By Dymitri Linus Harszewski
After seeing a number of articles in the Vanguard Incarcerated Press about prison reform, I thought I might offer another perspective, something ideologically related to my last essay here, “The Faulty Logic of Punishment.”
As an out-and-proud anarchist, I’m sometimes asked how I can favor abolishing prisons entirely over simply “reforming” them. The people, who read my blog (betweenthebars.org/blogs/1660) or who find me through the websites of various anarchist and abolitionist organizations tend to be genuinely interested in discussing these ideas, but other prisoners rarely ask about it with sincerity.
More often, they only want to flex their parole-board bona fides and demonstrate the comprehensiveness of their brainwashing by demolishing a straw man. Without a doubt, this is not what I expected from my fellow captives when I first entered this system. The reality is, despite the abundance of circle-A tattoos, prisons are profoundly conservative places, entirely dominated by system justifiers and authoritarian 
mentalities – and that’s just among the inmates.
Nevermind the psychoses of the guards and other employees. American prisons, and California prisons, especially since the “realignment,” push of the past decade, are places where critical thinking goes to die and where the caged learn to thoroughly internalize their oppression and identify with their badge-brandishing victimizers. Nevertheless, one cannot judge these prisoners too harshly for their perversity; after all, psychoanalysts from Freud to Wilhelm Reich and beyond have described the human tendency to conform our minds to “authority figures” and others who give us the attention we crave.
Stockholm Syndrome is a well recognized phenomenon among hostages of all sorts, from battered wives to political prisoners. Perhaps we should talk more about the soul-wrecking “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” Schemes foisted on prisoners for “rehabilitation,” but for now let’s just consider abolition as a social and moral imperative.
The first thing that most people ask when they hear that abolitionists categorically oppose human caging is, “But then what will we do with all the Bad People?” In prison, this is often connected to the emotional appeal of a convicted “criminal” adding “… you know, with someone like ME?” And since no thoughtful abolitionist can give them the satisfyingly simple answer they demand, reformist prison supporters then insist that trying to eliminate prison is unrealistic; even downright irresponsible in the absence of a clear plan for what we would “put in its place.”
But not every removed thing can or should be replaced by something comparable. What do we put in the place of an excised tumor? Well, nothing, of course. We treat the wound and try to prevent a relapse while hopefully remedying the conditions which caused the cancer in the first place. Elimination of prisons is not so different.
Reactionary dismissals of abolitionism typically assume that abolitionists are just demolishing prisons (perhaps converting the rubble into something socially useful, like filler for potholes), while leaving intact the entire societal context in which those prisons flourished. But abolitionists are not so naive, and prison abolitionism must not be understood as a merely negative enterprise of removal. Rather, abolition is fundamentally constructive.
Those of us who wish to eradicate the very concept of incarceration also mean to radically reimagine and reconstruct the elements of society that made prisons appear so necessary in the first place. Prison abolitionists may recoil at calls for “prison reform, but we aren’t militant anti-reformists, either. We simply insist on reforming the deeper causes of discontent and dissociation that lead to most individual and collective harms.
Abolitionists emphatically oppose the time-wasting and counter-productive tinkering with dehumanizing systems, like prisons, especially since such “reform” just gives those destructive systems space to shield themselves from meaningful criticism by ceaselessly squawking about distractions, like “crime upticks” and glorifying the grisly spectacle of State-imposed punishment. We must remember that reform implies a desire to improve something we want to retain, and the last thing any humane society needs are “better”, more invisible warehouses for storing inconvenient or surplus human beings.
In her book, We Do This ‘Til We Free US, Mariame Kaba argues that abolitionists do not bear the burden of presenting a fully-formed blueprint for precisely how prisons will end and what will be done about the “Dangerous People” before we can condemn these obviously calamitous institutions.
After all, we regularly acknowledge the need to eliminate harmful things from our lives even before knowing exactly how to go about it or what all the ramifications will be.
For example, we do not try in advance to predict and counteract every conceivable consequence before we yank our hands away from hot objects, though there may be unintended effects that could’ve been avoided with a bit more thought.
Sometimes we just have to act quickly, and that’s precisely abolition’s point: if we squarely acknowledge the catastrophe of prisons, then we can – as we must – begin to think seriously about creating a society in which we need never again be burned by an obsession with human caging, much less by the social and economic conditions that tricked us into thinking no alternative to inventing and embracing these dungeons to begin with.
Incidentally, when inmates ask what my abolitionism says about how THEY Should have been handled when they were in the depths of their addictions and antisocial destructiveness, I sometimes ask in response; “How long did prison exist before your personal reign of terror began? Because, if prisons are so effective and necessary for preventing crime, then why didn’t their long existence stop you from hurting others in the first place? As it turns out, few have ever asked themselves anything like that before. It’s not an insight that the prison rehabilitation cartels are keen to encourage.
The movement for prison abolition is practical and realistic. And now that society is beginning to ask meaningful questions about this mutant leviathan that has been created in its name, abolitionism challenges us to keep them at the forefront of our thinking about the presumed value of incarceration and what the alternatives to it may be.
