Abolish the police!

Abolish prisons! You’ve probably encountered these phrases on social media over the past few years.

Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020,  these rallying cries have  grown across the United States. Prison abolition, which was once  seen as extreme and unrealistic,  is now a full-blown social movement. But however you feel about this, you probably have some questions.

And political theory can help us navigate them. I'm Ellie Anderson and this  is Crash Course Political Theory. [THEME MUSIC] In her 2003 book “Are Prisons Obsolete?,” Angela Davis wrote that  “the prison is considered so  ‘natural’ that it is extremely  hard to imagine life without it.” And when you consider that the US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, it’s easy to see why that’s the case. We tend to assume prisons have always existed,  but they’ve only been around in the  Western world since the late 1700s.

Sure, there were jails before  that, for short-term confinement,  but nothing like the long-term  carceral system we have today. So, I wanted to know: what’s the rationale behind our current form of prison-based punishment? Before the late 1700s in  England and colonial America,  almost everything was punishable by death.

Which — yikes! Calm down, ye olde folks. In this context, the idea of prisons was seen by some as a humane alternative.

Which brought me to the 19th-century  philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who argued that the point of punishing lawbreakers is to keep people from breaking the law —also known as deterrence. Which you can do in two ways. You can deter would-be criminals by having a serious enough penalty, scaring them out of committing  the crime in the first place.

Or, you can deter repeat offenders by physically stopping them from doing it again. Like by locking them up. And/or, using a strategy Bentham thought was even more effective: surveillance.

Bentham envisioned a prison where someone is always watching…or at least might be. Imagine a circular building with  an open space in the middle. The walls are lined with cells,  with one prisoner in each cell,  and in the middle there’s a watchtower.

A guard in this watchtower can  see into every single cell,  but the prisoners can’t see the guard. Of course, the guard can’t actually be looking in every cell at every minute, but the prisoners always know  the guard might be watching them. And so, Bentham thought, they would  be deterred from stepping out of line.

He called his creation the “panopticon.” If this sounds incredibly  creepy to you, you’re not alone! A hundred fifty years or so later,  the philosopher Michel Foucault  appropriated Bentham’s idea and  offered a new way of thinking about modern punishment and its  impacts on European society. To Foucault, the panopticon was a metaphor for  a power system that influenced  all parts of society, from prisons, to hospitals, to factories.

Wherever you go, and whatever you do, Big Brother might be watching. Foucault argued that people  who live under this system  of control eventually become their own wardens. They internalize the power structure and adjust their behavior accordingly—no prison necessary.

Which on one level sounds like deterrence at work. But it also sounds more than a little dystopian. In Foucault’s words, “the panopticon  presents a cruel, ingenious cage.” Today, some argue we’re all living  in a panopticon, digitally speaking.

People on both the left and  the right point to the state’s  increased ability to surveil  its citizens through technology, whether that means watching  security camera footage  or reading my group chats about The Bachelor. But, OK, even with that level of security, you can’t deter everybody from committing crimes. So what happens when they do?

And what do we hope to achieve by punishing them? I learned you can break down the intended purposes  of criminal punishment into  three overarching categories: retribution, reformation, and restoration. But first, I’m gonna need  to level up my coffee game… [funky music] Almost too pretty to drink.

When the point of criminal  justice is to avenge victims,  it’s called retributive justice. An eye for an eye. Today, very few political theorists, or even pro-prison advocates, would openly subscribe to this rationale,  which can feel very outdated,  or Game of Thrones-y.

Instead, the modern Western world  takes the reformative justice approach. This version doesn’t set out  only to penalize an offender  —it theoretically aims to  “correct” their behavior. You can hear it in the words we use: correctional facility, corrections officer.

Reformative justice thinks of criminality as  a condition that prison or  other sentences can treat. At least in theory, an offender  walks into prison a criminal  and comes out a law-abiding  citizen, ready to rejoin society. But here’s the thing — if we fail to make good  on efforts to reform people  who’ve committed crimes, we sort of end up with a retributive justice system, whether we like it or not.

That’s why, more recently, there’s been a greater push for a third way: restorative justice. Proponents argue neither  reformation nor retribution  addresses the needs of  everyone involved in a crime. In this view, crime isn’t  just a violation of the law;  it’s a violation of social relationships.

And to hold offenders  responsible for their actions  would require them to repair the harm done. For example, the Victim Offender Education Group pairs an offender with a surrogate victim — someone who’s been affected by a similar crime — to exchange their stories. The goal is to help both victim and offender find common ground and heal from the experience.

In this case, justice becomes about more than just punishing one individual. It’s about understanding the pain on both sides of the victim and offender relationship— what reformative justice  advocates want to normalize. It’s important to note that  experiments in restorative  justice have been on a relatively small scale.

We don’t have examples of it on a large-scale civic level, at least not yet. But whatever it might look like in practice, the prison abolition movement provokes us to think deeply about incarceration, and ask if these rationales for punishment really hold up. Let’s go back to Angela Davis, the prison abolitionist I mentioned at the beginning.

She gave a name to the network of systems that uses surveillance, policing, and imprisonment to address economic, social,  and political problems. She called it the Prison Industrial Complex,  which is a riff on the  “Military Industrial Complex,” a phrase you might’ve heard of before. Police forces, private prisons,  companies that provide food  to incarcerated people or use prison labor —they all benefit financially from incarceration.

And this is all wrapped up with pervasive racial inequalities in our country. Karim, can you throw that Black  American History episode onscreen? Thanks.

But what about the people who should   theoretically benefit from prisons — the people sent there to be reformed? Prison abolitionists make the case that prisons actually harm more than they help. Because of the growing number  of incarcerated people,  US prisons are overcrowded, which can affect living  conditions, safety, and access  to meaningful programs and mental health services.

Prisons isolate people, taking  them away from family and friends. And the harm can continue even  after a person is released  — having a record makes it hard to  get a job or find a place to live. So, if prison is meant to be reformative, but it ends up creating new harms, where does that leave us?

Well, that’s where the call  to abolish prisons comes in. To do so would require reducing the number of incarcerated people—in other words, decarceration. But then what?

There are people in prison who have  committed seriously violent offenses. Do we just… let them out? Turns out, most prison abolitionists have thought about this.

They tend to suggest replacing prison with other strategies to rehabilitate offenders, like restorative justice approaches, and offering  more robust services that  prevent crime before it even happens, like broader mental health  and substance abuse programs. And many people argue that there’s still a place for prisons, just a radically reduced one. Tommie Shelby, an advocate for prison reform,  agrees that most of the alternatives  that Angela Davis suggests —like rehab, mental health  support, and restorative justice—  are more effective crime deterrents  than the ones we have now.

But he argues that sometimes we’ll need to  incapacitate people who’ve  committed violent crimes, and we can’t reintroduce them to society. Still, the world he imagines  is one with way fewer prisons. And that word, “imagine,” is essential.

Political theory is about  imagining a better world, and part of that exercise is  to set aside the practical  considerations for a moment and  think about who we want to be. Contending with these ideas is  good and healthy, even if you,  and me, and everyone else watching  reach different conclusions. When it comes to prisons and mass incarceration, it can seem like the place we’re in is inevitable.

The prison abolition movement asks us to remember that it’s not inevitable, and that we are active agents in deciding the kind of world we want to live in. Next time, we’ll talk about utopia— and if it’s really too good to be true. See you then.

Thanks for watching this episode  of Crash Course Political Theory  which was filmed at the Basteel Studio, and was made with the help  of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash  Course free for everyone,  forever, you can join our community on Patreon.