Prison Abolitionism

This essay will critically evaluate the argument that the use of imprisonment should be abolished. According to Cowell and Stenson (1995, p.203) ‘Abolitionism is based on the moral conviction that social life should not and, in fact, cannot be regulated effectively by criminal law’. This illustrates that under the system of law societal life is not coherent. Although there is a criminal justice system there are also moral convictions taking place. Prison abolition is a movement aimed to reduce the number of prisons and eradicate prisons in relation to replacing them with more humane, effective and nominal systems. Prison abolitionist could be considered as an effective organisation in order to eliminate and diminish the number of offences that
During the 1960’s, the prison abolitionism movement began. The abolitionism movement argues that prisons are ineffective, inhumane and stigmatising. The main unifying thread of the different abolition movements is that crime is a social construction: we decide who commits a crime, we decide how they should be punished, and this is wrong as the roots of crime rely on society. We need better societal collective ways to deal with crime. As Duff and Garland (1997, p.333) states; “Punishment cannot be justified at all; that we should aim not simply to reform or limit our penal practices and institutions, but to abolish them”. This suggests that abolitionism movement has a radical view which focused specifically on abolishing rather than reforming. This was a distinct form of improving prisons as they resisted that prisons are unproductive and do not work; they also argued that prisons were being used as extended social services. Certainly, if the offender is in prison for a limited of time and there is no access to any rehabilitation programmes this is a problem as they are not
He argued that prisons are ineffective and the real role of prisons is controlling the poor. He argues that ‘prisons are symbolic, demonstrates to us the public government is doing something about crime’ (Mathieson, 1986, p.83). He illustrates that prisons are used by the government to get rid of undesirable people within society. This shows that prisons are futile and stigmatising under the government’s laws and the criminal justice system. Within the United Kingdom, there is only one small group of abolitionists which is the Empty Cages Collective. They are individuals who experienced harm in the prison system. They are ex-prisoners or individuals associated with prison-related struggle. However, this is a small group of abolitionists. If we compare this to Scandinavian countries like Norway, Sweden and Finland, they have a more extensive group of abolitionists, which have been more successful as they have a unified voice in order to abolish prisons. More specifically, comparing the UK to Sweden, abolitionists in Sweden are a much broader group, unlike United Kingdom, having just one small group of abolitionists. ‘Sweden is closing prisons and reducing the prison population’ (Guardian, 2014). This exemplifies that the abolitionist movement in Sweden is much more effective than the UK and other European countries. Simultaneously, if we move onto looking at the prison population between