Is Prison Necessary?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html

by charlescearl • 7 years ago

27 59 7 years ago

Fjolsvith10• 7 years ago

A sad but true story:

I spent about 6 years in federal prison, and at my last prison location, I made a really good friend, Jeff. He could play guitar as good as Slash (he ran the prison music room), he was funny, and could run a D&D game like the best DM's out there. I knew him about 19 months before I release d to the halfway house. He was supposed to release about a year after me.

He had gone into the Army when he was 18. Because he could play the guitar, he got into a band unit, and they would march in parades and such. He molested his first victim for which he was caught while in the Army, and they gave him a hard 20 (20 years with no parole or probation). They also never ordered him into sex offender treatment. He spent most of his prison time in the military brig, but was eventually transferred into the Federal Prison system for being a troublemaker (brewing alcohol, getting drunk and fighting). That's how I met him.

I always wanted to be his friend after we got out of prison. I never expected him to re-offend, after knowing him pretty closely for a year and a half. When I asked my Supervision Officer if I could write to him while he was still in prison, I was ordered to not have any contact with any former prison acquaintances while on probation. I though, "Okay, I'll just wait until I finish my probation. No problem."

A few years after my release, I thought I would at least check up on him without contacting him. When I found out what he had done after he got out of prison, it was like I had been punched in the gut. I was in a state of numb disbelief for days.

Here are a couple of articles about Jeff:

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/police-...

https://www.kfvs12.com/story/19996812/jeffrey-dean-shelton-f...

https://www.courthousenews.com/child-molester-gets-120-years...

Prison is the best place for him.

Faaak3• 7 years ago

If he would've been correctly re-integrated, this would've maybe never happened.

This proves it: all this prison time alone, without good programs in place, was just "vengeance" and it didn't work.

nick_kline• 7 years ago

You can't draw conclusions from one case. Treatment could have helped him, but he was a menace in that state and shouldn't be released. So you can use this one case to argue either way. I'd sure not want him released. Most people aren't like this.

_pmf_• 7 years ago

Homosexual conversion therapy does not work, but pedophilia conversion therapy magically works?

layoutIfNeeded• 7 years ago

Define “correctly re-integrated”. Note: defining it based of re-offending makes your argument circular.

qazpot2• 7 years ago

So it is the society's fault and not the fact that he is pedophile.

PedroBatista• 7 years ago

If you think all those people in prison can be re-integrated you’ve never seen true evil.

Fantasies and wishful-thinking apart, most of the prison population are a real threat to society and a not-so-small percentage will stay that way forever. Others are made that way inside prisons.

kstenerud• 7 years ago

The article largely mirrors how European countries deal with crime: low sentences and extensive re-integration programs.

The goal in Europe is integration and eliminating recidivism, whereas the goal in America is vengeance and isolation. You won't see any progress until that overarching goal changes.

nullwasamistake• 7 years ago

IMO the biggest problem with American penal system is how crazy the punishments are for non-violent crimes. Get caught smoking crack a few times? You might be in prison for many years.

Another issue is how the government + private industry is allowed to punish you for life even though you've supposedly "done your time". Employers can and regularly do discriminate even for things that would have no affect on job performance. Oh also housing and loans. You're basically pushed to the fringes of society unless you manage to make it big with your own business.

Oh and if you commit a drug crime you're cut off from school financial aid for life. And if you have any felony the army probably won't even take you. Have fun trying to turn your life around when your own government slams the door.

I'm okay with long prison sentences for really nasty stuff like murder. Not such a big deal if an ex-con steals some shit again, pretty bad if he goes back to killing people.

indigochill• 7 years ago

whereas the goal in America is vengeance and isolation

Given the way American politics runs on lobbying, I'm inclined to lean towards the goal actually being maximizing profits. This can appear in various ways:

Private prisons lobbying for longer sentences, and service providers monopolizing service to prisoners to charge exorbitant rates: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/making-profits-o...

Training voice AI on prisoner phone calls: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/30/prison-profiteering.html

Even profiteering on halfway houses: https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2018/mar/6/cages-commun...

And others. Just look up "prison profiteering" and you'll find endless examples.

baud147258• 7 years ago

Not all European countries: considering how French prison are overcrowded and the recidivism rate there. (also considering how most of the terrorists in France spent time in prison)

dagw• 7 years ago

This paper from 2015: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4472929/ seems to indicate that the US vs Europe story about recidivism rates is more complicated than it first appears.

jillesvangurp2• 7 years ago

Dutch prisons are currently leasing space to Belgium because of low occupancy rates. This low occupancy is the result of various policies to cut costs. Prisons are not cheap so cutting sentences a bit and using alternative punishments for lighter offenses helps keep cost down. People still get caught doing stuff they are not supposed to. Locking them up is one of the punishments and it's used if needed. But it is used in moderation. Occasionally this is unpopular when high profile criminals end up back on the streets a bit sooner than people would like. Particularly when it involves e.g. sex offenders. But mostly this works out fine. This has not resulted in a massive crime wave and most people in prison are neither sex offenders nor psychopathic murderers.

The US is a great example of how prisons don't help prevent crime. It has the largest prison population per capita in the world and crime and murder rates to sustain that (i.e. notably much higher than other countries and also much more violent). Locking up people in the US apparently does not seem to lower crime rates. If anything, prisons actually help perpetuate this problem. The people who come out of them are likely to end up coming back. That's why it is important to keep young offenders out of prisons. Locking them up all but guarantees they come back for more. Locking them up for really minor offenses is simply counter productive and just locks them into a life of crime.

Part of the problem in the US is of course that prisons are big business. Big as in trading on Wall Street. E.g. CoreCivic is worth about 2.5B $: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CXW/

I used to regard movies from the eighties like Robocop as pure satire but you have to admit that this company, it's name, and it's sameless corporatism and hollow marketing makes it look like OCP quite a bit. Straight from their website: "CoreCivic's effective, high-quality reentry programs are at the center of our mission to reduce recidivism and help better the public good.". Yeah, right. Comes with a photo of a friendly smiling prisoner (black, naturally).

wahern4• 7 years ago

Part of the problem in the US is of course that prisons are big business.

This is directly debunked in the article: "By now it has become almost conventional wisdom to think that private prisons are the 'real' problem with mass incarceration. But anyone seriously engaged with the subject knows that this is not the case. Even a cursory glance at numbers proves it: Ninety-two percent of people locked inside American prisons are held in publicly run, publicly funded facilities, and 99 percent of those in jail are in public jails."

spiderfarmer• 7 years ago

Public jails, hiring big businesses.

jillesvangurp2• 7 years ago

We're still talking about well over a 120K individuals: https://www.criminaljusticeprograms.com/articles/private-pri...

For reference, I believe Germany has a prison population of about 75K (on a population of 80M).

Those publicly funded prisons provide plenty of cheap labor to corporations and they make use of contractors and suppliers. We're not talking about civil servants here. The bottom line is that there plenty of corporate interests in perpetuating the status quo.

This system indeed sucks up a lot of public funding as well. That's kind of the point: tax payers are funding this and corporations cream off the profits through contracting, prison labor, or indeed privately run prisons. Some of these are multi billion dollar companies even.

Grustaf8• 7 years ago

Maybe it’s just me but I couldn’t find an actual argument. Unless it’s that the murderer’s life is just as valuable so it’s bad to steal part of it from him by putting him in prison. I don’t think anyone outside academia values the lives of murderers very much, is there another argument in there somewhere?

zichy• 7 years ago

I don’t think anyone outside academia values the lives of murderers very much

What.

Grustaf8• 7 years ago

I should have said left-wing academia I guess but it’s sort of tautological.

wahern4• 7 years ago

Because Gilmore isn't trying to make an argument about specific approaches. She's trying to change the narrative--the way to reduce violence in society is to address the root causes of violence, not react to it after the fact as if both violence and violent people are inevitable.

Does she actually believe that prison would never be necessary for anyone if we could enact the ideal set of societal changes? It's not clear to me that she actually believes that.[1] I'm particularly doubtful that she thinks we can just turn loose existing violent offenders. If you read between the lines what she seems to believe is that the abolition movement as she understands it is more a process than a goal, and it's largely prospective. Note that she's quite critical of the motives of other reformists.

[1] In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if she thought both the question and the answer irrelevant. We see an elephant in the room and she's saying, "there is no elephant". That is, if you presuppose an elephant you're going to end up creating one.

charlescearl• 7 years ago

That was the sense I was getting. I’ve been grappling with the implications. The whole concept of prison and policing in the US — I’ve just experienced as state sponsored violence against the communities that I’ve lived in. Releasing a violent predator just seems wrong, but US isn’t even trying to rehabilitate, there has to be an alternative.

roca• 7 years ago

It's not clear to me that she actually believes that.

It's unfortunate that a long, in-depth, sympathetic article titled "Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind" didn't make it clear to you whether Ruth Wilson Gilmore believes prison is necessary.

Personally I have taken prison abolitionists at their word, that they actually do want to abolish prisons. I have long been genuinely curious how they would handle serious crime in the complete absence of prisons. I expect this is the first thing most people would want to know about their program. It's surprising and disappointing that the article (and other articles I've read on this subject) fails to answer that question.

Grustaf8• 7 years ago

One good way to “change the narrative” is to come up with arguments.

I agree it would be nice to stop criminals from committing crimes in the first place, but until we achieve that we need prisons. And once we achieve it prisons are a moot point.

So it seems she should just focus on making criminals stop committing crimes, if she thinks that is possible. I don’t think she does believe that though, she’s probably not a complete fool

galfarragem• 7 years ago

Prisons might not help prevent crime but surely help prevent retaliations.

Victims that support keeping their offenders out of jail might exist but I'm not aware of such cases.

zacherates• 7 years ago

Here's a statement from someone robbed at gunpoint doing exactly that (arguing to keep the perpetrator out of prison): https://twitter.com/stainerson/status/1125956097997774850

chr1• 7 years ago

The article doesn't propose any practical ways of reducing the number prisoners. Simply letting everyone out and hoping for the best doesn't seem to be a good plan.

One thing that could work for non-violent crimes, would be a bracelet that records all conversations and all movements of wearer, making recidivism very hard. Of course attempts to destroy the bracelet should be punished by real prison terms.

Is Prison Necessary?

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