Is Prison Necessary?

People change, believe it or not.

Germany and the Netherlands both have lower violent crime rates. An extra 600 per 100K Americans deserve to be imprisoned and are a real threat to society or there's something wrong with the US approach.

Which would make identifying them, before they commit a crime, hugely beneficial. Treating it as a disease, might lower the stigma, and allow these people to self identify themselves.

Consider the possibility that there are a set amount of pedophile's born in every generation. We as a society can decide how we treat people with that condition, and what might work best, reducing suffering, at a reasonable cost.

It's not a ridiculous statement to assume we haven't found the global optimum for that problem. Specially considering the huge risk of recidivism.

In a large election a single vote doesn't matter. And yet if we permitted that fact to dissuade us from voting nobody would vote and democracy as we practice it would be impossible.

I haven't read Gilmore's writings, and I'm basing my interpretations off the article author's gloss--their selected quotations and elaborations--but applying the rule of lenity and in light of some of her very cogent points (that private prisons aren't a big problem, that the vast majority of prisoners are in fact violent offenders) it would seem that she's applying the same principles as Plato and MLK. Specifically, that society can only achieve and will only reap that which it orders itself around.

Whether irrepressibly violent people will always exist is beside the point. If we build a system directed toward the management of such people, then those are the people we're going to get, above and beyond whatever genetically predetermined base rate we might otherwise find in the population.

How does Gilmore translate her abolitionist position into specific policy prescriptions? I don't know. Maybe they're contentious; maybe I'd disagree with them altogether. But at least superficially I don't see abolitionism particularly inconsistent. I doubt you feel compelled to demand that a Get Out the Vote volunteer explain to you why voting matters, or demand that a "Why Voting Matters" article provide a concrete proof for why it matters. It's more intuitive that voting could only matter in so far as enough people have internalized the notion that it matters and act accordingly. Americans, I think, lack that intuition and suspension of disbelief when it comes to violence and crime. Some things are self-fulfilling prophecies--if we believe or don't believe, that's what we'll get. How societies manage to shift from one set of expectations to the polar opposite... that's still something of a mystery, but surely it involves being open to advocates like Gilmore.

1) Spain has light sentences for murder.

2) Spain has a low murder rate.

3) Leniency in criminal justice begets less violence.

4) Imagine the most lenient system possible--no incarceration whatsoever. That may result in the least amount of violent crime.[1]

Step #3 is I think the most contentious. Is leniency a cause or effect? In reality it's probably both. And I presume that Gilmore could provide much more sophisticated arguments that don't rely on there being a simple, unidirectional causal relationship. But my impression from the article is that the overarching emphasis is that there is some causal relationship and that by refusing to accept that it exists we perpetuate an inflated rate of violence. We can't productively get into the weeds of concrete prescriptions without first establishing the nature of the causal relationship.

[1] Nowhere does the article imply the claim that all violent crime could be prevented. At least conceptually, it may be better to have a few Ted Bundys roaming freely than to construct a criminal justice system that molds many more people into gladiators. In any event, this would be a quantitive question and not something that is categorically foreclosed. Establishing that Ted Bundys exist and would kill doesn't resolve anything, so why require Gilmore to answer how she would prevent Ted Bundys from killing?