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Anti-Prison Movement

The individuals and organizations that comprise the contemporary anti-prison movement are working to create a world without prisons. This national and international force is also known as the prison abolition movement. Prison abolitionists believe that imprisoning people does not prevent crime, make society safer, or address the root causes of crime and violence. Instead, anti-prison activists locate the root causes of crime in pervasive inequality, structural oppression, and a dominant culture of violence. They also question the definitions of crime and criminal and seek to dismantle state violence and capitalism, which play key roles in the criminalization of entire communities. The foundations of existing efforts to abolish prisons lie in the earlier prison abolitionist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The existence of a prison-industrial complex provides the political and economic context of the contemporary movement and serves as the target of anti-prison activists.

To achieve the anti-prison movement's long-term goal of solving social problems and generating public safety without warehousing millions of people, organizers work to educate the public about the problems with prisons, prevent the construction of new prisons, promote alternatives to incarceration, and implement community-based solutions to violence. A diversity of people and organizations are involved in working toward a world without prisons, including grassroots organizations, prisoners and former prisoners, activist-scholars, policy advocacy groups, youth organizers, and artists. Many anti-prison activists also participate in movements to end violence against women, stop police brutality, protect the rights of prisoners, increase funding for education and social services, free political prisoners, and stop environmental injustice, among other progressive goals.

Arguments for Prison Abolition

Prisons do not make society safer. Prisons are used to punish offenders after a violent crime has been committed; they do not prevent violence from occurring. Incarceration also fails to protect people from state violence such as police brutality. Instead, imprisonment increases violence by subjecting nonviolent offenders to violent conditions in prison, such as rape and assault by other prisoners and prison guards. Some of these previously nonviolent offenders go on to commit acts of violence once they are released, after having lived in such a violent environment.

Prisons do not address the root causes of crime. Most crime and violence are caused by economic inequality, structural oppression, and a pervasive culture of violence, not moral failures or individual pathologies. Many people commit crime because they have limited legal means to gain resources needed for their own survival. Forms of oppression engrained within social structures exclude entire groups from opportunities for legal employment and adequate income. Society also promotes a culture of violence through mass media, government policies, and dominant values that celebrate violence, especially violence against women. Rather than addressing these economic and cultural causes of crime, prisons exacerbate the social conditions that fuel it.

Prisons do not address the needs of crime victims or offenders. Incarceration does not help to repair the harm done to individuals who have suffered losses as the result of crime. Similarly, instead of allowing communities to meet existing needs, through drug treatment or quality mental health care, for instance, incarceration simply isolates those in need. Most prisoners have been victims of crime before their own involvement in committing crime. By only considering the most recent act of victimization and fostering an artificial binary between “victims” and “perpetrators,” the criminal punishment system fails to holistically address the needs of everyone affected by crime and violence.

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