What will you replace prisons with?

Work and reeducation camps.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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