the wealthy, but Gopnik insists
we cannot pick among the people we would protect to accord with our own preferences.…. If the logic of decarceration is to be applied, it ought to be applied—and will have more power if applied—impersonally [even to convicted child molesters, as portrayed in the play, “Downstate.”]
More deeply, Gopnik questions “transforming prisoners into patients,” as Davis “in effect” proposes.
Treating their actions as mere symptoms diminishes their humanity, their claim to moral agency. It also reminds us that, not that long ago, patients were being reimagined as prisoners. When the deinstitutionalization movement began, Ivan Illich was there to tell us of iatrogenesis, insisting that hospitals produced as much illness as they cured, while Thomas Szasz and R. D. Laing argued for the madness of thinking that madness was a special neurological condition, rather than an understandable response to the horrors of existence. Yet decades of deinstitutionalization have seen a rise in chronic homelessness and mass incarceration, neither of which benefits the intended beneficiaries.
Whether with prisons or psychiatric institutions, merely opening locked doors is no solution.
“Anxiety over social disorder is a fact of democratic political life that cannot be wished away, and it tends to erode the kind of political power that remains the one means toward reform,” Gopnik argues. Fundamental social reform requires unified people power, and discord about how to handle anti-social threats undermines unity.
From Gopnik’s perspective, alternatives would involve “a truly equitable society that invested properly in public health—that assured access to preventive care, community wellness programs, and outpatient management of complex conditions.”
These programs would keep many people out of hospitals and prisons, which would help society humanize these institutions. The rate of institutionalization can and ought to be reduced. Nevertheless, ”that does not mean that there are no humans in need of imprisonment. Evil exists.”
Gopnik concludes:
There is no plausible world without sanctions for violations of the social covenant. Public order can be, as the abolitionists warn, a form of class policing; it is also a necessity for civil peace. Finding the honest space between these two truths is the key to opening prison doors. If we are to plant human beings in places where they might blossom again, we need to build better gardens.
A world without incarceration would be wonderful, but this controversy illustrates the danger of abstract ideology and absolute declarations. Pushing a totalistic ideal can bring heat to an issue and help mobilize outsiders to apply pressure. Ultimately, however, insiders must design institutions that confine people who pose a persistent threat.
Achieving this goal humanely is difficult, but Halden Prison in Norway illustrates one possibility. The bottom line is a compassionate commitment to avoiding revenge, retribution, and cruel punishment and maximizing self-determination.