Paradox of Prisons: Do They Create Solutions or Exacerbate Conditions?

“… a fundamental requirement for the revitalization of democracy is the long overdue abolition of prison system.”

• Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

The roots of restorative justice can be traced back in the efforts to address injurious acts by encouraging meaningful conflict-resolution between victims and offenders. It rests on the belief that crimes are indeed violations of fundamental rights, but the ways to hold perpetrators accountable and appease victims or their families should remain equally humane on both sides. In this sense, justice is seen as an opportunity for recovery and rehabilitation. This notion, however, has taken a whole different meaning with the onset of prison systems and punitive policies where retributive justice in the form of mass incarceration flourish. It is based on the premise that lawbreakers should be dispossessed of their basic rights and confined behind jail cells as a consequence of their unlawful acts. It aims to deter violence using, simply put, violence. The prison system is a paradox that can only be explained or solved by considering the different social, historical, and political contexts of transgressions. With the help of local and international literatures and studies, this paper attempts to discuss a supportive position on the calls for prison abolition and provide opinions and possible solutions on the topic.

Around the last week of May 2020, I was introduced to Rachel Kushner’s feature-length profile of prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore. I remember staring at my reading device for a good couple of minutes after reading that article. It gave me so much hope, so much optimism, and even prospects for realization- maybe the goal to abolish prisons and create vital support systems is not so impossible after all. Since then, I started exploring more prison abolitionist literatures from Michel Foucault to Angela Davis to Simone Browne to Jackie Wang and many more. My stance on the advocacy grew from mere fascination into actual progressive concern for the carceral system in the Philippines and in many other countries. The only question now is if we are willing to imagine (and well, create) a world without prisons. This world would probably be almost impossible, unthinkable, and implausible to conceive, let alone materialize. This world, however, is possible.

Studies by the Institute for Criminal Policy Research (2017), Loyola University Chicago (2017), and Global Alliance for Behavioral Health and Social Justice (2019) have proved that mass incarceration and larger prison populations never really addressed the goal to secure safer communities and only exacerbated prison conditions. Aside from this, they had little to no effect on lowering the rates at which crimes are committed. While initial instincts suggest that resorting to mass incarceration would reduce crime and dissuade future crimes by depriving people who commit them their rights to life, liberty, and property, studies by Stemen (2021) and Equal Justice Initiative Organization (2017) consistently showed otherwise. They argued that “higher incarceration rates are not associated with lower violent crime rates since expanding incarceration primarily means that more people convicted of marginal offenses (like drug offenses and low-level property offenses) are imprisoned.” Crime reduction advantages, if there really are any, from increased incarceration are relevant only in minor offenses committed, mostly, by the poor out of desperation.

According to the Philippine National Police (PNP), theft, physical assault, and robbery were among the most common crimes reported in 2019. These offenses are rooted from the socioeconomic inequalities that drive the economically disadvantaged, who were deprived of opportunity for a better life, to break the law in the first place for mere subsistence. If we look at it on a larger scale, big corporations rob the state more than all the poor criminals combined do. Furthermore, heinous crimes are left either inhumanely punished or completely unaddressed. Drawing from this, it would not be erroneous to deduce that prisons are simply ineffective and they produce just as many crimes as they assume solve. The relationship between crimes and prisons is neither naturally-occurring nor an outcome of historical theory and practice, it is a product of deliberate choices of the powerful to control the powerless. By imprisoning offenders, crimes are not resolved, they are swept under the rug and, quite literally, hidden behind walls.

Prisons are now deeply ingrained in the society to the extent that most of us are, if not terrified, appalled at the thought of prison abolition. Many condemn the elimination of, they claim, the only social structures that safeguard fundamental rights. In all these, shouldn’t the condemnation be directed towards the myopic sense of justice (that sees prisons and only prisons as the sole solution to all criminal acts) drilled within our minds? In this subject, it is important that we also tackle other factors that may have played significant roles in the exacerbation of prison policies. As will be further expounded, these are, but not limited to, the media, racial and ethnic disparities, gendered structure of prison systems, class inequality, discrimination, and exploitation.

The media, in particular, made the thriving of retributive institutions such as prisons possible. Television programs, social media platforms, and other news circulations are now saturated with representations of prisons. In an article written by Beale (2021) she argued that “[the media] manipulate prison violence in entertainment programming to establish specific brand identities, increase viewership during periods when local advertising rates are set, and counter especially popular programming on competitors’ channels.” The media fetishized prisoners’ experiences behind jail cells, dampened the abuses committed by law enforcement officers, concealed the fragilities of the justice system, and in some cases, even justified vindictive recourses. Since the media’s perception and analysis of crime and violence shaped and continues to shape public opinion and criminal justice policies, they are not just mere mirrors that reflect social reality as it is but are social forces capable of influencing the mass to be in favor or against prison abolition. Media representation of prisons showing prejudiced views of prison policies convinced us that we know exactly how, as an example, super-maximum security prisons work when, in reality, we do not. Truly, there is more than meets the eye- and the media have only shown us a small fraction of all the horrifying realities of prison systems.

To make things worse, the racial and ethnic disparities (which extends from the literal segregation of people based on their race to the exclusion of some based on their ethnicity and religious practices) of prison systems are also revealed. Majority of the most brutal forms of punishment and repression are inflicted upon prisoners which are people of color or are from ethnic and religious communities. In the US, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that 35% of state prisoners are white, 38% are black, and 21% are Hispanic (Nellis). In China, authorities arbitrarily detained one and a half million people, mostly Uyghurs but also including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, ethnic Turkic Muslims, Christians, and Kazakhstanis on grounds of being labelled as extremists for simply practicing their religion (Maizland). In the Philippines, ethnic groups and indigenous peoples are, if not bombed out of their homes, detained and/or imprisoned on charges of terrorism (Mallari). Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) are also found to serve far longer sentences than white offenders for the same offense. These are only some of the most harrowing images of the racial and ethnic composition of prisons, many other countries face the same or worse problems. If one would think that slavery and involuntary servitude were abolished at the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, I would offer a glance at the racist and suppressive structure of prison systems.

Gender also plays a role in establishing coldblooded presumptions of criminality. The macho-patriarchal culture permeates even and more particularly behind the bars. Noticeably, masculine criminality has always been deemed more normal than feminine criminality. This stems from the contention of Newburn and Stanko (1994), that “The most significant fact about crime is that it is almost always committed by men.” Precisely because of this, women are incarcerated in psychiatric institutions far greater than in prisons. Stereotypically, deviant men are normally regarded as criminals while deviant women are regarded as insane. The supposed equal approach between male and female prisoners was taken into a whole different context. Instead of curtailing oppressive prison policies for men, tyrannical prison policies for women are heightened to meet the former’s policies. Furthermore, within the confinement facilities, feminism has been influenced largely by liberal constructions of gender inequality. Women in prisons are instilled with values of domesticity so when they are released, they would make great cooks and maids for rich families. Issues of abuse and harassment committed by supposedly noble law enforcement officers have also been long established that many people are not even shocked and outraged at the thought of it.

Structures of class inequality and exploitation have also become apparent in the emergence of privatization and capitalization patterns in prisons. With the rise of the bourgeoisie, prison sentences were equated with labor-time as the basis for computing the value of capitalist commodities and services. Unsurprisingly, the production of commodity arose with the onset of penitentiary in 1700s. As the prison system expanded, corporate investments also unfetteredly burgeoned. Prisons, from degrading institutions that never really fixed what they promised to do so, became capitalists’ dreamland. The Reagan era’s neoliberal free market policies heightened the provision of goods, services, onerous sentencing requirements, and prison labor, which in turn produced huge amount of capital to the extent that the “prison industrial complex” was created. As Angela Davis wrote in her book Are Prisons Obsolete?, “The prison has become a blackhole through which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited.” The impacts of the creation of the prison industrial complex cascaded throughout the world. As the United Sates sunk into capital accumulation through prison dependency, many other countries were induced to take heed and emulate, including the Philippines. This is demonstrated by the boom in prison construction and state-sanctioned murders despite falling crime rates. The resistance to capitalist globalization, then, must also integrate resistance to prison system. Shabazz (2021) listed companies that reaped (and some continues to reap) profits from prison labor without state constraints. Some of these are Microsoft, Victoria’s Secret, Johnson & Johnson, McDonalds, and Walmart, to name a few. Companies resort to prison labor for many beneficial reasons; cheap (some are even uncompensated) labor, easy control, no health insurance, no unions, no demands for sick leaves, and etc. Prisons supplied the capital’s need to increase productivity with as little labor-time as possible for a cheaper cost. Prison labor has been an essential ingredient of capitalists to minimize cost and maximize profit. Prisons, then, are perfect profiteering mechanisms and avenues for exploitation. As we can see, lawbreakers are abhorred and considered dispensable in the “outside world” but as major sources of profit in the carceral world. The proliferation of prisons constitutes profit for a few but devours public funds which could and should have been used for far essential programs such as education, rehabilitation programs, housing, and child/healthcare.

Fundamentally, this all goes back to fixing the very root causes of any problem in the society- the social, economic, and political fragilities. Instead of looking at the possible causes of crimes as wholly caused by the workings of the perpetrators’ minds, we should also consider the role that social systemic causation plays in shaping individual acts. When we hear about marginalized, unemployed, or desperately hopeless individuals, it is easy to think that their problems are theirs alone. It is easy to think that the very act of committing a crime is a personal choice, because, at some level, it really is. But as Charles Wright Mills reasoned in Sociological Imagination (1959), private troubles are best understood as public issues. A noticeably clear demarcation between troubles and issues is that troubles are problems affecting individuals while issues affect many individuals as it lie in the social structure of the society. Crimes, then, are personal acts with social roots and consequences. The consequences of individual acts require us to consider the inequalities in the economic and political institutions of the society to better understand them. Any other individual act (i.e.: committing a crime) is never purely a personal act but one that is largely affected by social conditions. Committing crimes is very much a ‘personal trouble’, but we cannot just do away with the fact that it is also, inherently, a ‘public issue’. We can only effectively resolve unjust acts if the flaws of the system that perpetuates it are addressed. Just as much as we do not cure a broken arm with a band-aid, public safety is not increased and crimes are not reduced with the establishment of prisons.

Once again, prisons never really achieved what they pretended to achieve. We cannot deny that lawbreakers exist (mainly for reasons previously espoused), but the whole point of this is to consider the fact that only a real structural transformation, which necessitates the overturing of structures controlled by the powerful few at expense of the marginalized, can address criminal acts. It is problematic enough that prisons have become the norm, but it is even worse to grasp that vengeful hate has also pervaded our minds that we would be more than willing to destroy people’s lives. The suffering of a person who may or may not have committed a crime does not and will never repair any damage. This is precisely why the abolishment of prisons necessitates that reprimand is conducted humanely so lawbreakers can be reintegrated and have a chance to contribute in the society. We ought to be reminded that rehabilitation must prevail over punitive justice.

Prison abolition entails much more than actual abolition of prisons. It is a continuous process wherein fundamentally legal, humane, and rehabilitative methods replace cruel, degrading, and inhuman criminal law enforcement. It requires the overhauling of repressive prison policies through new democratic forms. Primarily, abolitionists advocate the establishment of, instead of prisons, more schools. Instead of spawning prisons at rates higher than schools, schools can be used as, aside from one of the driving factors of economic growth, tools for “decarceration”. As the opportunity for greater standards of living (provided by education) increases, the chance of resorting to criminal acts would naturally decrease in return. Furthermore, the abolition of prisons would redirect greater focus and investment in decent jobs, adequate housing, and accessible healthcare. Abolitionists also see the establishment of facilities which are not repressive like prisons to assist the marginalized. In fact, an article by Brown (2021) featured Architect Deanna Van Buren who was known to design civic spaces that are healing alternatives to correctional facilities. This also includes job and living wage programs, community-based recreation, and other restorative forms of justice. Decriminalization of drug use by incorporating free and accessible programs for people who wish to deal with their drug problems is also seen as one of the principal alternatives to prisons. Many confuse prison abolition as an advocacy that upholds only prisoners’ rights and welfare, but in its core, it calls for survivor-centered responses to violence by ensuring that survivors, instead of being infused with remorse and trauma, have access to appropriate, accessible and good quality services including healthcare, psychological and social support, and other necessary assistance. We do not heal a wound by wishing what or who caused it ill, we assess the injury and look for remedy.

The shift from today’s criminogenic reality toward the vision of a just and prison-less society requires coordinated efforts to craft strategies and alternatives to prisons. This would also require global solidarity in rejecting carceral logic and system since policing is a global institution. We should not only go feral and fight for societal reforms as a consequential emotional release from shocking and major events like the Black Lives Matter movement, War on Drugs, massive crackdown and red-tagging against activists and progressive groups, the killing of Sonya and Frank Gregorio, etc. The grounded and consistent demand for prison abolition has been going on for decades. But so long as the centralization of state power, community disempowerment, and capital’s need for structural reinforcement are not addressed, nothing much will really change. This is not to ignore the fact that some efforts of prison reformists fell short in actually addressing the root problems of prison system. Some were infused with reactionary beliefs which call not for the absolute abolition of prisons but for mere improvement of confinement facilities. Although reform is a part of the continuous process of prison abolition, the shortcomings of reformists before bolstered the strength of prisons now. Prison abolitionists today must unite for stronger calls against prisons. Just like any other struggle against repressive social structures, prison abolition is a gradual process and it, as most prison abolitionists recognize, does not happen overnight. So long as our concept of justice is inflicting punishment and not changes in unlawful behavior, locking up the person who violated our rights will never really give us the justice that we need and deserve. As the organization Prison Policy argued, “Justice is not simply a collection of principles or criteria, but the active process of preventing or repairing injustice.”

We may ask ourselves how 16 million people voted for a fascist madman who has adulterated the justice system by blatantly defending its fraudulent policies or how many aggrieved Filipinos go to television shows to look for “justice” or how a puny metal badge authorizes cops to barge into people’s homes even without a warrant and pull the trigger of their guns at the drop of a hat, or how prisons still exist despite its inefficacy, and many more questions, without getting close to any definitive answer. All of these do not make any sense, we need to stop pretending like they do. Clearly, the justice system in the Philippines and in other countries is one built on retaliation and not on correcting a wrong. Carceral justice means we need revenge, we need to hurt who hurt us, we need to deprive lawbreakers of any chance to change, and we need to blame someone or anyone. Somehow, these things can make us feel better about ourselves, even better than instigating change and real justice. We can no longer ignore the lengths at which the justice system fails to correct unlawful acts on a daily basis. Truly, the world has progressed past the need for prisons.

The rate and severity of crimes will not be solved by improvements in prison facilities or reinforcement of the teeth of the law alone. It requires bolder actions in terms of addressing socioeconomic inequalities- prison abolition and focus in education, health, and housing. Instead of asking how to punish people who have committed inadvertent and unthinkable crimes, we should rather ask why our ways of solving problems are restricted to inflicting the exact same violence, only they are sanctioned by the state and thus, are rendered “legal.” Ending mass incarceration and abolishing prisons would mean opening vital programs that can actually protect and cater the needs of communities. Instead of funding incarceration systems, why don’t we altogether invest on communities?

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