Reframing, Not Retreating: Prison Abolition & Defund the Police
Progressives are losing arguments they should be winning, because these positions are being defended as slogans rather than as trajectories. Abolition and defund are not under-argued idealism. Abolition in particular is a developed tradition — Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Critical Resistance — and that tradition already contains the distinction we need: Gilmore’s line between reformist reforms, which entrench the carceral state by making it more palatable, and non-reformist reforms, which shrink its footprint and its necessity. What follows is abolition as trajectory rather than demand. That is not a betrayal of the position. It is the position, argued in a register that can actually win.
The underlying recognition is defensible and should be stated plainly. Many prison and police systems lack proper oversight and operate as fiefdoms of impunity. They are often at odds with the communities they serve. Families and individuals who interact with these institutions rarely experience restoration or rehabilitation. They experience punishment. This is exacerbated by inequitable access to the courts and to legal counsel, which makes the judiciary an accomplice in the injustice.
On prisons: abolishing for-profit prisons is necessary, but let us be honest about scale — private facilities hold under a tenth of American prisoners. The symbolic fix is not the fix. The non-reformist program is this: every prison well funded, judged by a single metric — does this change reduce the number of people the system needs to hold? That standard is what separates humane warehousing from an abolitionist trajectory, and nothing meets it more directly than re-entry. Education, vocational training, and sustained support before and after release — housing, employment, community connection — allow a person to re-enter gracefully rather than be discharged into the conditions that produced the sentence. Every graceful re-entry is one fewer return; this is the reform that shrinks the system by its own operation. And it includes the officers. Corrections work carries well-documented psychological harm, and the field is in a staffing crisis the unions understand better than the commentariat does. Improved conditions, pay, and trauma support for officers are not a concession to the system; they are coalition material, and they make the institution easier to shrink. The healthier these institutions are, the less our society needs them — until, ideally, the system bears no resemblance to the one in place today. Abolitionists call that the horizon. I am agreeing with them about the destination and arguing about the road.
On defunding: enforcement priorities should track harm. That is the whole argument, and it wins on its own. Estimates put wage theft at tens of billions of dollars a year — by most reckonings more than all street robbery, burglary, and larceny combined — yet financial fraud, tax evasion, and wage theft are historically starved of enforcement while petty crime, drug use, and flat-fee citations are policed severely. Note what I am not arguing: I am not proposing we police the rich because it pays. Municipalities funding themselves through enforcement is the disease — Ferguson taught us that — and it stays the disease whether the target is a poor motorist or a wealthy tax evader. Any revenue recovered from fraud enforcement is restitution to the harmed, incidental to the purpose. And defunding was never only about which crimes get policed; its core is reallocation to responses that are not police at all — mental health crisis teams, housing, violence interruption — sending armed officers only where armed officers are the right tool. That reallocation also improves the quality of life and professional standing of the officers who remain.
These are the grounds on which I would defend both positions. Others may defend them differently, and honestly held disagreement about the road is not endorsement of the status quo. But defended as bare slogans, these positions concede ground they should hold — and the status quo is only too happy to keep it.
Power is a funny thing. By the nature of wanting power, you are probably unfit to wield it. These types of intellectual masturbation exercises can be fun, but they are just a distraction. We cannot just stop having cops and jails. What we NEED is some type of “draft” and wholesale restructuring of the entire cop culture. We initiate a law enforcement draft of sorts where we develop a profile of attributes wanted in a New World cop. Psychological and emotional stability, a reverence for life, a moral compass, whatever else we want. Now, heres where all the personal information data mining can be used for good. Leverage AI to scrub the WWW for folks who fit the profile, then we draft them into service. There will be a vetting process to be sure the meta data matches the candidate. Maybe we also enact term limits of maybe 7 to 10 years to avoid entrenched power. The service should have civilian oversight and the model will be to deploy unarmed or lightly armed patrol units to observe and report. If the issue requires a tactical response, then we have highly trained, uniquely specialized tactical units who can be called to the scene for kinetic engagement. I am just spit balling, but I think its a start. We overhaul the mission statement, the model and culture. As for prisons, sure I agree that the U.S. prison system is disgusting and cruel. Of course it is, but abolishment is silly. Ideally, yes, we would not need prisons because we have achieved utopia. A place where there are no dangerous psychopaths that, probably, just grew up super poor and the victims of fucked up parents. I would venture a guess to say we are light years away from that scenario. Until then we need to adopt the Nordic model of attempting to rehabilitate these folks. If we can tackle the manufactured housing and food insecurity crises, prison population would rapidly drop. Anyway, until we get money out of politics even Healthcare For All amounts to mental jacking off. So, Id say the idealized fantasy of prison and cop abolishment is really a waste of bandwidth.