There was a really interesting piece in the NYT a few days ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/m...n-gilmore.html
Essentially, it's a profile of the author of "Golden Gulag", making the case for prison abolition. Obviously a lot of the argumentation in this space borders on the naive, but I was impressed with the depth of her background in the subject. So what do you guys think? Is prison abolition actually an achievable goal?
I think we can all agree that the prison system in much of the world - the US in particular - has serious flaws, and that large numbers of inmates (and society) could be better served by (a) preventing the conditions that encouraged their criminal behavior in the first place, (b) decriminalizing a lot of activity, or (c) diverting convicts into various forms of rehabilitation rather than leaving them to rot in jail for large portions of their lives.
But I'm most interested in the argument for wholesale abolition. What would that look like? How would such a society function for the class of criminals that are seen as a danger to society and possibly irredeemable? Are we just going to continue to have custodial sentences but give them a name other than 'prison'? Or do we stick to our principles and figure out an alternative?