Prison Abolitionism

This essay will critically evaluate the argument that the use of imprisonment should be abolished. According to Cowell and Stenson (1995, p.203) ‘Abolitionism is based on the moral conviction that social life should not and, in fact, cannot be regulated effectively by criminal law’. This illustrates that under the system of law societal life is not coherent. Although there is a criminal justice system there are also moral convictions taking place. Prison abolition is a movement aimed to reduce the number of prisons and eradicate prisons in relation to replacing them with more humane, effective and nominal systems. Prison abolitionist could be considered as an effective organisation in order to eliminate and diminish the number of offences that
is triggered by offenders. Systematically, there are several arguments approached in different ways in order that the use of imprisonment should be abolished. This essay will be focusing on the abolitionism movement and imprisonment under the rules of law.
Abolitionism is a global movement which is diverse in different countries.
During the 1960’s, the prison abolitionism movement began. The abolitionism movement argues that prisons are ineffective, inhumane and stigmatising. The main unifying thread of the different abolition movements is that crime is a social construction: we decide who commits a crime, we decide how they should be punished, and this is wrong as the roots of crime rely on society. We need better societal collective ways to deal with crime. As Duff and Garland (1997, p.333) states; “Punishment cannot be justified at all; that we should aim not simply to reform or limit our penal practices and institutions, but to abolish them”. This suggests that abolitionism movement has a radical view which focused specifically on abolishing rather than reforming. This was a distinct form of improving prisons as they resisted that prisons are unproductive and do not work; they also argued that prisons were being used as extended social services. Certainly, if the offender is in prison for a limited of time and there is no access to any rehabilitation programmes this is a problem as they are not
able to use the programmes in order to help them recover just because they are incapacitated for a short period of time. Consequently, abolitionists contended that offenders could be managed more effectively mainly within the community. Duff and Garland (1997, p. 338) states that ‘the criminal law is rather, destructive to society’. This suggests that the law is not an efficient way in reducing the number of offenders within imprisonment, it is not helping to protect society either as it is seen as ‘destructive’ to society. Therefore, prisons are ineffective which should be eliminated. Prisons need to be substituted with other alternatives such as community sentences as this could be a successful way in rehabilitating offender’s relationship amongst society. The distinction between abolitionism leaders who contended that too many non-violent offenders were being sent to prison. They believed that there could be alternatives that could work more smoothly and efficiently amongst offenders and society.
Thomas Mathieson was a distinguished representative of the prison abolitionist movement.
He argued that prisons are ineffective and the real role of prisons is controlling the poor. He argues that ‘prisons are symbolic, demonstrates to us the public government is doing something about crime’ (Mathieson, 1986, p.83). He illustrates that prisons are used by the government to get rid of undesirable people within society. This shows that prisons are futile and stigmatising under the government’s laws and the criminal justice system. Within the United Kingdom, there is only one small group of abolitionists which is the Empty Cages Collective. They are individuals who experienced harm in the prison system. They are ex-prisoners or individuals associated with prison-related struggle. However, this is a small group of abolitionists. If we compare this to Scandinavian countries like Norway, Sweden and Finland, they have a more extensive group of abolitionists, which have been more successful as they have a unified voice in order to abolish prisons. More specifically, comparing the UK to Sweden, abolitionists in Sweden are a much broader group, unlike United Kingdom, having just one small group of abolitionists. ‘Sweden is closing prisons and reducing the prison population’ (Guardian, 2014). This exemplifies that the abolitionist movement in Sweden is much more effective than the UK and other European countries. Simultaneously, if we move onto looking at the prison population between
Sweden, US and UK, ‘Swedish prisoner’s numbers have fallen from 5,722 to 4,500 out of a population of 9.5 million’ (Guardian, 2014). This shows us that the prison population in Sweden is reducing. In comparison to the United States, the prison population has increased during the 1970s and 1980s. ‘In the 1970s for drug use offences there were 350,000 people in prison and by the end of the 1980s, it has dramatically increased to 850,000’ (Cowell and Stenson, 1995, p.206). This suggests that the Penal System or the Criminal Justice System is not a proficient way to reduce crime as the prison population rates are increasing rather than decreasing. Whereas, ‘the prison population of England & Wales rose by about 90% between 1990 and 2016’ (Allen and Watson, 2017, p.3). Instantaneously, in England and Wales the prison population is cumulative between the previous years and recent years. This illustrates that in the UK and US, the abolitionism movement is not successful at this point as there is a huge increase within the number of the prison population.