Loïc Wacquant recently launched a frontal attack on the movement that supports prison abolition, in an article for New Left Review. Wacquant is one of the most important European sociologists, and in his classic book “Prisons of Poverty” (published in Greek by Patakis), he showed how the expansion of the penal system and the growth in the number of prisoners is actually part of a strategy for managing unemployment and, more broadly, the social devastation caused by neoliberal policies.
But why would someone closely associated with the radical critique of “law and order” politics, and the resulting rise in sentences and prison populations, choose to harshly criticize a political and social movement that today stands at the forefront of anti-authoritarian politics worldwide?
Wacquant argues that the problem with the logic of “abolitionism” is that it underestimates the fact that rising crime mainly affects the poorest social groups and their neighborhoods, which suffer at once from excessive surveillance and stigmatization and from inadequate policing of the offenses that directly concern them.
This is combined with what he calls “community fetishism,” meaning an emphasis on the role of “community” instead of specialized state institutions, along with an insistence on viewing prisons through the lens of the “Prison Industrial Complex” as the cause of all social ills.
He also stresses how difficult it would be to apply such a program of abolishing the penal system in a country where the total prison population is nearing two million.
Instead, Wacquant proposes penal minimalism: measures focused on prevention, interventions aimed at solving problems without resorting to incarceration, funding and improving the judicial and penal system, and using imprisonment only as a last resort.
All of this makes it necessary to return to the starting points of “abolitionism” as a movement. The recent Greek publication of a classic text from this movement helps with that: “Are Prisons Obsolete?” by Angela Y. Davis, published by Epekeina in a translation by Fotis Terzakis.
For Davis, no matter how “utopian and idealistic” those who call for abolishing prisons may seem, the question remains: “Are we truly willing to condemn an ever growing number of people from racially oppressed communities to an existence of isolation governed by authoritarian rule, violence, illness, and exclusionary technologies that cause serious psychological instability?”
She notes that just as slavery and racial segregation were once seen as institutions “as eternal as the sun” before they were abolished, the same could happen to prisons, while also highlighting the link between racism and the expansion of the US penal system, including the exploitation of prisoners’ labor.
Davis stresses that imprisonment emerged as the primary form of punishment right around the time basic freedoms were being recognized, which is what gave the removal of those freedoms its punitive character, at a moment when labor time itself was also being turned into an economic measure.
She points out that what is now considered the standard for maximum security prisons actually began as a “reform” of prisons focused on isolation. At the same time, she notes that while prisons were historically tied to racism, especially in the United States, they gradually took on a gendered dimension as well, reflected in the extensive reports of sexual violence against women inside prisons.
Davis insists it makes sense to speak of a “prison industrial complex.” On one hand, because turning prisoners, most of whom are people of color, into sources of profit who consume and often produce all kinds of goods drains public funds that could otherwise go toward social programs such as education, housing, childcare, recreation, and drug treatment. On the other hand, incarceration is increasingly becoming a field for investment as private prisons continue to grow.
Davis stresses that the search for alternatives to imprisonment cannot be one dimensional and requires broader social change, starting with how schools are used: “
If today’s structures of violence are not removed from the schools of poor minority communities, including the presence of armed security guards and police officers, and if schools are not turned into places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the main pipeline into prisons.”
In the same way, decriminalizing drug use, combined with public rehabilitation programs, could limit one of the main mechanisms driving up the prison population. The same goes for decriminalizing undocumented migration, which would also reduce the number of prisoners.
As for what form of justice should take the place of pure punishment, Davis argues that we should consider restorative justice, where the offender is treated essentially as someone who owes a debt, who must take responsibility for their actions and take on the work of making amends. She points to the case of the killers of Amy Biehl in South Africa as a successful example of how forgiveness can work within a restorative justice framework.
For Davis, crucial questions lie ahead of us: “What would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become a source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are no longer the main factors determining punishment? Or a society in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern of the justice system?”
In any case, both Wacquant’s perspective and Davis’s underline the need for political thinking that goes beyond the current limits of penal severity and correctional brutality.
