In a recent frontal attack against the current that supports the abolition of prisons, Loïc Vacan, one of the most important European sociologists who, in his classic book “The Prisons of Misery”, showed how the expansion of the prison system and the number of prisoners is actually part of a strategy for managing unemployment and, more broadly, the social impoverishment caused by neoliberal policies, has made an article in the magazine New Left Review.
Why, however, does a man who was primarily associated with the radical criticism of “law and order” policies, and the consequent increase in sentences and prison populations, choose to harshly criticize a political and movement current that is currently the spearhead of anti-authoritarian policies internationally?
Vakan argues that the problem with the logic of “abolitionism” is that it underestimates the fact that increased crime disproportionately affects the poorest social classes and their neighborhoods, who suffer both from excessive surveillance and stigmatization and from inadequate policing in relation to the delinquency that directly concerns them.
This is combined with what he calls “community fetishism,” i.e. the emphasis on the functioning of the “community” rather than specialized state institutions, but also with the insistence on treating prisons in the light of the “Prison Industrial Complex” as the cause of all suffering, while underlining the difficulty of implementing such a program of abolishing the penal system in a country where the total number of prisoners reaches two million.
The answer that Vacan proposes is penal minimalism, i.e. measures that focus on prevention, interventions that aim to solve problems without resorting to imprisonment, financing and improving the judicial and penal systems, and using penal confinement as a last resort.
All of this makes it necessary to return to the origins of “abolitionism” as a movement. The publication of a classic text of this movement, the book “Are Prisons Obsolete?” by Angela Y. Davis, helps in this. For Davis, however “utopian and idealistic” those who argue that prisons should be abolished may be, the question remains: “Are we really willing to condemn ever greater numbers of people from racially oppressed communities to an existence of isolation governed by authoritarian rule, violence, disease, and technologies of exclusion that cause serious mental instability?”
That is why he emphasizes that just as slavery and racial segregation were once considered institutions “eternal as the sun” before they were abolished, the same could be done with prison, not failing to emphasize the correlation between racism and the expansion of the prison system in the US, including the exploitation of prisoner labour.
Davis emphasizes that imprisonment emerged as the main punishment precisely at the time when basic freedoms were recognized, when their deprivation acquired a punitive character, when it was simultaneously quantified as an economic quantity and work time. She even points out that what we today consider the maximum security prison model began as a “reform” of prisons with an emphasis on isolation.
At the same time, she notes that if historically prisons were associated with racism, especially in the US, they gradually acquired a gender dimension that is also reflected in the widespread complaints of incidents of sexual violence against women in prisons.
Davis insists that it makes sense to talk about a “prison industrial complex.” On the one hand, because “the transformation of prisoners—the majority of whom are people of color—into sources of profit who consume and often produce all kinds of commodities gobbles up public funds that could otherwise be allocated to social programs such as education, housing, child care, recreation, and drug-control programs.” Furthermore, prisons are becoming an investment destination as private prisons proliferate.
Davis emphasizes that the search for alternatives to incarceration cannot be one-dimensional and requires broader social transformations, starting with the use of schools: “If the current structures of violence in poor minority communities are not eliminated – including the presence of armed security guards and police officers – and if schools are not transformed into spaces that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the main pathways to prison.”
Similarly, decriminalizing drug use in conjunction with public addiction treatment programs could reduce one of the main mechanisms that increase the prison population. So would decriminalizing undocumented immigrants, which would also reduce the number of prisoners.
As for what another form of justice that goes beyond punishment should be, Davis insists that we should consider the possibility of restorative justice, where the offender is essentially a debtor who must take responsibility for his actions and shoulder the task of reparation, and cites the example of the Amie Biehl murderers in South Africa as a successful example of how the logic of forgiveness can work within a restorative justice concept.
(Amy’s parents, Linda and Peter Biehl, chose not to oppose the amnesty application, stating that true reconciliation required looking forward and embracing dialogue. The family established the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust, creating youth and community empowerment programs in the very townships where the tragedy occurred. In a profound turn of restorative reparation, two of the men convicted of Amy’s murder were later employed by the foundation to work on community upliftment projects alongside the Biehl family.)
For Davis, crucial questions arise: “What would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become a source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not major determinants of punishment? Or a society in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the administration of justice?”
In any case, both Vacan and Davis’ perspectives highlight the need for political reflection beyond the current confines of criminal severity and prison brutality.
The problem, however, is that human nature operates in many cases, even if there is education and appropriate training, to commit crimes that make criminals extremely dangerous to the rest of the community (sexual crimes against children, etc.). For this reason, prisons cannot be completely abolished.
In any case, programs such as the aforementioned ones proposed by the two outstanding sociologist researchers should be examined and implemented, so as to achieve the optimal reduction in the prison population at all times, allowing the release of many funds from state budgets for the improvement of the conditions of less privileged people. But prisons should exist as the maximum possible “punishment and confinement for extremely dangerous people.”
What Davis proposes was not achieved by the anarchists in Spain when they took power. For this reason, this movement to abolish prisons can at best be considered Davis’s utopia.
