Arguments Against Prison Abolition

The case for prison abolition is no longer an abstract utopian academic ideal. The prison abolition movement is real and picking up more and more support. I could begin to address the immorality of practices like solitary confinement, companies using prison labor with inadequate compensation to the workers, or the existence of privately owned prisons. I won't even begin to argue the morality of those practices; instead, I will argue the morality of our prison industrial complex. I will first lay out what I feel are the most compelling arguments for prison abolitions. Then I will address the main critiques and concerns facing the movement toward restorative justice. The first concern is one pointed out by Angela Davis in "Are Prisons Obsolete"1. She states "prison… functions ideologically as an abstract site, into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues of afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the work that prison performs – it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging
In my ethics class, when we discussed capital punishment, that was the main argument against; that capital punishment was retribution rather than reformation. Implying that the ethical standing of the existence of prisons is based on the ability to reform. When I could this fact of penal reformation into question, I was quickly written off by my peers, but we should ask ourselves, does prison have the power of reform? I would say, "No", evidence points to the contrary actually. The research evaluated by Frank T. Cullen, Cheryl Levo Tonson and Daniel S. Nagin in Ignoring Science "concludes that across all offenders prisons do not have a specific deterrent effect."2 So we can safely say, based on these findings, that the purpose of prison is not