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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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The USAmerican carceral state is inseparable from its fundamental hostility to black people and migrants. If every USAmerican government official became Lenin, i would absolutely want them to abolish the policies of solitary confinement, V-coding, children being kept in dog cages, slave labor, mandatory minimum sentencing, the criminalization of drugs, and civil asset forfeiture. i’m sure i could list more tortures and cruelties. The fact that MLs advocate for state socialism does not mean a red coat of paint on the old, bleeding machinery. Any revolutionary government that would continue sentencing trans women to sex slavery, separating children from families, or performing no knock raids would deserve to be overthrown. The settler colony occupying most of Turtle Island is indistinguishable from its tools of coercion. The budget draining petty fiefdoms of every county police force and intelligence agency are the enemy, full stop. There is no seizing the police from the inside and improving them; every person who has ever worked as a prison guard or a cop or DHS or anything needs to be barred from ever holding power over anything larger than an irrigation ditch.
In what world do police take care of any crimes? Less than half of all crimes are reported, and less than half of those cases are ‘closed’. Not solved, just administratively closed out. 80% of the municipal budget and military equipment on the streets are justified by the idea that cops are “handl[ing] real crimes ordinary people care about”. Meanwhile, if you get robbed half the time the cops can’t even be bothered to give you the information you need for insurance. They are thugs of capital who exist to protect private property and bourgeois laws. Abolition means rejecting and dismantling the system of colonial, patriarchal, and racist violence. Conflating the fact that a state would need some organized body to keep public order with the reality of USAmerican policing is one of the widest reaching motte-and-baileys i have seen in my life.
Punishing people and expecting them to get magically better is obviously a terrible idea. In the current moment, the police and the carceral state actually exist to generate a labor force and crack down on dissent. The fact that there’s a fig leaf lie over all of that suits their purpose. A revolutionary state, presumably interested in justice and rehabilitation, would have no need for monuments to chattel slavery and American white supremacy. Punishing people for arbitrarily long times in arbitrarily cruel conditions is not any kind of revolutionary justice. Saying the system where prisoners are charged from their slave wages to access books or phone calls needs to be rebuilt after the revolution is heinous, and arguing that it needs ‘reforms’ is comic understatement. If you think the current state of affairs can be made moral and just through “far-reaching reforms”, you can go vote for the Democratic Party like the rest.
I think what the person you are replying to is saying that people who are currently imprisoned in the capitalist system should not be imprisoned but that there are still swarms of fascists and committed reactionaries of all kinds who will need to be repressed by the state until the development of society makes those reactionary ideologies obsolete. Even those people should be getting help and be in humane conditions imo but they should not be allowed to freely walk the streets and spread bourgeois ideologies. It unfortunately takes a long time to heal a society from mass and widespread mental illness and there will be plenty of people who would rather kill us than allow us to be liberated
i do not want reactionary trans women to be V-coded in place of poor ones. i do not want conservative South African migrants stripped from their families at the border in place of Hispanic ones. i do not want black capitalists kept in former cotton plantations in place of poor ones. If you want to advocate for re-education camps, i’m right behind you. The word ‘prison’ in the United States of America implies a specific institution with a specific history, inseparable from the most depraved aspects of the country.
History shows that revolution will need to be defended from reaction and counter-attack, from without and within. That is not an excuse to take the tools of the old regime and whip them around. A hypothetical Turtle Island Liberation Army would inevitably come across stores of depleted uranium and white phosphorus. The responsible thing to do would be to safely dispose of the toxins, not hurl them into more soil and more children because the reactionaries live there. i see the carceral state, with its generational legacy of processing migrants, queers, the unhoused, and the mentally ill, as the social policy equivalent of white phosphorus.
I think you are making a lot of assumptions and what people are saying out of a valid place of care and a desire to see a harmful system being ended. I just don't think anyone here is even slightly advocating for the things you are worried about. Even the other person who is essentially saying prisons should exist for people who refuse to exist in society without harming others isn't saying anything like what you are worried about.
It depends. A lot of crimes are prosecuted everywhere, including AES states, and would be addressed in some serious fashion under almost any imaginable society. Think of the guy who won't stop drunk driving and has caused a fatal wreck, people who do multiple robberies, shootings, home burglaries, sex crimes, etc. Not everyone currently in prison in the U.S. is a weed dealer or got stuck with an unjustly long sentence.
This isn't an endorsement of any other part of our current legal system. I'm saying that there are plenty of people out there who are fine with hurting others as long as they get what they want, and who will do exactly that if they can get away with it. I think committing to never, ever putting someone like that in any sort of prison for any length of time is a bad idea.
Sure but their mental illness is a symptom of capitalism and even most of those people can be helped if that was what resources were being spent on. As a person who has a lot of experience working in community with killers, pimps, drug dealers, addicts, etc. I really know most people are not beyond reach and that we have the technology and resources to reintegrate them into society. Look at the Chinese approach to salafism, mostly it was education and job training to get the majority of people back into society. USians are an extreme case and need a lot of therapy and support but there is no reason to think that 95% of "criminals" aren't in that position because of capitalist indoctrination and can't be helped . The types of truly sociopathic people you are talking about are very few compared to most people in prisons
So you mean a guy that doesn't have access to public transportation and people who are poor? All of these things could be eliminated with basic socialist planning. These are not traits inherent to the people who do them, but consequences of material conditions
I agree that a lot of people commit crimes in the U.S. because their basic human needs (including mental health resources) go unaddressed. The best way to reduce crime is making sure everyone has housing, education, employment, healthcare -- all the stuff any socialist state would do its best to guarantee.
But people without acute mental health issues also commit crimes, and not everyone who has an acute mental health issue will voluntarily engage in treatment. And even if a revolution won total victory tomorrow, society won't change overnight. I'm reading Justice in Moscow, by George Feifer. It was published in 1964 and written based on observations from Soviet courtrooms around that time. There were still "real crimes" committed there, as there are in China today.
I generally agree but even still most people will choose rehabilitation if it is genuinely an option and for those who really won't I think their isolation from society should be infinitely more humane than what is being offered in the US or China, with the option always available and effort put into helping them anyway
I agree. But this is talking about reforming the carceral system, not abolishing it.
I'm not saying the police are great at their jobs, or that they solve the vast majority of crimes. And I realize you're not exactly saying the police do zero crime-solving, but you're coming pretty close.
The reality is that there are real crimes committed -- you give the example of robbery -- and police do find and arrest the right person in many of those cases. You can find a local courtroom in your area and see this for yourself. It's as real as the fact that schools, despite their many flaws, do actually teach a lot of people to read.
Think of the worst crimes you can imagine. Rehabilitation might be part of what justice looks like when society catches the guilty party, but it's not always the only goal. And you still need somewhere to put people who will not voluntarily cooperate with even the most humane and revolutionary justice system -- i.e., a prison. It can be the last resort, but if it's not there at all the worst people will just ignore your system and it will cease to function.
You plainly have no practical or theoretical understanding of prison abolition or the movement around it. i don’t care what crimes a person committed, if you have the state power and facilities to build a prison you have the power and facilities to build adult schools and train social workers. You seem to be convinced that there’s some magically bad crime that would make me turn on a dime and say, “oh, of course, those people should be tortured forever.” i am not a Christian, sorry. If someone is a drunk driver or a multiple murderer or even a sex criminal, they should face consequences like never having a license again or having to meet with a social worker regularly. There is no amount of badness you can do that will make you deserve torture. If you don’t have the state apparatus for it, some people will need to be shot. If you do have the state apparatus, why would you build torture camps?!
i will, in the interest of politeness, not mention the degree to which the ‘horror’ or obscenity of certain crimes is used to whip people into anti-black and anti-queer lynch mobs. Also i get that you were cutting and pasting my quotes, but i did say and did mean that the police are less than useless in solving crime. Please listen to anyone talk about trying to get a restraining order for an abusive ex or what cops do during school shootings. The police solve ‘crimes’ that are constructed as lower status. The biggest amount of theft by value is wage theft, but cops never arrest bosses. Drugs are only illegal if you’re in the wrong combination of income bracket and skin color. Corrupt thugs selectively enforcing the law while the biggest thieves and most prolific sex criminals give them marching orders is not justice, it’s a racket. i object to conflating the torture racket with any notion of public order.
If you have any interest in self-education or examining your latent pro-cop brain worms, i recommend the following prison abolition/ queer theory text: https://annas-archive.gl/md5/56342d6e9d03a37cf829fbc8cb384d35
I mean this as a genuine point of clarification: if someone is currently a danger to the community and uninterested in cooperating, do we not need to temporarily confine them for the purpose of rehabilitation? If we do, is that not a prison?
Obviously this is not an endorsement of torturing the person, i.e. inflicting any manner of suffering on them to punish them.
There will be situations in which force or enforcement would be necessary for social order. i’m not idealistically opposed to prisons or confinement as a concept, i am opposed to the existing institution of the Prison, with its own experts and episteme in the “West”. i think it’s impossible to avoid a social situation where there would never be a need for force to restore order. All traces of the currently existing institution would have to be carefully and scientifically excised before that new structure is built. i think that’s the core of prison abolition: this is a capitalist industry and also the boot tramping down on all outsiders and disposables in society. For many of the most marginalized in the Imperial Core, the bleeding edge of systemic violence is the carceral state. For many queer theorists (that is, not Marxists), this level of violence grants prison abolition a central role in struggle. i believe land back and prison abolition movements are non-Marxists who have nevertheless developed a theory and practice during the Western Left’s post-91 wilderness days. i think basically all queer advocates would be best served by forming a group or a faction within the structure and platform of a worker’s party. Nevertheless, we should make some effort to understand their terms and developments.
To directly answer your question, confinement of a struggling threat to the community might involve a prison, but it shouldn’t involve any ‘Prison’. i’m not trying to be arbitrary or capricious about that. The current standards are violently inhumane. For acceptable treatments of ‘inmates’, for the relationship between ‘inmates’, between ‘inmates’ and ‘guards’, and between ‘inmates’ and the people detaining them. It would be impossible for me to articulate exactly what developments would be made in constructing a New (Soviet) Social Worker, but i see it as an area where there’s a lot to be done. Current methods of agriculture are monstrously wasteful and climate destructive, and a new industry would need to be formed from the ground up, between the reality of communities on the ground and the people designing state policy. Similarly, medical workers, education workers, and local government workers would need to form a new system of keeping public order. In a state where, say, fixed costs for the average person are very low, the current US system of fines for municipal violations would be less effective. Does that mean increasing the fines, or finding a new method of punishment? It’s easier to do the former, because the policy and enforcement mechanism already exists.
The use of secret police and distant prisons in the USSR is worthy of careful study in the West. While arguments from reactionaries impose a sort of forced defensive mentality vis a vis the purges, it’s worth noting that in a number of ways the Soviets faced an uncomfortable and unfamiliar problem, and responded by reproducing the institutions that the previous state had used. i am not going to argue that NKVD was worse than or as a bad as the Okhrana, but states are institutions with a certain viewpoint and inertia. Of course it would be cheaper and more efficient to convert prisons in the USA and Europe into holding pens for reactionaries, even temporarily. If you do that though, you are implicitly keeping solitary confinement and execution chambers. i think giving into that temptation, and trying to mold tools designed to bring out the worst of humanity to some other end, is a mistake. The Stanford Prison Experiment has been retracted because the lead psychologist basically told the participants to act out stereotypically. While it’s not a study of untainted human society, it’s still noticeable that the lead researcher expected certain results, and all the participants knew what stereotypes he meant.
USAmerican culture is utterly, top to bottom obsessed with the criminal and the outlaw. Every channel on TV has a cop drama, people say the names of the FBI Most Wanted like celebrities, every local newspaper runs a blotter reporting every crime, the news tracks every car chase obsessively, and so on and so forth. Cultural notions about the ubiquity of violent crime and how people ought to be punished for it will need to be erased and replaced. If you ask any USAmerican, no matter how much of a commie, to imagine a prison, they are going to think of guard towers, barbed wire, bad food, and the looming threat of sexual assault. There is a world of difference between needing to deal with interpersonal violence and needing a complex kick back system of private prison labor teams and the election campaigns for the judges and attorneys that fill them. Are prisons in Cuba inherently wrong or dangerous? i would say no, but Cuba spent decades intentionally reckoning with the cultural legacy of colonialism. That examination and removal of the biases and practices we consider ‘ordinary’ needs to happen or else we will merely reproduce the institutions of bourgeois society.
What I'm getting from this is that you aren't, in a common person's use of these terms, supporting abolishing prisons, but that you are supporting abolishing "Prisons," which is sort of an abstract category that relates to some of the historical approaches to confinement and torture but is much more specific than the general use of the word prison in common language, and beyond that I guess also that the literal physical prisons are architecturally designed in ways that are overly conducive to abuse, but that there should still literally be physical prisons where people are kept for as long as we can't feasibly trust them not to cause certain types of meaningful harm to the community.
Am I missing something as relates to my original question?
abolition is about dismantling the current system because it's irredeemable and corrupt by design.
there's some tiny percentage of people who will do horrible things regardless and we'll always have something for them that "sounds like a prison" if you're paying no attention to the differences or purposes of the systems.
I'm just speaking in terms of common English because I don't have a degree in critical theory. I do not view two places being prisons as making them equivalent, just as two places being states does not make them equivalent, they just have certain specific features in common that both make them fit that definition.
If someone said, for instance, that I don't support the ultimate destruction of "the state" in common language but rather a more specific and abstract definition of the "State" inherited from Marx referring to the apparatus that mediates class antagonisms, but that if one uses "state" to simply mean "government" then yes, I think there should always be a government, my reply would be "yes, that is correct". I can speak at length about how my desired government would be different from the existing one, but by their definition it would still be a "state" and that's fine.
It's important to be able to communicate in a way where people who are trying to understand what you're saying can understand what you're saying, even if there will always be concern trolls doing a Young Turks fear mongering routine (who only need to be accounted for in terms of combating them, which being understood by sincere listeners helps with)
you’ve basically got what i’m saying. sorry, i got my university minor in critical theory so it’s easy for me to slip into jargon. i also suspect that the New Soviet Social Worker wouldn’t build prison blocks, but something more like a supervised collection of condos (like the stereotype of Scandinavian prisons). That’s just supposition though
You don't need to apologize, it's fine. I am not sure how to communicate this effectively, but if you want to both hold on to the "prison abolition" framing (which is fine) but also be understood by laypeople, it would probably be helpful to your advocacy to lead with the fact that you are using that much more specialized definition of "prison" and that in terms they would use, you do still acknowledge the need for prisons but basically want to replace the whole justice and carceral system with one that still has prisons (by the common definition) but is radically oriented toward rehabilitation and humane treatment. I truly think you'll have an easier time discussing with people and get fewer attacks that feel like mischaracterization (some of which will remain because there are malicious actors, but some stemming just from communication issues).
And if not, that's fine, I'm mostly saying this because I misunderstood you at first and saw a few other people also misunderstand you, despite the fact that I think everyone involved basically agrees.
one thing I am convinced of is that we can invent a non-torturous way of removing someone from society to protect people from them. The fact that a serial killer's rights are restricted and they're not allowed to leave a building doesn't mean our post-abolition institution includes all the other things that are wrong with modern prisons.
Is it post-abolition if you're restricting someone's rights and confining them to a building, even if you do so in the most humane possible way?
I would say no. I think it does us no favors to talk in terms of abolition and then describe what is at bottom a very nice prison.
yes, if we dismantle the current system whatever is built after is post-abolition.
if you have a repeat serial offender you have to restrain them, kill them, or let them hurt people. One or two of those are obviously not acceptable, so are you going to have capital punishment or are you going to figure out a way to separate someone from their victim pool in a humane way that doesn't carry the baggage of institutional racism etc?
abolition doesn't mean you never have custody of someone, it means the current carceral system is abolished.
Calling that "abolition" strikes me as a really poor way to communicate a good idea, especially in an environment where one of the main criticisms of AES states is "this is just a dictatorship with red aesthetics." You immediately have to explain to people that you don't mean abolish abolish, and it will feel like a bait-and-switch. I think a lot of self-described abolitionists would strongly disagree with defining abolition that way, too.
When people talk about abolishing the death penalty, they don't mean making executions fair and humane, they mean no more executions. Same for abolishing slavery: see all the leftist criticism of the 13th amendment's carve out for prisons. We should either mean it or say something more precise.
take it up with people active in the movement.
"'feminism' poorly communicates equality" type analysis
You're telling me your idea of prison abolition involves building nicer prisons. You really don't see how that's going to confuse people?
i agree with this, i think justice for the victims (if any) would necessitate at least moving the perpetrator out of the town/ area where things happened. In a society where housing was a right, something like indefinite house arrest with occasional parole review would be an appropriate ‘strictest’ level of punishment. Every existing prison needs to be torn down though
House arrest requires monitoring. You can't just have every violent criminal on house arrest. That's not a practical goal.
There are also the questions of what you do if they leave, and what you do if they leave and commit another serious crime.
there's a lot of logistical problems in preventing people from having the opportunity to re-offend and whatever the solution is we need to not create systems where staff or admin abuse of their wards or of the inmates harming one another freely
I haven't said anything like that. I began my last comment by agreeing with every single prison reform you listed. I'm going to disengage now.