This is a thread about prison abolition and reform, and a personal experience of mine that formed my convictions about it. It's also about the first George Bush and his infamous Willie Horton campaign ad. (CW: rape)

So, background: In the presidential race between the first George Bush and Michael Dukakis, Dukakis's campaign went down in flames after people found out about a furlough program in his state of Massachusetts that let criminals have days off from prison. Even violent criminals.

One such criminal was William Horton, who used his furlough to rape someone twice and stab her fiancé. Bush ran an attack ad about this case, slamming Dukakis for being soft on crime. (Dukakis hadn't created the program but had vetoed an attempt to abolish it.)

When those ads ran, I watched them with stunned disbelief because I'd grown up in Massachusetts and, by what still seems to me like a crazy coincidence, when I was sixteen, I was raped by someone who was on furlough from prison under the same law that freed Horton.

To make this as clear as I can make it: On the night I was raped at sixteen, my rapist was technically in prison for two counts of rape.

He was the brother of my best friend, and he was furloughed for Christmas. I went to their house for Christmas because my family was so sad at that time that this actually seemed like the better option. I also assumed that, since the parents would be there, it was safe.

In reality, of course it wasn't safe, and the parents were exactly the kind of people you'd expect. But whatever, I had just turned sixteen, so I obviously made the dumbest decisions available to me at any given time.

I don't really know how to put this, but, as sexual assaults go, it wasn't violent. But my attacker *was* a habitually violent, life-long criminal who would go on to spend almost his entire life in prison for various violent crimes, without me having anything to do with it.

And it was, as you can imagine, a horrible experience that fucked me up for a long time, and arguably affected my whole future in not good ways. What it did not do was to make me think the furlough program was a bad idea.

So getting back to the furlough program. What it was designed for was to allow prisoners to get out on occasional weekends and holidays, to remain in touch with life outside, maintain relationships with family members, feel more human, avoid becoming too institutionalized.

At the time, I didn't know anything about penal reform. Still, even after what happened to me, I believed it was a good idea in principle. I felt it was too cruel to keep a person in prison for years and years without a break. But I naturally struggled over it a lot.

One thought I had was that prison doesn't really stop anyone from hurting people, if they're going to hurt people. It just means they hurt each other. And the prisoners are already the world's least fortunate people.

But only years later, I found out I was unequivocally right to believe in the furlough program. Because—and this is a thing you annoyingly seldom hear in discussions of the Willie Horton episode—the program was a success at reducing crime.

The furlough program that freed Horton significantly reduced the recidivism rate among the prisoners affected. That means there was *less* violent crime as a result of it, not more.

If they hadn't had that furlough program, I would not have been raped. That's really true. But more people in total would have been raped. This is harder to understand than the simple, "Because of this furlough program, this bad thing happened!" narrative. But it's true.

That Willie Horton ad wasn't just a scaremongering racist dog whistle. It was a lie. And it's a lie that's told over and over again in discussions of prison reform. Wherever you see the phrases "law and order" or "tough on crime," you will find this lie being told.

If you want to prevent crime, including rape and murder, you should promote programs like these, not scaremonger about them. But "law and order" people never talk about determining how to effectively prevent crime. In fact, they lie to justify policies that cause more crime.

It is also not about "closure" for victims. I didn't want or need to see my rapist's life turned into an unending spectacle of pointless misery. I wanted to see him realize what he'd done and stop hurting people. Even if that meant his life got *better* as a result of hurting me.

Maybe he couldn't ever do that. It's conceivable he would need to be in some kind of institution all his life, for the safety of everyone. But even then, making the institution a place of squalor, violence, and hopelessness achieves nothing. It's *just* an atrocity.

Finally, you may have figured out that I did not report this rape, a decision which was easy because, somewhat surreally, my attacker was going to prison in the morning for rape without me having to do anything.

This turned out to be very lucky for me. Thanks to this possibly irresponsible decision, I escaped being used as a pawn in the election campaign of the first George Bush.