this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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My partner studies criminology, and a guest lecturer came to speak about prison abolition. I was curious about what should happen to serial killers, so she sent him and email and this was his response:
"Thanks for getting in touch - I'm glad you've been talking with your friends about abolition! Believe it or not, this is probably the most common question abolitionists get and I think it's an important one. Prison abolition isn't about opening the prison doors overnight. It's a long-term strategy that aims to prevent the creation of future 'serial killers' by creating a less violent society in the first place. However, even in more peaceful society without prisons, people will continue to hurt each other and sometimes quite seriously. For people who pose a serious and immediate threat to the lives of others, they would need to be securely detained and/or supervised. This would not need to be in a prison, however. A prison involves collecting up all those people. An abolitionist alternative would be for that small number of people to be managed in the communtiy, with pretty strong supervision so that they don't get the opportunity to commit the kind of violence you're talking about. They would also get consistent access to habilitation programmes that are consistently found to be more effective in reducing violence than in-prison programme.
Of course, this is a miniscule group of people and the group of people who cause far more death and destruction are on the boards of corporations that contribute to issues like pollution. An estimated 3,300 people die from pollution in NZ every year - compared to about 50 for murder. https://www.ehinz.ac.nz/indicators/air-quality/health-effects-of-air-pollution/#more-than-3300-deaths-from-human-made-air-pollution-in-2016"
I thought this could answer your question as well. I hope you find it useful
Thanks for the explanation. While I definitely agree that offenses exist that should not result in prison time, I cannot agree with the above. This assumes that people are reasonable and can at least learn to be considerate of others.
For example, in the case of white-collar crime where psychopathic CEO/Shareholders/etc consistently find ways to increase profits at the expense of everyone else, I think prison is the only place they should ever be. There's a difference between a guy selling tinnies and a guy who offloads HIV infected blood to poorer countries and infects thousands of people.
Until we have a societal shift that eliminates the possibility of being solely profit (or selfishly) motivated, I would like to keep the prisons.
Maybe white collar criminals could be disallowed from positions of power or authority. I don't know if they would be able to do much harm stacking shelves at Countdown. It's fair to think they deserve prison because of the horrible things they've done, but I think they could still be useful to the community in certain roles.
But I'm not too familiar with all the arguments. I'm not studying criminology
Yeah this seems like a relatively simple problem to fix in the grand scheme of abolition. Also worth noting that not having prisons doesn't mean not having a justice system. There would still be ways of identifying people that are doing bad things, and confirming that they are indeed doing those things. All that could remain as public as it is now (or more so), so folks would know who the white-collar crims are.
That last note on the larger group of people causing death & destruction is one I find really interesting. I watched a video a year or so ago from Philosophy Tube that among other things talked about what violence is, or can be. Which in a way flips the narrative on violent crime - at least the narrative you read in our major dailies or see on TV.
There's a lot of talk about the impact of violent crime, but if you start thinking about what violence is first, you realise violent crime is just a very narrow subset of violence that our system chooses to address. The same system ignores all sorts of other violence - or in some cases even supports it.
So then when you think, 'well why is this subset a crime, but all this other stuff isn't?', its not a long road to realising that a lot of stuff that isn't crime are activities that by design or not service to reinforce power & privilege. Which then starts to make you wonder about a whole bunch of other crime & justice issues in general, eg when a welfare recipient might get hounded for desperately grabbing some cash they weren't entitled to, but some rich person can fleece millions and get away with it.
I love Philosophy Tube! I saw that video, too. I agree; it's an eye-opening perspective
That's fantastic, thanks! The original article doesn't really tackle the subject of prison abolition, just that TPM want it. That email tells me a lot about how the system would work.
It didn't take much to convince me, but now I'm a fan of this approach (ok, to be fair I was already keen on a better system than putting all the minor criminals in a big group together to reenforce the behavior). Unfortunately we wouldn't see societal results within a couple of election cycles so it's hard to see how this could actually become reality without the risk of getting cut at the next government change. But this is the kind of future-thinking policy I like to see.
Seriously? Because one of the big advantages of prisons is that these people aren't being "managed in the community", they're kept away from the community for our safety.
Yes, seriously.
Remember, our society created these people because of the existing structure . The idea is not to let them out tomorrow, it's to work towards this as an end goal. As an example, Scandinavia already has murderers rehabilitating by being carefully monitored while being integrated with the community.
Also, we start out on the journey with a rough idea of how we think it will go. 100% chance it will not go exacly to plan, but we respond to change, and the end goal is feasible even if we have to adjust the path as we learn.
And lastly, what does it cost to put someone in prison? It's well over $100k a year per person. We could hire personal security details for everyone based on risk, and the cost would come out the same. Some people would need a couple of bodyguards, some would need one, and most would only need checkins more like parole.
The issue is that if you catch someone dealing weed and put them in prison, you make all their friends convicts. They lose their job (and almost any chance of ever getting another). You make their kids grow up with one parent, and you make your partner struggle to raise their kids on their own. This changes the path their life is on, and their kids.
If you instead got everyone to stay in the community (to start with, just those convicted of nonviolent offenses), they can keep their job, be there for their partner and kids, keep most of their friends.
Over time this changes the cycle producing criminals, cuts out a gang recruitment channel, and raises kids less likely to commit crimes themselves. It's a multigenerational change. Each step would not be a big jump, but I think an end goal of having no prisons is feasible. If it's truly not, we would work that out over the next few decades as we worked towards it. The worst thing that can come out of trying is a lower crime rate with a small number of very dangerous people still needing to be locked up.
Plus we have private companies running prisons, who very much don't want to see the cycle broken.
And I just want to reiterate that we don't just stop locking people up overnight. It's likely decades of small steps.
That is an absolutely massive jump from "let's not lock up stoners" to "let's not put murderers in prison" though.
Which definitely won't backfire at all.
The idea is to have it as an end goal. When all the non-violent prisoners are integrated in society and breaking the cycle, it may not seem like such a big jump. Plus, we will simply have a lot less violent criminals if people aren't locked up with others who think it's appropriate behaviour. Having a person that murdered someone living in a house with a 24/7 security detail isn't really that farfetched - and in 20 years is probably even more feasible, with newer technology.
My flippant response is to ask why such a commonly asked question isn't part of the lecture. Though maybe it was touched in briefly and easily forgotten.
Well to be fair they said its the most commonly asked question they get, which I think they meant in general. Probably people see a headline in stuff then post 'but whaddabout the muderers?'.
Most people in this country are too stupid, too racist, too cruel and too venegeful to even listen to somebody say something like this let alone accept it as policy.
They simply want prisoners to be hurt as much as humanly possible. If you told them you were going to torture them by peeling their skin off they would vote for you.
These people are genuinely completely out of touch with reality, aren't they?
I don't think the idea of people who have committed absolute atrocities being "managed in the community" will be a popular one with the voting public.
That was my thought. There's plenty of people who don't deserve prison, but then there's pedos and the guy who shot up the mosque.
The only reason those people even go to prison is because we can't be 101% certain they're guilty. If we could we'd just execute them. Then this might work.
A perfect society where we could manage low level criminality through empathy, rehabilitation in the community, and take mass murderers and slowly dissolve them in acid. A beautiful dream.
It just shows a lack of political understanding, in my view. If they talked about making societal changes and making more effort to rehabilitate prisoners, in order to lower our prison population, they would have a lot of support.
But this is just madness.
Surely you don't object to mass executions of criminals though.
Oh I have a follow up question that you may or may not know the answer to. On rereading, I noticed they used the term "habilitation", not "rehabilitation". Is there significance in this distinction?
I think the idea behind habilitation is that people who've spent most of their lives in the prison system were never properly integrated into society in the first place- rehabilitation implies return to a prior level of fitness that wouldn't apply here.
Ah thanks! This is the kind of think I thought might have been implied by using that term.
I'm not sure, sorry
Thanks for the answer it’s naïveté is astounding.