This issue should be important to everyone because of how massive the scope is. As of 2019 the U.S. had 2.3 million people locked up in various prison, jails and correctional facilities. Of the 612,000 people that were specifically in jails 76% of them are NOT convicted of any crime. And in total the U.S. justice system controls nearly seven million people annually. Half of whom are on probation and are one small mistake away from ending up back in prison. On top of the human suffering there is a massive amount of money spent every year on locking up human beings. The organization Vera has attempted to track our countires spending on incarceration and they found that “Among the 45 states that provided data, the yearly cost in 2015 per inmate averaged $33,274 and ranged from a low of $14,780 in Alabama to a high of $69,355 in New York.”
The majority of this spending, 68%, is spent on salaries, overtime and benefits for employees at the prisons. Compared to a mere 11% of prison spending that was spent on health care for inmates. The remaining 21% was made up of catch all categories that included facility maintenance, legal judgements and anything else you can think of. Our takeaway from this should be that the enormous cost of our prison system is mostly spent on corrections officers with very little being put into creating a humane environment. Considering the current spread of COVID-19 I believe it’s more obvious than ever that putting humans into cages and ignoring them is a recipe for human rights abuses and in direct conflict with the 8th amendment which made “cruel and unusual punishment” unconstitutional.
Unfortunately a reification process occurred long ago when discussing prisons. Prison is where “bad” people go, it’s something that “we have to have” to keep law abiding citizens safe. As Ms. Angela Davis says this “relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism.”Because it is a societal norm to judge the people in prison and not the system itself reforms alone aren’t enough to solve the underlying issues. As a country we have a retributive sense of justice, we believe that punishment needs to be enacted and we hardly spend anytime thinking about the consequences of that punishment, or the lack of consideration for the victims of crimes. The criminal justice system is vast and complicated and it’s far easier for people who haven’t come face to face with it to assume that everything is working as it should be. This lack of awareness allows human rights abuses to become the norm and it has created a system that destroys lives, families and communities.
When I was considering topics to write about prison abolition was something that I had been aware of for some time but had never done a deep dive on. I was most interested in learning more about a topic that I felt very strongly about but often met high resistance when talking with other people. I’ve found that even in very progressive settings often times people prefer their skewed sense of “safety” over the lives and experiences of other people. I think that prison abolition is a starting point for forcing people to look at their own biases more directly and determining what happened to cause so many people to get entangled in this system. Why do we have the highest incarceration rate in the world and why does nobody seem to care. These sorts of questions motivated me to have enough information to feel confident in conversations about the abolition of prisons and hopefully open some peoples minds along the way.
An issue of this scale will require transformative justice to make change occur on a macro level. While restorative justice might eventually be a framework we as a society use to handle conflict there is too much rot in our current system. We have to transform what we have by focusing on why it exists in the first place, who is benefitting and who are the change agents that can help make it possible. I believe that this issue requires a transformative approach because it’s such a societal norm. The idea of “time outs” for kindergarten students is essentially a small example of our justice system. Do something against the rules of whoever happens to be in charge, and get isolated for a random amount of time. As a country we need to transform the systems that allow the richest country in the world to have such a high rate of poverty. We need to transform how we view those who are different than us and realize that racism is a driving force behind many policies that have lead to mass incarceration. And we need to transform how we handle conflicts, we need to start taking the victim into consideration instead of just hiding all of our issues under the rug.
When considering the broader context of this issue I’ll go into more depth on the history of imprisonment in America in a different section. But to wrap up here I want to focus on this idea of America as “the land of the free”. I think that the history of this country is one of cognitive dissonance where we refuse to look at the evidence of our actions and as a result have created one of the most inequitable countries in the world. Our prison system is a perfect representation of the antithetical nature of our country. We pride ourselves on the Bill of Rights and the American Dream while also locking up more children than any country on earth, and creating school to prison pipelines without blinking. This issue of imprisonment is as old as the country itself making it extremely difficult for change to occur. But I think that once people realize that the fabric of the country is a little broken it will be easier to call out other oppressive systems for what they are and begin transforming the U.S. into something a little more equitable.
Prison Abolition 