![]() This makes us all less safe in the long run. The prison environment itself makes people more likely to use violence once they’re released. When people come out of prison, that intensified violence then flows into the community and makes it less safe. Prisons take violence from the community and concentrate it all in one place, making it more intense. ![]() Doesn’t putting dangerous people away keep us safe? ![]() For the very small number of people who pose an immediate risk to themselves and others, short-term intensive supervision within the community, as well as active therapeutic intervention, would be required. Justice is achieved not through punishment but through empowering people to change their behaviour. It would start with the belief that everyone has the capacity to change and everyone should be treated with dignity and respect. Justice in a world without prisons would provide dignity to both victims and perpetrators, and acknowledge that the lines between these categories are often blurred. However, even in a world without prisons, people will continue to harm one another. It means ensuring that people with intellectual disabilities are provided with the support they need to lead fulfilling lives. It means ensuring everyone who needs access to emancipatory mental health and drug treatment can receive it. That means a world without prisons ensures that everyone has a decent standard of living where they can thrive. If we address these root causes of imprisonment, we can make prison entirely unnecessary. The people in prisons overwhelmingly come from poor backgrounds, struggle with mental illness and addiction, have intellectual disabilities, and are targeted by racist policing. The process of abolishing prisons is ultimately about making them redundant. While we can make immediate changes to reduce the number of people in prison, creating a world without prisons won’t happen overnight. Evidence from abroad shows that there is unlikely to be any major impact on crime as a result. We could release thousands just by making immediate changes to bail, sentencing, parole, and drug laws, for example. There are a large number of people in prison right now who could be released without any negative effects on the community. What does a world without prisons look like? Prisons contribute to intergenerational cycles of poverty, and create worse outcomes for the communities already most impacted by imprisonment. By taking away key family members and wage-earners, prisons make families poorer in multiple ways, which in turn means they will continue to be overwhelmingly targeted by the prison system. Evidence from New Zealand and abroad suggests that having a parent who has been incarcerated substantially increases the likelihood that a child will be incarcerated in their lifetime. It hurts entire communities.īecause they overwhelmingly target poor and Māori people, prisons actually reinforce the social inequality which drives crime. This means that the violence of prisons hurts more than just those on the inside. When people re-enter their communities, that violence often comes with them. ![]() Far from rehabilitating people, prison teaches people that violence is the best way to address conflict and achieve desired outcomes. Across the world, prisons are often incredibly violent places where physical and sexual violence are everyday occurrences. Why do abolitionists think that prisons are harmful? Instead of locking up people and forgetting about them, prison abolitionists believe we need to not only help people change as individuals, but that we need to change the circumstances that lead them to harmful behaviour in the first place. Prison abolition requires dealing with harm in ways that actually address its root causes. A context of inequality, racism, and poverty is what causes crime, and putting people in prison does nothing to address it. Prisons punish people who have harmed others, but they don’t actually fix the deep social problems that make this violence so common. Rather than putting people in prison, prison abolitionists think that we should replace them entirely with systems of rehabilitation that do not focus on punishment. Fundamentally, prisons are totally ineffective at addressing harmful behaviour and actually make people more violent. Prison abolitionists see prisons as a cause of harm rather than a tool of justice. Prison abolition is the belief that we would all be better off in a world without prisons.
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