Knopp, Fay Honey (1918–1995)

Instead of Prisons

Instead of Prisons puts forward a strategy for diminishing/dismantling the prison system that consisted of five stages: moratorium, decarceration, excarceration, restraint of the few, and building the caring community. The moratorium required communities to stop building prisons and jails while creating the space to develop nonpunitive programs, processes, policies, and philosophies. Decarceration strategies focused on depopulating jails and prisons. Excarceration meant a halt to putting people behind bars in the first place. Restraint of the few was [Page 528]defined as follows: “For the very small percentage of lawbreakers who need to be limited in movement for some periods of time in their lives, a monitoring and review procedure should be established with the goal of working out the least restrictive and most humane option for the shortest period of time” (Knopp et al., 1976, p. 63, emphasis in original). Building the caring community, the important end piece of this approach, was a method of providing the empowerment and support of prisoners through community support services, peer-assistant groups, victim assistance and restitution, and voting rights and constitutional guarantees.

A weakness of Instead of Prisons, Knopp felt, was its discussion of the dangerous few, including sex offenders, about whom little was then known. If prisons were abolished, she felt that incarceration, at least as we generally perceive it, should not be used for these offenders regardless of their potential or perceived dangerousness. However, their dangerousness, and their possible threat to personal as well as public safety, was of great concern to her, and she felt that the remedies to replace imprisonment of such offenders was described inadequately in Instead of Prisons. In typical fashion, she started to examine what could be done with this population, a project that only grew larger and was not completed before her untimely death.

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