Prisons will still be necessary for the most egregious and irredeemable criminals. The sad reality is that there are certain people who simply need to be sequestered from the rest of society for the general public’s safety, and no amount of rehabilitation or intervention will solve that. But that should be the exception, not the norm. The massive prison population is absolutely a problem, but it isn’t something that can be completely abolished. It may be called something else in the future (like a long-term involuntary mental health facility,) but it’s still serving the same basic function while wearing a more friendly mask.
It could be abolished in the sense that the “location where we keep the most irredeemable people in society, who absolutely can not be left unsupervised” may not be a “prison”, but some other secure facility that maximizes the ability of these people to make whatever contribution they may be able to make to society.
but some other secure facility that maximizes the ability of these people to make whatever contribution to society they may be able to make to society.
Yeah, I touched on that with my last sentence:
It may be called something else in the future (like a long-term involuntary mental health facility,) but it’s still serving the same basic function while wearing a more friendly mask.
There are two problems with that. The first is that “maximizing contribution to society” can easily be interpreted as “being forced to stamp license plates for 16 hours a day.” We already know this is a possible interpretation, because that’s how our system already interprets it. Either way they’re locked up against their will, and are being forced to perform labor to someone else’s benefit. The very nature of their confinement means that any contribution they make will be for someone else and not themselves. And the simple word for that is “slavery”. The second problem is that it’s still prison. We haven’t actually solved the prison problem at all in this scenario; We’ve simply given it a mask so we can say prisons have been abolished. Like if we don’t call them prisons, we can say we don’t have any prisoners.
My bad for the lack of reading before replying
They will be locked up against their will, unfortunately (until a future society figures out something better)
They don’t need to be forced to stamp license plates under socialism (prison abolition can’t happen under capitalism ofc), but if work were available to them they could receive a fair wage. That would not be slavery, it would be imprisonment, i guess (did I contradict my original point? Idk Maybe, but I still see it as fundamentally different than how a “prison” is defined in the 2020s).
Also “prison abolition” doesn’t need to be literal, it’s just a goal to work towards over many generations. Is it even viable? Who knows, but it’s not gonna get figured out during our lifetimes anyway. In the meantime, we can start to restructure our society in a way that will minimize the scale of prisons, and maybe our grandchildren will find a way to phase them out totally, but that’s their problem.
