Asklemmy

Prisons are punishment but that won’t deter crime committed out of necessity or substance abuse from self medicating mental illness. Root cause that shit - meet the basic needs (food, water, shelter) of everyone unconditionally, provide physical and mental health care to everyone as a basic right, and you suddenly have less need for prisons.

Interesting cases that challenge this argument: white collar crime - would this be consider a mental illness? Sexual predators - definitely mental illness likely caused by prior trauma, we need to provide mental health care.

What will you replace prisons with?

Work and reeducation camps.

I don't think it's possible to abolish prisons for all crimes. But why does a thief or a drug dealer (or worse, just a drug user) need to be in prison? What about the nature of their crimes necessitates imprisonment as a reasonable method of corrections?

If the point is stopping people from reoffending, prisons don't do that. Like objectively. Recidivism in the US is super high, and going to prison predicts increases in the severity of crimes people commit.

So, what reduces recidivism? Eliminating the factors that drove them to crime in the first place. So, you monitor them closely - house arrest, assigned social/case workers, etc. Like a more robust parole system for nonviolent offenders. With enough surveillance, you can reduce the likelihood of reoffence by making the chances of getting caught much higher. This enhanced monitoring would be temporary.

For violent offenders and more serious criminals, maybe prisons are still necessary. But they don't have to be dehumanizing and can provide necessary health/psychiatric, educational, social, and job skills training.

You could make the corrections system more effective by making society easier for criminals to reintegrate into. If you're a felon and you can't find work because you're a felon - how are you going to afford to live within the confines of the law? Step 1) jobs programs for felons with a path to eliminating non-violent offenses from your record as it relates to work with exceptions as necessary. Step 2) improve the education system to prevent people from turning to crime and to help give former criminals relevant job skills to earn an honest living. Step 3) provide healthcare to people - having access to healthcare for mental and addiction-related conditions is super important to reduce crime.

Basically - prison abolition isn't about just letting rapists and murderers go free with no consequences. Instead, people in favor of prison abolition are typically in favor of reducing the societal pressures to commit crimes and preventing reoffense.

I don't think you can start with prison reform.

You can't rehabilitate someone who is stealing out of necessity or because they are mentally unwell. Have to start with providing UBI and universal Healthcare (including and especially mental health and addiction rehab). Probably also should solve homelessness and provide cheap educational options too.

Once that's in start improving prisons, make them not slums, provide some ways to keep up with the times (an excon with no concept of the internet is not going to be functional in today's society) and provide job programs and some way of protecting excons from excessive discrimination. The number one metric to measure the success of a prison should be the recitivism rate.

Now maybe after all this is done there's a few people who cannot be classified as insane and are deadset on committing violent crimes. I will point out that a lot of organized crime would fall apart when there isn't a fresh supply of disenfranchised people to exploit at the bottom and a lot of white collar crime does not need full exclusion from society more than exclusion from the system they were exploiting.thise few remaining murders and terrorists can go be in prison.

Tldr: to fix prisons you must first fix society.

Id say: prisons dont work, cost a lot and does huge damage. They also often work as a gateway to heavier crime. I dont need a replacement for that. "Nothing" would still be an improvement. This is the short answer

When that is said, what do we do about crime? Id say that depends, what kind of crime? There are so many different motivations for doing crime, there should be just as many solutions: removing poverty, proper sex education, confiscating the money from the rich, remove the reasons people are doing crime in the first place

We also do a lot of alternatives today: fines, mental hospitals, community service, guidance, conflict counseling, anger management courses, sometimes a serious conversation with the police, childcare help, detox institutions, and a lot more

They have three things in common: they work, they are a lot cheaper and they dont for the same mental damage as torture/prison

And then there are those under 1% og criminals that is totally lost, that need to be locked up. But only until we get a society where they dont get lost..

The basis of prison abolition is not the idea that we should replace prision with something else. We start by understanding that it is the structure of our society that creates and perpetuates systems of crime and punishment. The emphasis on punishment does little or nothing to address the safety, health and property rights of the public. So it can be seen that it is a public problem that requires a public solution: the vast resources spent on catching and punishing people would be better spent on prevention by making mental health, substance abuse and addiction treatment affordable and available to everyone.

Rather than punish, a greater effort could be made to help rehabilitate people who have lost control of themselves and their lives, to restore them to living in harmony within their communities. Of course there will always be a small proportion of the population that are unable to healthy lives, unable to resist resorting to theft, violence, and desperate attempts at self-medication. Such persons do not benefit from punishment.

Plenty of word around that prison is a poor deterrent and to me it doesn't make much sense as a punishment. It should be a tool to guide the person on right tracks.

For instance, a fellow gets caught for not paying a million in taxes so they get sent to prison where they will continue to not pay and instead spend government money. For a situation like this I suggest they remain captive (not imprisoned) working for the government until they have paid their debt. Alike in prison, someone will have a constant eye on the fellow and every breath they take. After all they managed to accumulate a million of tax money so they obviously are capable.

Those who we genuinely can't trust to not be out of trouble should be locked up, for a reason.

I don't need to have a replacement ready. It's enough for me to say that the current system does not work.

Education and intensive face to face therapy.

I think I understand the spirit of your question, but the way you've worded it suggests that the law is immutable and/or that lawbreakers are necessarily evildoers. I interpret the question as "without incarceration, what do we do about those who do harm to others". To that I would answer that we need institutions and programs that provide various types of care, support, and protection to people and that those who cause harm and do not provide restitution to their victims lose access to those institutions and programs. For example, if a child molester's house burns down, the fire department would not be expected to try and save them. If it was arson then the arsonist might only get fined for creating an environmental hazard and putting adjacent buildings at risk. The lack of a carceral system would make funding available for the above programs and institutions.

Seize the illegally obtained wealth, pay civil damages to the victims and rehabilitation program including education and psychological support.

I'm fine saying that people like Dutroux, Breivick or Abdeslam shall not be out before a very long-time. However, they're not the average criminal.

Let me return you the question, there is that single-mother who struggle to pay the rent, and debt collector knocked her door a few times, a drug dealer ask her if she can keep a package for them and that someone will pick-it up tomorow night and give her 500 € in exchange, does that woman (Which is now part of drug dealer network) desserve jail-time ? Wouldn't giving her the mean to pay the rent prevent her from needing to take part of drug traffic ? That drunk person has a fight in the train station, the other fighter falls on the track as the train arrive, now a person died. Does the person desserve to spend 5-10 years in jail ? Wouldn't Rehab work better ?

I'll go even further and say that welfare program, teacher, psychiatrist and some other do way more at preventing crime than police, jail and hard on crime policies

We don't replace prisons, because putting people in cages is bad. There's nothing to "replace" them with. If I wanted to "replace" prisons I wouldn't want to abolish them. That's like asking what you'll replace slavery with, how on earth are we going to get cheap labour otherwise.

Bourgeois law should be abolished too. I have no respect for "the law".

In short, community based restorative justice and support services. I.e., repairing harm through dialogue between victims, offenders, and community members, while addressing root causes like poverty, mental health issues, and substance abuse.

Ultimately, the goal is to create a society where crime is less likely to occur. This requires a shift towards preventive measures that promote social equity and community engagement. Abolishing prisons, for me at least, is one part of a larger movement that values dignity and promotes healing rather than perpetuating cycles of harm

Criminals will be required to work social services for the common good. High-risk criminals will also be put under constant surveillance either by automated systems or, in extreme cases, Human guards to stop them from reoffending.

in starship trooper I believe they replaced all prisons with corporal punishment.

3 psychologists per criminal I'd guess.

Same as what we had for centuries before prison of course.