The Need to Abolish the Prison System: An Ethical Indictment

The Need to

Abolish

the Prison System:

an ethical indictment

by Steve Martinot

Copyright 2014 Steve Martinot

Smashwords Edition

Table of Contents

The Problem of Prisons and Crime

The Judicial Machine

The Criminality of Punishment

The Social Anatomy of Criminalization

Social Criminality

Policing and the Structures of Racialization

The Cultural Effect of Prisons

Toward the Abolition of Prisons

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

The Problem of Prisons and Crime

Today, in the US, there are 2.5 million people in prison. ¹ This is more than any other country in the world. One could say it represents a serious social crisis. Or one could say that there is something happening in the US that is very wrong. If prisons are a means of maintaining social order, to use them in a wrong way makes a mockery of the idea of social order itself.

Prison is supposed to be a way to separate society from bad guys. But 2.5 million bad guys? That doesn't say much for US society. It is not a certificate of merit. Instead, maybe prison itself is a bad idea. But then, how do we think about what we owe all those people who have been the victims of that bad idea?

The abolition of prisons is today unthinkable. ² Perhaps that is because this society thinks it must teach people lessons when they stray, and the only way it can imagine doing that is through violence (all imprisonment is violence). To presume an entitlement to teach someone through violence is to assume a supremacy. The European aristocracy assumed a supremacy when it threw people in dungeons or tortured them to death. The colonists in Virginia assumed a supremacy when they enslaved Africans. Is the current problem just an assumption of a more civilized supremacy?

Perhaps prison abolition is unthinkable because the act of imprisonment is thought of as revenge. Many people relish the idea of saying about others, serves them right. Vengeance is satisfyingly self-justifying. But vengeance only responds to transgression with another transgression, to a crime with a crime, by definition. If vengeance is the inner logic of imprisonment, then imprisonment is only a huge criminal endeavor adding to the sum total of criminality. In that case, those clamoring for an end to crime and violence through more prisons and more executions find themselves calling for more social violence. Systematic violence, which is what prison represents, stands in contradiction to the very idea of social order. If the innermost logic of prisons is a bad idea, then the abolition of prisons will have to become thinkable. This essay will be an attempt to make it thinkable.

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There are 2.5 million people in prison in the US. This is far beyond the number of crimes committed in this society. It is more than in any other country, per capita as well as in absolute numbers. The US accounts for 5% of the world's population, but it has 25% of the world's prisoners. In addition, there are 5 million under the thumb of probation officers, and altogether a total of 8 million people disenfranchised as ex-felons. The vast majority are people of color. ³ Even governments that strictly suppress freedom of speech or oppositional political activity do not engage in this degree of imprisonment or social control. That is, the prison system in the US goes beyond the suppression of freedom of speech or political opposition. It obeys a drive for a different kind of suppression, a suppression about which we are not informed. Something else is happening for which we have been given no justification.⁴

Here's the problem. When you throw someone in prison for whatever reason, whether you call it justice or something else, you are committing a crime against that person. It is the crime of sequestering a person against their will. This is even recognized in law as a crime, most often called kidnapping. The law,however, decriminalizes its comparable act of imprisonment as punishment. Or rather, legislation decriminalizes it. In legalizing imprisonment, legislation acts against the meaning of its own law. But the fact that legislation can establish the concept that a convicted person deserves prison does not constitute a justification for legislation violating its own law. Instead, it constitutes a use of political definition, imposed on those subject to this law, and transformed by edict in justification . Someone may have been injured or harmed by the convicted person (which today is true only in a small minority of cases) for which the transgressor is to be punished. But both the substance of punishment and the form it takes as imprisonment remain arbitrary, the result of a political conjuring act.

Five percent of the prison population are there for having committed crimes of violence (murder, rape, assault, robbery with a weapon, kidnapping, etc.). Another 25% are there for non-violent crimes (white collar, fraud, forgery, theft, etc.). The rest, some 70%, are there for victimless crimes (drug possession, disobeying an officer, resisting (unjust) arrest, gambling, a variety of categories of consensual sexual activity, etc.). ⁵ Punishment for victimless crime violations constitutes the core of the prison system. Yet imprisonment for a victimless crime cannot be to avenge anyone. The people arrested and prosecuted for victimless crimes are the victims, not of criminals but of victimless crime laws.

Prisons constitute a form of victimization.

Though people of color make up only 25% of the total population, 75% of the prisoners in the US today are people of color. People of color do not commit proportionately more crimes than whites. The crime rates between those different communities are pretty much the same. But if the ratio of whites to people of color is three to one, and the ratio of white prisoners to prisoners of color is one to three, than a person of color has a nine to one greater chance of being imprisoned for a crime than a white person. This is a disparity that attaches to the arrested person and not to the crime itself. It is a disparity so great that it dispenses with any social pretense to equality before the law. Though legal rhetoric proclaims that every individual has equal rights in the judicial process, somewhere between the act of policing and the slam of a prison cell door, that equality gets transformed into a nine-to-oneinequality. In other words, it is an imbalance manufactured at the heart of the judicial machine. It is something that some people are doing to others. It is a policy enacted to create a racial disparity in prisons.

What crime is being avenged by this nine-to-one ratio, the crime of not being white? That is an absurdity so great that only a white supremacist could not see it as such. But for the rest of us, this disproportion must call in question the existence of the prison system as an instrument of an impermissible racialization being imposed on this society. The fact that it occurs under the cover of a supposed colorblindness renders the instrumentality of prison itself impermissible.

The Role of the Revenge Ethic

Popular consciousness about prisons, and general acceptance of the existence of a prison system, traditionally justifies itself as a system of revenge for transgression. That is, a revenge ethic informs social acceptance of government imprisonment policy. Many people justify imprisonment by saying, Look what the convicted guy did (if he really did it). He has to pay for that. He should be victimized in turn. And others will add, What about the victim? Doesn't the victim have any rights? Shouldn't the victim get recompense, or closure? These are arguments levied against procedures designed to grant rights to defendants. Leaving aside their assumption that the defendant is guilty before being tried, they also raise the issue of responsibility – responsibility for the victim as well as for punishing the (proven) perpetrator.

Surely an injury to a person occurs with the commission of a crime. And there is an injury to a community; in the person of the victim, there has been a transgression against all. The judicial machine pretends that this is so by calling itself the people, as in "the people vs. John Doe." But if each crime is a transgression against all, then a sense of community responsibility to the victim indeed becomes paramount. Insofar as the judicial machine's primary focus is on imprisoning a perpetrator, that is on committing a criminal act against those it convicts of crimes, then it is a community that must take up the task of responsibility of the victim.

But of what would that task consist, if it were really a community that took it up? Community involvement in the victim of an anti-social act would also have to be community involvement in the perpetrator of that act, as a community. In order to heal its torn fabric, the community would have a dual involvement, a concern toward both the victim and the perpetrator,and a need to bring the two together. That would be the response implied in its responsibility. It would imply an ethic of restoration rather than revenge. Those who call for revenge against the perpetrator out of concern for the victim (What about the victim?) are contradicting themselves on more than one level.

Furthermore, a community sense of responsibility could not just pick and choose. Its involvement in the victim must be a community involvement in all victims, including those of the judicial machine. It must include those who are victimized by imprisonment. Its concern must apply to all those victimized by biased prosecutions that substitute a nine-to-one incarceration ratio for equality before the law.

Instead, the more general social response (by prosecutors and spectators) is a call for avenging the wrong (allegedly) done by the convicted person to another (we will see that that is rarely ascertained). It is a call that rationalizes imprisonment as vengeance. But revenge is always an act designed to respond to a criminal act with an equal and opposite criminal act. Repetition is its essential nature. The desire for vengeance is always a desire to take the law into one's own hands, which means to dispense with the constraint of law. Its purpose is to make someone suffer for what they did. The revenge ethic thus erases the difference between crime and punishment. It proposes to bargain a suffering for a suffering. Its reality is the commission of a crime in response to a crime.

But those who seek to justify imprisonment also speak about the rights of the victim. The concept of the rights of the victim has also been used but to negate the rights of the accused, prior to trial and thus prior to conviction (we shall deal with the issue of lynching below). That is, rights are used as a call for violence as well as vengeance. It is a