Back in 2023, I did a post called “Why Can’t Everything Be Free?” and people were asking, “Is this how far our society has gone downhill? Are there people so dumb that we need to explain to them why everything can’t just be free?”
Yes, there are.
Many of them are probably the same people who think that we don’t need prisons. Now you might think people like that are just random idiots on Reddit, but many of these people are prominent on the Left.
Like whom?
Well, let me give you just a few examples.
Briahna Joy Gray, a political correspondent who used to be Bernie Sanders’ press secretary:
Francesca Hong, who’s running for governor of Wisconsin:
New Yorker Darializa Avila Chevalier, who was strongly supported by Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, will be representing a Democratic district in Congress starting in November:
Zohran Mamdani, the current mayor of NYC, has said he doesn’t even know what purpose prisons serve:
So, how feasible is it to abolish prisons? Most of us would reflexively say, “It couldn’t work,” but is that true?
Not necessarily.
What if we had a system where minor crimes required caning? Thieves that were caught would have to pay restitution for their crimes, have their hands chopped off, or become debt slaves. More serious crimes? Those would merit banishment, perhaps to some Third World hellhole that we could pay off to take the dregs of American society and, of course, we’d want to dramatically expand the death penalty.
Has anyone ever done anything like this since humanity got past the tribe/small town state of development?
Sort of.
Ireland, along with some places in Africa, tried this.
However, it has been hundreds of years since any society fully abandoned the idea of jails. That’s largely because a system without prisons obviously tended to make a lot more sense when we lived in small groups, and everyone knew each other.
When a group of humans was 150 people who saw each other every day and took orders from a chieftain, if somebody stole 4 chickens (“I bet it was that damn Bill again!”), they had much less of a chance of getting away with it, which made them less likely to commit a crime in the first place. If Bill was a useless criminal, he might be told he could leave the tribe or die, which often ended up being basically the same thing.
In a country with 342 million people that stretches 2,800 miles coast-to-coast, you don’t have the familiarity with the people around you that made these systems more feasible when we were divided into tribes.
It’s also worth noting that many of the things I suggested above COULD BE DONE NOW as an alternative to prison. We could start caning people by the tens of thousands as an alternative to jail, executing them by the tens of thousands, and banishing career criminals from the country. Conservatives aren’t the brake on that. I wouldn’t be surprised if three-quarters of conservatives would support all of those ideas if they thought they could be implemented.
The people who don’t want to do any of those things are the same left-wingers that want to abolish prisons and defund the police. Liberals may love aborting innocent babies, but they hate the idea of putting people like Ted Bundy to death. Caning? You’ve got to be kidding me. Deporting American criminals? Liberals don’t even want to deport illegal aliens who aren’t supposed to be in our country in the first place.
So, you may ask, “What is their alternative to prisons?”
Mostly it’s childlike naivete. You know, “We’ll get them counseling, help them understand that they hurt people, and give them more societal support and soon they’ll become some of our best citizens!”
The fact that in places like NYC, where you have career criminals with 40+ arrests that have been coddled for a decade plus, still roaming around and causing havoc on the subways doesn’t faze them at all.
It’ll just magically work somehow.
Well, you may say, “What’s their answer for the worst of the worst? The serial killers, mass murderers and serial rapists?”
From what I’ve seen, the prison abolitionists really don’t have one. They just know that being against putting people in prison makes them sound kind and compassionate, so details like that will be figured out later.
So, what would happen if they really got their way and there were no more prisons?
Well, murders would soar into the stratosphere by necessity because if the law won’t keep order, other people will need to step up to create order. Think “Hatfields and McCoys” or “Shootout at the O.K. Corral”:
You kill my cousin, and you’re getting off with some counseling? The only way to get justice for him is to kill you. One of your guys killed one of our guys? Then we need to kill three of yours to send a message. What are you going to do? Send a social worker to tell us that’s bad? Lol.
There’s a reason every society on earth today either puts people in prison themselves, or if they’re tiny enough, like say the Vatican, they ship people out to be imprisoned elsewhere.
It works.
Criminals that go to prison can’t commit more crimes against the public while they’re in prison. It’s also a strong deterrent to crime because almost nobody wants to end up in prison. If you don’t believe that, look at El Salvador, which has gone from “the murder capital of the world” to a safe vacation spot since Nayib Bukele took over and jailed every gang member they could catch:
Abolish prisons? No. Put more career criminals in prison for much longer time periods. That is a much better way to address crime.
We’re literally talking about people that somehow made it to adulthood while having the mental capacity of a five year old. In prior generations, most of these people would be in institutions, destitute and living in squalor, or dead. Now they get elected to Congress and Mayor.
I have personal experience with this. After my parents divorced, my mother married my step-father who was an absolute POS. He convinced. my mother to move to Santa Cruz, CA in 1972. We had lived in a conservative farming town in Central CA. He wanted to move to isolate us kids. He was abusing us when mom was away.
We moved to Santa Cruz and it was a culture shock. Many of the hippies in San Francisco had migrated to Santa Cruz. It was extremely liberal. In the spirit of equal rights, women could walk around town without a shirt. The local courts ruled that if men can do it, so can women. There was a clothing optional beach and it was also the only beach that you could run your dogs. My mom loved her dogs. It was my job to take them to the beach to run them at least 4 times a week. We did not live far from the beach.
So I witnessed nudity and people engaged in sexual activity. I was 10. People smoked pot openly, including the police that were patrolling the beach and boardwalk area.
My step-father became even more physically abusive. He never did it when mom was around. Mom just thought we were all prone to accidents because we needed stitches often and there were more than a few broken bones.
I finally had it and told my mother. She had a talk with him and said he denied it and I was mistaking discipline for abuse. Then mom took me to the doctor because I had lost 40 pounds within a year. I was overweight by about 15 lbs before we moved (I weighed 80 lbs) and my doctor was working with me. The idea was to eat a little less and exercise more. In a couple of years, I would grow into my weight. I started riding my bike at least 2 hours every day. It was not a chore, it was fun riding around the neighborhood playing games on our bikes with my friends.
When I got down to 40 lbs, mom knew something was wrong. The doctor examined me without my mom present. He saw the bruises that were hidden by my clothing. He just asked me who was beating me, I told him my step-father. He called my mother in to show her and then said he was reporting it to the police. He left the room for a few minutes and came back to inform mom that the police were on their way to the office and we needed to wait. The officers entered, the doctor showed them the bruises, pictures were taken and report was made. The officers then told us to wait, they were on their way to arrest my step-father.
I thought it was over. Well, he gets to court and makes a plea deal, 6 weeks of counseling. At the end of that, I was told I was making him angry and I needed to bye nicer.
Well, it was okay for a few months, then he went back at it. He just got better at it and made threats what would happen if I ever told. I eventually reached a point where death was preferable to the daily beatings, so I told my mother. Wash, rinse, and repeat. 6 weeks of counseling. I knew I was screwed then. My mother wanted to divorce him but the counselor and our church told her not to. So he came back home.
A few months later, it started again. Then he started the sexual abuse. That was a nightmare. Then one day, when I was 12, he stripped my sister in front of us children and was fondling her telling her he was getting her ready for sex. He had my brother, who was 5 years younger, get involved. When he left for work, I made plans to leave. The next morning, I boarded a bus for our hometown. I then called my grandmother and told her what I was doing, when I arrived at the city I needed to transfer busses. She picked me up then called my mother. Mom already knew, my step-father figured it out and confessed that he was beating me again. He knew I was going to tell about the sexual abuse.
Mom brought all the kids to my grandmother's, returned and put the house up for sale. She told him she was divorcing him. I was promised that he would never be in my life again.
Well, the courts in Santa Cruz gave him 6 more weeks of counseling. Then he moved back to where we were living and joined our church. He was a Catholic, we were Baptists, but he switched to convince my mother he was reformed. He did several months of counseling with our pastor who then convinced my mom to not divorce him. I was beyond angry.
He was good at controlling himself for several months. Then he lost it and beat my brother. A few minutes later he left for his bowling league. I called the police. This was different. They took pictures and a report. They called my mom and told her she had to be home in 30 minutes or we would go to the local children's home. She left work immediately. By the time she got home, he was arrested. The next day CPS showed up and made it clear, if she ever let him back, she would lose us kids.
After a week, he was released from jail with a court date for felony child abuse. He tried to make the same deal as before. In this county, they did not make deals, he could either plead guilty as charged or go to trial.
As the court date got closer, he realized he was going away for a very long time. He got wind that I was going to testify. I told the DA he did much more but I was not going to talk until I was in court. I wanted to be sure I was heard and it could not be swept under the rug. My step-father learned about this and knew, I was going to spill the sexual abuse and the sex crimes he committed in Santa Cruz. He was the Santa Cruz rapist that was drugging and raping coeds from UC Santa Cruz.
So he decided that I had to go. He had a rifle that he swore to the judge that he did not have. Was was not to possess firearms while he was awaiting trial. That worked. He came after me when I was delivering papers. I am thankful he was lousy shot. I insatiately knew it was him and tore out of there. I knew of several places I could hide from him. A customer saw me and I told her to call the police, the gunshots were from my step-father.
As a result, he ended up dead.
Counseling never helped, it just made him hide it better. He was afraid of prison. He knew what happened to child molesters. When he knew he was going away and he could not talk his way out of it, he was willing to resort to murder. The note he left behind made it clear. He would rather face murder charges than those he would face when I testified.
Today, prison time is not much of a deterrent. Chances are good that that most sentenced to prison will be out quickly due to time off for good behavior or prison overcrowding. They can also spend years filing appeal after appeal. Even before the trial, they will be free awaiting trial. They can use that time to harass potential witnesses or commit more crimes. Our legal system no longer protects the victims and the innocent. It protects the criminals. It has gone so far in the wrong direction that I expect vigilante justice to become common.
The liberals cannot fathom that there are predators in society. They cannot be fixed by therapy. All prison does for them is to make them better criminals.
Prison is not about reforming criminals, it is to keep them away from society. It makes society safer for the law abiding.
I also believe that those in prison need to earn their keep. Why should society pay to keep them isolated so they cannot harm the innocent. We need to go back to prison farms and other prison industries where they have to work to cover the cost of incarceration.