Op-Ed | What Prison Abolition Is—and Why ‘Forks and Dorms’ Matter

In the United States, where incarceration has become a normalized feature of public life, prison abolition still strikes many as an impossible idea. What would we do without prisons? What about the dangerous people? Who would keep us safe?

But abolitionists aren’t naïve. They know this system cannot be undone overnight, nor should it be. Instead, they offer a different vision—one rooted not in chaos or fantasy, but in a deep, moral reckoning with what our society chooses to punish and what it chooses to ignore. Abolition is about building something better by asking bold questions and pursuing real alternatives.

It begins with a simple idea: prisons don’t work. At least not in the ways we’re told they do. Prisons in the United States fail to rehabilitate, fail to deter crime, and instead entrench cycles of poverty, violence, and racial injustice. More than two million people are incarcerated in this country, and millions more are tethered to the carceral state through probation, parole, surveillance, and fines. The scale is vast—but so is the harm.

Prison abolition is not about walking away from accountability. It’s about transforming the systems that define justice in America. It’s about addressing root causes: poverty, trauma, addiction, untreated mental illness, and systemic racism. And it’s about imagining—then building—community-based systems of care, not cages.

Abolitionists don’t begin with punishment. They begin with harm. When someone is hurt, what would healing look like? When someone causes harm, how do we repair it, reduce it, and prevent it from happening again?

Restorative justice is one such practice. Unlike the adversarial model of courts and prosecutors, restorative justice brings together the person who caused harm, the person harmed, and community members to seek accountability, restoration, and healing. It doesn’t erase harm—it confronts it with honesty, rather than punishment. Dozens of programs across the country have shown that restorative practices can reduce recidivism and bring closure in ways traditional punishment rarely does.

Meanwhile, abolitionists are pushing for decarceration (reducing the number of people locked up) and excarceration (preventing incarceration in the first place). They demand an end to the War on Drugs and the criminalization of poverty. They call for the decriminalization of addiction and for non-police crisis response teams—like CAHOOTS in Eugene, Oregon—to respond to mental health calls instead of armed officers.

And above all, they urge reinvestment: moving resources away from prisons and into housing, education, healthcare, and jobs. In this vision, safety isn’t produced by punishment—it’s nurtured through equity.

Nowhere is this vision clearer than in how abolitionists contrast the U.S. prison system with models abroad—particularly in Norway. In Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change, Maria Hawilo uses two surprisingly powerful symbols: forks and dorms.

In the U.S., incarcerated people eat with plastic sporks or their hands. They are confined in cages, surveilled at all hours, and denied even the smallest gestures of humanity. The environment itself is dehumanizing.

In Norway, by contrast, people incarcerated are given real forks and knives. They prepare and share meals communally. They live in dorm-style housing—small, private rooms with windows, desks, even kitchens. The architecture reflects a fundamental belief: the punishment is the loss of liberty, not the loss of dignity. And when you treat people like human beings—like neighbors-in-progress—they’re more likely to return to society ready to thrive, not reoffend.

“Forks and dorms” are not just symbolic. They embody a radically different ideology. Where the U.S. prison system is designed for control, Norway’s is designed for return. Where our system assumes dangerousness by default, theirs assumes responsibility unless proven otherwise.

Even in the U.S., experiments inspired by Norway—like those in North Dakota—have led to reduced use of solitary confinement, more positive staff-resident relationships, and improved reentry outcomes. These aren’t utopias. They’re proof that humane incarceration is possible—and that the alternative to brutality isn’t chaos, but care.

One of the most common misconceptions about abolition is that it calls for immediate, sweeping elimination of prisons and police. In truth, abolitionists know this work will take time. As Fay Honey Knopp wrote decades ago, it is a “long-range goal”—an ideal to orient our actions, not a purity test to enforce.

The path forward is a “build and dismantle” approach: dismantling harmful institutions while simultaneously building alternatives. That means reducing police roles in nonviolent situations, while investing in violence prevention. It means ending cash bail and expanding pretrial support services. It means pushing progressive prosecutors to decline low-level prosecutions while also changing the laws that allow such prosecutions in the first place.

Critically, abolitionists distinguish between reformist reforms—which make the current system more efficient—and abolitionist reforms, which shrink its power, budget, and legitimacy. Banning chokeholds while increasing funding for policing is a reformist reform. Redirecting traffic stops to civilian agencies is abolitionist.

The goal is not to perfect the system. The goal is to outgrow it.

Perhaps the most radical part of abolition isn’t its policies—it’s its imagination. It dares to ask: what if safety didn’t require cages? What if healing didn’t require punishment? What if our budgets reflected our values?

These questions aren’t academic. In California, where the housing crisis grows more dire each year, the state spends over $100,000 annually per person in prison—more than double what it spends per student in public schools. What if that money went to housing, job training, and community mental health instead?

What if we built communities where harm is less likely to happen in the first place?

That’s what abolition asks us to consider. It’s not a reckless dismantling. It’s a moral awakening. One that sees dignity, even in people who’ve caused harm. One that believes in second chances, even for those we’re taught to fear. One that refuses to accept cages as the price of safety.

When we hear about “abolition,” we often hear fear. What about the worst-case scenario? What if someone gets hurt?

But ask yourself this: what about the worst-case scenario under the current system? Because people are already being hurt—often by the very institutions meant to protect them.

Abolition isn’t about ignoring harm. It’s about refusing to compound it. It’s about believing that safety is not built through punishment, but through justice. Real justice. The kind that comes with food on the table, a roof overhead, a counselor who listens, a teacher who believes in you.

The kind that doesn’t require cages.

In the end, prison abolition isn’t about being soft on crime. It’s about being serious about solutions.

And sometimes, the revolution begins with a fork.

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