I know y’all mean well, but When people criticize prison abolition by saying “what about the rapists & murderers?” the respone shouldn’t be “we don’t do anything about rapists & murderers now anyway”—it cedes the terms of the debate to them in a way it shouldn’t

While, perhaps, the intent of the reply is “since we don’t do anything about them now, it won’t be fundamentally different or less safe if we get rid of prisons”, the reply comes off as saying “prisons would be okay if they were more full of people”

It presupposes essentialism, Namely that one is defined permanently by one’s past actions. This is even though most people who do even heinous things do not reoffend in the same category, & the limit of prediction on reoffense is about 40% in best of all possible worlds

The fact is additionally that the labeling effects of such an essentialist manner, and the stigma they carry, actually *predispose* people to reoffense, by affecting their self definition,& cutting them off from social alternatives—what Braithewaite calls ‘disintegrative shaming’

It neglects that 80% of the variance in human behavior across individuals is explained by situational factors outside of our control—individual traits explain about 10%, & that itself contains bundles of causes—culture, upbringing, development, experience, genetics, personality

I know it’s consoling to believe that most people in prison are ‘non violent’ or not guilty of that for which they are imprisoned (and both these categories are problematic on their own), but this isn’t true.

For federal prison, 50% are drug offenses, and another portion white collar crime, but 33% also have at least one primary violent offense and maybe twice that a secondary one. For state prisons, the proportion is much higher—probably 2/3rds have a primary ‘violent’ offense

The clearance rate for murder is about 60%—in other words, 60% of murders result in a conviction. Since there is a small minority of murderers who commit more than one (it looks like Zipf’s law), the chances that they get caught for at least one of them is quite high

In other words, most reoffenders end up in prison, so even though the clearance rate for murder is only 60%, probably more like 3/4 out of people who have ever murdered are probably in prison.

For sexual misconduct, a similar thing applies, while most assaults aren’t reported, or convicted, the majority of serial offenders end up in prison, and the majority of those offenders who don’t end up in prison don’t reoffend.

This may seem counter intuitive or even offensive & false, but over the life course, it’s true, especially because serial offense is correlated with a range of other offenses.

This is even before accounting for the fact that the legal system, academics, NGOs, ‘the average person’ & leftists/activists each have different operational definitions of these offenses. This is especially true across countries.

It’s notable that even given all of these facts, prisons not only don’t do anything to reduce ‘crime’ but increase it.

Meta analyses of offense & re offense studies show that:
1. Equivalently Matched people across equivalent matched offenses are 7% more likely to reoffend if they go to prison than if they don’t

2. Within people who have gone to prison, those, equivalently matched, who go to prison longer than others for the same offense, reoffend at a 3% higher rate

3. For every 66% rise in the prison population, there is only a 3% fall in crime, but this is misleading, as the indirect effects on communities & people is much larger than this. This makes the aggregate maximum *ceiling* of imprisonment’s effects 0%.

4. In aggregate, prisons & police cause ‘crime’ of all types, they do not reduce it —drug prohibition enforcement explains probably half of murders in America

5. We must account for the fact that recidivism data includes reoffense for *any* crime and for simple bureaucratic parole & probation violations. Reoffense of the *same* crime is much lower. When this is accounted for, the criminogenic effects of prisons & police are even higher

6. Back in the day when police could just grab anyone off the street for an offense, and throw them in prison, clearance rates for murder were close to 100%. And, while this means probably 20% of people in prison were innocent of the crime for which they were inprisoned

6. Nonetheless during such a period, the majority of people who murdered someone ended up in prison at some point in their life. This is a central lesson—imprisoning more ‘guilty’ people *necessitates* imprisoning more innocent people & more police power

7. If we really followed Blackstones it’s better to let 10 guilty people to go free than 1 innocent man be punished, then by the state’s own statistics 45% of people need to be released from prison—that’s the *low* estimate for world prisons

7. Cont. If we use jurors self assessments, plea deal data, counterfactual imprisonment models, & conditional estimates of offense, its roughly twice this, for basically all countries, at minimum.

I’m sorry, but the fantasy that most people in prison didn’t do the thing of which they are convicted (let alone if they didn’t do it *ever* or didn’t do *any* other equivalent offense) is just false.

It’s just also the case that prisons & police do not reduce these phenomena in question, in any country, at best, and more usually, increase them. That means even if we had a ‘perfect’ justice system with a 100% clearance rate, the effect would be null.

Not to mention probably 20-33% of people would be framed but alas. There is no criminal justice system in the world that has a high clearance rate that doesn’t also frame & imprison people, I’m sorry, it just doesn’t exist. Even in all your favorite SocDem & AES countries.

Anyway, if tomorrow we took all money & resources out of prisons, and put it into road safety, even if we assumed the maximum rate of crime that would result, on net, lives, injury, & net damage would be saved.

If one is a utilitarian or consequentialist, this on irs own should make you a prison abolitionist. Dollar for dollar, even if you let serial murderers run free, you’d still save net lives by spending the money elsewhere, assuming the *most pessimistic predictions*.

When one uses the not right wing think tank predictions, but the actually scientific ones, since the murder & other rates would basically not change at all or even fall, its clearly the case that the above is true.

Never mind that carceral models just don’t work. At minimum 1/3rd of people in the US have committed some heinous unforgivable offense—it’s more like 50-66% when capitalist exploitation is considered. https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1304871426307043328?s=21 https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1304871426307043328

In most countries the minimum is 2/3rds—just look at the child marriage, incest, domestic abuse, child abuse, IPV, sexual assault, arranged marriage, and lifetime victimization data alone.

In the US, the average person commits 3 felonies a day. This is clearly not a workable way to deal with human behavior.