Why You Should Care About Prison Abolition

How the Prison System Can be Replaced with Systems of Care  

“In a truly compassionate society, we should be able to envision something different in relation to all those who do wrong and all those who are hurt by the wrong.” – Moana Jackson 

Prison abolition is a subject that is generally considered utopian or idealistic – something out of reach and unachievable. For this reason, it is usually overlooked and dismissed with a sweep of the hand that implies without prisons, our society would be reduced to anarchy. This is actually far from the truth, and it is becoming ever more essential that Aotearoa divorces itself from its reliance on the prison system. 

Prisons are violent, inhumane places that strip those within them of their freedom and safety. We cannot reasonably expect that those who enter these institutions will exit as rehabilitated individuals ready to participate in society. And we cannot expect incarceration to result in public safety when we know of the violence that occurs within prison walls. 

We cannot continue to invest in a broken system – we need to strive for change. Prison abolition can offer that change for Aotearoa.  

Image: PAPA

Redirecting funding towards social wellbeing  

 The phrase ‘defund the police’ has entered mainstream discourse recently, primarily due to the Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd in 2020. I’m sure many readers have become familiar with the phrase – but for some it may be unclear what defunding the police would look like in practice within Aotearoa.  

 In reality, defunding the police refers to only one part of the abolitionist argument. It is not simply about reducing funding to the police force, but rather about reallocating police resources, funding, and responsibility toward community-based models of safety, support, and prevention. Therefore, we would be replacing the police with systems that support human needs like housing, education, and health.  

 In this essence, Liam Martin, a lecturer of Criminology at Victoria University of Wellington, perceives prison abolition to be about the work of social creation.  

 When thinking about prison abolition we need to be considering “what kind of society we need to build where we don’t need prisons anymore,” says Martin.  

 “This is a kind of long-term vision of a society where we become involved in a work of social transformation that will make it so that we don’t need prisons anymore.” 

 Prison abolition is therefore not about an immediate closure of prison doors, but rather about making the prison system itself redundant. Incarcerated people statistically come from disadvantaged backgrounds, with histories of mental illness and addiction, while simultaneously being targeted by racist policing and policies. By addressing the causal elements of crime, prisons can be made unnecessary. 

 A very poignant example of this can be seen through the connection between incarceration and homelessness.  

 “We have a housing crisis that is intimately linked to the system of hyper-incarceration - where people are shuttling in and out of prison and homelessness. They’re going from living on the street unable to access a house to being incarcerated in a brand-new prison,” says Martin.  

 From an abolitionist perspective, this begs the question: Why the fuck are we building more prisons in the time of a housing crisis? As pointed out by Martin, there is an obvious misuse of resources occurring when our investments are going towards very dysfunctional institutions like punitive policing and prisons rather than investing in social wellbeing.  

 In 2017, the cost of keeping an individual prisoner was approximately $97,000 annually (Buttle, 2017). This results in spending of around $165 million for remand facilities with another $590 million being spent on sentenced prisoners. While further investments continue to be made into incarceration, social services are in dire need of funding to provide adequate support to those in need of their services. The high spending of the prison system therefore seems illogical when existing social services could provide the types of support that offenders actually need.  

 This becomes even more apparent when you have people purposefully getting incarcerated to avoid homelessness, as has been pointed out by Martin. 

 “These are situations where we’ve done such a poor job of building a social infrastructure that prison actually becomes that social infrastructure.” 

 Ti Lamusse, the National Secretary of People Against Prisons Aotearoa (PAPA) and a Victoria University of Wellington Criminology lecturer, agrees with this sentiment and notes that after a century and a half of failure, there is no evidence to show that prisons are successful at achieving their goals.  

 Rather, he sees it as imperative to invest in systems that we know to work such as violence prevention programs and mental health support that can offer meaningful change in people’s lives.  

 “If we are going to get serious about the safety of our communities, we need to ensure that all people can live with dignity, and we need to make sure that we respond to harm in a way that is restorative and in a way that respects the dignity of all people,” says Lamusse.  

 In this sense, prison abolition is not only about investing in social wellbeing, but it is also about creating a safer society for us all to live in. If all New Zealanders had access to basic essentials such as housing, education, healthcare, and transport, we would see less social harm occurring.  

 We need to start looking outside of the box when it comes to alternatives to the prison system. We cannot keep reforming an institution that is rotten at its core. Real, meaningful change can only come from the work of social creation that will enable us to reimagine a society in which prisons are no longer needed.  

 We need to dig into the roots of societal problems, rather than lazily rely on incarceration as the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. It is time to think bigger and look to alternatives that can actually offer us a world in which we do not need to lock people in cages to feel safe.   

It is time to abolish prisons.