Abolitionism

Prisons and jails have been condemned, at least by some, for as long as they have existed. In the nineteenth century, concern about the inappropriate use of imprisonment led to such reform measures as probation and parole, which were seen as alternatives to jails and prisons. In the 1930s, many reform agents were critical of the conditions of confinement suffered by those men and women detained or sentenced in jails and prisons. Sanford Bates, the first director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, wrote in Prisons and Beyond (1936) that the prisons cannot solve society's problems and they must be must be destroyed “root and branch.” By this, he meant that the existing conditions of confinement must be changed; he did not challenge the use of confinement itself as a reponse to violations of the law. Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, however, reform advocates grew increasingly wary of efforts to reform the penitentiary and urged the abolition of jails and prisons. By this, they meant that these facilities should no longer exist and that greater attention should be given to the roots of crime and criminality. This position came to be known as “prison abolitionism.”

Abolitionism is an international movement, with its main advocates coming from such nations as Canada, England, New Zealand, Norway, and The Netherlands (Consedine 1990, 1995; Culhane 1979, 1985, 1991; Morris 1983, 1989, 1995; van Swaaningen 1997). In the United States, the most profound statement of support for abolitionism is the document Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists (Knopp et al. 1976), prepared by the Prison Research Education Action Project (PREAP). Instead of Prisons gives the following explanation of abolitionism:

In retrospect, it is clear that this abolitionist statement gave early expression to such subsequent reform movements as victims' rights, community justice, safe communities, and restorative and transformative justice. Abolitionism has also given emphasis to different strategies for change, ranging from simply abolishing prisons to abolishing the entire criminal justice apparatus, a perspective proposed by the Philadelphia lawyer Gilbert Cantor (1976), as well as by Dutch law professors Herman Bianchi (1994) and Louk Hulsman (van Swaaningen 1997).

Thus, there is a difference between the terms penal abolition and prison abolition. Prison abolitionism focuses directly on prisons and jails, while penal abolitionism focuses on the whole criminal justice process. The prison abolitionist might say that society should no longer incarcerate people, because prisons and jails are damaging, harmful, and overly expensive places that citizens should no longer support.

However, the penal abolitionist might further assert that people do not find themselves in jail or prison by accident; rather, they are sent there after a [Page 2]series of decisions have been made. Some of these decisions are a person's own, and they result in the commission of criminal offenses that trigger the criminal justice process. More important, however, decisions that result in incarceration are also made throughout the criminal justice process, by personnel from police officers on the beat to parole officers supervising men and women under their care. Because incarceration results from a whole array of decisions made by criminal justice personnel and processes, many advocates and theoreticians have preferred the term penal abolition, by which they mean not just stopping the incarceration of people but also changing the nature of the process by which people have come to be incarcerated.

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