I was excited in the WashPo coverage that they said Colin would be pushing more coverage of prison reform.
It took me awhile, including attending a few events run by public defenders, to come around to the far end of the spectrum of reform which is abolition[1]. Abolitionists would say that reformers are wasting their time and that prisons work as designed.
Prison abolition, like defunding the police, is a topic that's reasonable if you dig into it but sounds radical and dangerous on the surface. So it's something the main stream media won't cover well or will cover with a lot of both-sidesism. I never read what the WashPo or NYT say on this topic because I know it'll be frustratingly bad.
So I see this as a great moment for Medium, to be a place where this topic can be covered fully and in depth. It's a win for their subscription model, which is generating the revenue that allows for high quality coverage. It's just great. I'm so excited.
[1] If abolition sounds dangerous or radical, the key point that got me over the hump was that it is a long term goal, say a hundred years, that is meant to be executed category by category. Once you see the goal that way, it's easy to first of all find categories that can simply be eliminated by decriminalization. And then as you keep going you find ways to either do restorative justice where the focus is on making amends or ways to solve the root issue prompting crime. It's not until the end where you would face the possibly impossible issues of what to do with a Jeffrey Dahmer for instance.
What do I do? Nothing. Did you see that part of my post? I really tried to emphasize that you go piece by piece and that harder pieces get addressed later. I'll be dead before anyone tries to figure out what to do with mobsters. But if you could find a way, almost definitely that way would be preferable to incarceration. That is why it's called abolition. The goal is to find ways to abolish every single category of incarceration.
There is a lot of research that people don't know about. And also a lot of people willing to do more research. So why limit your position here to just the solutions you can personally imagine?
>you go piece by piece and that harder pieces get addressed later
Sounds like diving head-first into something with significant short and long term consequences while refusing to plan for the actual end-game. Frankly the reason people haven't addressed the "harder pieces" of abolition yet is because there is no good alternative to prison. Some people are fundamentally dangerous to society and no amount of "please be nice" therapy or education will change them.
What is the risk here? Break it down for yourself. I think either you are imagining a different process than I'm imagining or you'll find there are no short or long term consequences other than maybe some research money that gets spent verifying a dead end.
If 90 years from now a set of experiments to find alternatives to incarceration for mobsters failed, that's not going to make people regret the first step of abolition which is probably decriminalizing drug possession. Or the second step, which is also well supported, which is eliminating cash bail.
It seems like you're setting a target that you have no actual plan to achieve. Perhaps de-scoping the project would have the twin benefits of appearing more reasonable to your audience, and allowing for the possibility of success.
The abolition movement does answer this which is that the reform movement has already been tested and failed.
For illustration, can we say the easiest and most straight forward solutions eliminate 50% of incarceration? We've had incarceration rates in the US that were lower than that.
When reformers say reform, they have to fight tooth and nail for 1% reduction. Even in New York State some simple bail reform got rolled back almost immediately after heavy PR by the police departments here.
How do you go from 1% to saying, no, no, we actually meant 50x more reform than that? It just doesn't work.
So, if abolition says 100% and it laters turns out that the theoretical healthy limit for a society is only 80%, well, nobody on the abolition side is going to be all that worked up about it.
But he has a point that attempts at small reforms failed for years.
And it also seems to me that lately radicals can get their way somewhat, but "reasonable center" is not achieving anything or ends up being enabler for more powerful sociopath.
It would be better if things were the opposite way, but they are not. It is imo the core reason for radicalisation of all involved sides lately.
I think they should re-assess their goal. Abolishing every single category of incarceration is as realistic as finding a way to travel faster than light.
It's a good exercise to look at who is currently in jail on a given night in the US and decide for yourself how much incarceration could be eliminated. I say the goal should be 100%, but it might take 100 years and might stall out before 100%. That's fine by me.
But maybe you see this only as 50%. I'd be surprised if you did your own research though and came up with only 5%.
prisons in the united states emerged on the heels of the abolition of slavery
it seems we have at some point forgotten the main aim it was put in place for... and even so, we see that extensive without oversight, people running the systems aren’t doing the right thing.
I imagine work on that problem will be ongoing long after it’s been figured out for everyone else. Definitely shouldn’t be a prerequisite to starting on the easier situations.
Saying "we'll figure it out as we go" is not very convincing to skeptics. Prisons are not a startup that should rapidly pivot, or 'fail-fast'. Why not just focus on a more limited set of objectives, which can be achieved via currently-known means?
Wasn't I clear about limited early objectives? Piece by piece over the course of a hundred years. It's not fail fast. The early pieces are pretty well known and not particularly controversial.
Framing something as a vague hundred year struggle makes it seem both unrealistic and unachievable. It's usually better to set a more limited target, then after you succeed and garner credibility, you propose a new goal.
You might think that I am quibbling about marketing, but there's a real chance you never get off the ground with the grand scheme, or your first step fails. The 'big ideas' are often very popular with adherents, and ignored by everyone else.
As a fan of iterations in software development it’s irked me as some of the language has been picked up in the “real world.”
Moving fast and breaking things and minimum viable products only work if you’re reliably iterating and changing. It’s not a license to suck and procrastinate and only do fun things and assume someone will figure it out afterwards.
I worked with a colleague who had this cargo cult mentality to projects where ve would come in, say crazy stuff, promise everything, hire a random contractor and then move on. Ve called verself a “change agent” but never really changed anything other than the air in the room.
Why do you think mobsters or human traffickers are driven by malice? Those occupations, if you can call them that, have clear economic and political incentives supporting their existence. If you want to stop people from becoming mobsters or human traffickers, I think it would make sense to create a political and economic system that reduces or eliminates those incentives.
People calling for restorative justice generally aren’t looking to simply reproduce the status quo without prisons.
Unfortunately, I'd say that there might be economic incentives to kill children. When people are extremely poor, children are expensive. When a single parent is working multiple minimum-wage jobs, the kids are going to be neglected. Neglected kids act out more. Frustration gets pent up, the impossibility of the situation looms; a hefty medical bill or a high-needs disability... I think it's actually pretty normal for parents to fantasize about killing their children... but when times get extra tough... grim.
Healthcare and UBI starting at childbirth would go a long way to reducing that incentive.
Economic incentive for rape... I can't think of an argument. On the other hand, trafficking is extremely lucrative. But, tragically, child molesters are frequently victims themselves. I can't help but think that a robust mental health care system could go a long ways towards breaking that cycle.
to support your use of the word radical, i wish to offer:
etymologically, “radical” comes from “radix” meaning root. to be radical in this context means to strike at the root of the problem. it means to reason from first principles and to reason in a way which takes into consideration leverage points in complex systems.
Right. Not sure why you are getting downvoted. This is true that people are afraid of root causes. And I think it's relevant to Hacker News because this is a community that tends to like first principle thinking.
I think society should focus on the root issues that lead to crime. That said, there are a lot of people in the world who we cannot allow to walk the streets without being quite cruel to the law-abiding rest of us. Making amends is great, but it should not lead to release.
Does it matter to how you treat those in front of you? Maybe, maybe not. There's a whole debate about the moral dimensions of responsibility and punishment to be had there, but it's beside the point I'm interested in.
Does it matter to your long term policy of how to deal with the issue of which they are an instance? Absolutely.
You waste human potential when you view the problem too narrowly.
When the words you use have been co-opted to mean people of minorities who are definitely not too cruel for society, those words lose all meaning. At this point, the cruel people look like a statistical anomaly.
From your other replies, I get the sense it shouldn't be callied "prison abolition", but "prison minimization where it makes sense, lets see how far we can take it". The former sounds like the dumbest idea you could possibly have, while the latter sounds perfectly sensible. From that perspective, you could not possibly have chosen a worse name for your movement, and it'll guarantee its failure under a torrent of questions like "this man raped and murdered my daughter - and you want him to go free??"
If you want to make a difference, call it something else.
From the name "prison abolition", my first assumption is an alternative more like Sharia. Thieves get their hands chopped off. Other ideas include caning (as in Singapore) and hanging.
It gets rid of prison. We save a lot of money. We still have a powerful deterrent to crime.
So with that we get prison abolition while still keeping bad people from being uncontrolled. Everybody happy?
> From your other replies, I get the sense it shouldn't be callied "prison abolition", but "prison minimization where it makes sense, lets see how far we can take it".
The latter is not sufficiently succinct as a label, and also not accurate. The goal of prison abolition is abolition.
And even if some institutionalization is left, it probably won't much resemble modern imprisonment much in it's scope, design, purpose, focus, or role in society.
It's similar (though longer term) to police abolition, which doesn't favor abolition of (even armed, uniformed) law enforcement, but does favor abolition of the monolithic all-purpose paramilitary local law enforcement agencies that dominate that function at the local level today.
> If you want to make a difference, call it something else.
Yeah, using a long phrase that people fall asleep.halfway through as a label for a political movement is effective messaging.
> If abolition sounds dangerous or radical, the key point that got me over the hump was that it is a long term goal, say a hundred years
Normally, when people say "abolish" they mean "get rid of it now". When you say "abolish" but you actually mean "we'll get rid of it in a century from now, after everyone currently involved in this issue is dead, and we don't even know how that future generation is meant to pull it off, but we are sure they'll work it out somehow" you aren't really talking about abolition in the here and now, you are actually talking about reform in the here and now. "Abolition" is really just reform with a deliberately provocative presentation.
This sounds like some inception from the far right to trick the far left into sounding insane.
I’m not sure if there’s a more far fetched wedge issue that drives the middle away than this. I though completely open borders was as interesting as I found, but “change human nature to never crime” is even better.
There’s a great science fiction book called “The Demolished Man” by Alfred Bester about a future society where criminals were rehabilitated rather than imprisoned.
Just imagine if you are a person that has a PhD in criminal justice, spent an entire career in the CJ system as e.g. a parole judge or internal affairs prosecutor, wrote textbooks about CJ reform, maybe even experienced incarceration and rehabilitation first-hand. Imagine how you would feel about this appointment. Would this look like a genuine commitment to advancing the kind of intelligent discourse that solves a problem? Or would it look like a desperate celebrity appointment for marketing and fundraising? Surely he’s brave and has learned a lot. His contribution was symbolically transformative. It’s hard to imagine that he is the expert on the topic. It seems to me that what is going on here is picking sides. BLM is like a social startup on a massive growth trajectory. Invest now for massive gains in social proof. There’s also a fear element, like, get your business on the internet or it’s the internet will kill your business. Replace ‘internet’ with ‘social justice movement’. This is the point in the timeline where every company on earth is desperate to make a website.
Pretty sure that the majority response from these PhDs is that they will be the authors in these publications. This isn't Colin Kaepernick's daily blog we're talking about. Colin has money/power and this is what he's using it to support. So, if I were a PhD or other expert, I'd be focused on the good news that there is a new source of support for getting my expertise out there.
Oh, you're saying that this is more like Colin Kaepernick's decision to partner with Medium moreso than Medium's conveniently-timed decision to support a movement through celebrity endorsement. Yes, that makes sense, and it seems that Kaepernick likely has the upper hand in this transaction. His brand is much stronger than Medium, better growth potential, impossible to replicate. I hope he got at least 20% of the company in this deal.
47 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 97.3 ms ] threadIt took me awhile, including attending a few events run by public defenders, to come around to the far end of the spectrum of reform which is abolition[1]. Abolitionists would say that reformers are wasting their time and that prisons work as designed.
Prison abolition, like defunding the police, is a topic that's reasonable if you dig into it but sounds radical and dangerous on the surface. So it's something the main stream media won't cover well or will cover with a lot of both-sidesism. I never read what the WashPo or NYT say on this topic because I know it'll be frustratingly bad.
So I see this as a great moment for Medium, to be a place where this topic can be covered fully and in depth. It's a win for their subscription model, which is generating the revenue that allows for high quality coverage. It's just great. I'm so excited.
[1] If abolition sounds dangerous or radical, the key point that got me over the hump was that it is a long term goal, say a hundred years, that is meant to be executed category by category. Once you see the goal that way, it's easy to first of all find categories that can simply be eliminated by decriminalization. And then as you keep going you find ways to either do restorative justice where the focus is on making amends or ways to solve the root issue prompting crime. It's not until the end where you would face the possibly impossible issues of what to do with a Jeffrey Dahmer for instance.
How do you do restorative justice with them?
Sounds like diving head-first into something with significant short and long term consequences while refusing to plan for the actual end-game. Frankly the reason people haven't addressed the "harder pieces" of abolition yet is because there is no good alternative to prison. Some people are fundamentally dangerous to society and no amount of "please be nice" therapy or education will change them.
If 90 years from now a set of experiments to find alternatives to incarceration for mobsters failed, that's not going to make people regret the first step of abolition which is probably decriminalizing drug possession. Or the second step, which is also well supported, which is eliminating cash bail.
For illustration, can we say the easiest and most straight forward solutions eliminate 50% of incarceration? We've had incarceration rates in the US that were lower than that.
When reformers say reform, they have to fight tooth and nail for 1% reduction. Even in New York State some simple bail reform got rolled back almost immediately after heavy PR by the police departments here.
How do you go from 1% to saying, no, no, we actually meant 50x more reform than that? It just doesn't work.
So, if abolition says 100% and it laters turns out that the theoretical healthy limit for a society is only 80%, well, nobody on the abolition side is going to be all that worked up about it.
And it also seems to me that lately radicals can get their way somewhat, but "reasonable center" is not achieving anything or ends up being enabler for more powerful sociopath.
It would be better if things were the opposite way, but they are not. It is imo the core reason for radicalisation of all involved sides lately.
But maybe you see this only as 50%. I'd be surprised if you did your own research though and came up with only 5%.
Here's a good starting point of who is in jail and why. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html
it seems we have at some point forgotten the main aim it was put in place for... and even so, we see that extensive without oversight, people running the systems aren’t doing the right thing.
The movement begins in the United States, but it is ultimately a global humanitarian concern.
Restorative justice ultimately is a paradigm shift in the way we relate to each other as human beings.
To realize such a vision, we start where we are, and put one foot in front the other.
You might think that I am quibbling about marketing, but there's a real chance you never get off the ground with the grand scheme, or your first step fails. The 'big ideas' are often very popular with adherents, and ignored by everyone else.
As a fan of iterations in software development it’s irked me as some of the language has been picked up in the “real world.”
Moving fast and breaking things and minimum viable products only work if you’re reliably iterating and changing. It’s not a license to suck and procrastinate and only do fun things and assume someone will figure it out afterwards.
I worked with a colleague who had this cargo cult mentality to projects where ve would come in, say crazy stuff, promise everything, hire a random contractor and then move on. Ve called verself a “change agent” but never really changed anything other than the air in the room.
Why set all or nothing requirements on the change when incremental change can do a lot of good right now?
People calling for restorative justice generally aren’t looking to simply reproduce the status quo without prisons.
Healthcare and UBI starting at childbirth would go a long way to reducing that incentive.
Economic incentive for rape... I can't think of an argument. On the other hand, trafficking is extremely lucrative. But, tragically, child molesters are frequently victims themselves. I can't help but think that a robust mental health care system could go a long ways towards breaking that cycle.
to support your use of the word radical, i wish to offer:
etymologically, “radical” comes from “radix” meaning root. to be radical in this context means to strike at the root of the problem. it means to reason from first principles and to reason in a way which takes into consideration leverage points in complex systems.
Does it matter to your long term policy of how to deal with the issue of which they are an instance? Absolutely.
You waste human potential when you view the problem too narrowly.
If you want to make a difference, call it something else.
It gets rid of prison. We save a lot of money. We still have a powerful deterrent to crime.
So with that we get prison abolition while still keeping bad people from being uncontrolled. Everybody happy?
The latter is not sufficiently succinct as a label, and also not accurate. The goal of prison abolition is abolition.
And even if some institutionalization is left, it probably won't much resemble modern imprisonment much in it's scope, design, purpose, focus, or role in society.
It's similar (though longer term) to police abolition, which doesn't favor abolition of (even armed, uniformed) law enforcement, but does favor abolition of the monolithic all-purpose paramilitary local law enforcement agencies that dominate that function at the local level today.
> If you want to make a difference, call it something else.
Yeah, using a long phrase that people fall asleep.halfway through as a label for a political movement is effective messaging.
Normally, when people say "abolish" they mean "get rid of it now". When you say "abolish" but you actually mean "we'll get rid of it in a century from now, after everyone currently involved in this issue is dead, and we don't even know how that future generation is meant to pull it off, but we are sure they'll work it out somehow" you aren't really talking about abolition in the here and now, you are actually talking about reform in the here and now. "Abolition" is really just reform with a deliberately provocative presentation.
Yes, but it's not allowed by the rules here.
Like you say "abolition sounds dangerous or radical".
Almost by definition Conservatives will vote hard as possible the other way.
If the idea is correct, you can't educate people on complex topics like this anyway. It needs to be iterative.
It also sounds nothing like it is. Sound bites matter when Twitter controls the discourse.
I’m not sure if there’s a more far fetched wedge issue that drives the middle away than this. I though completely open borders was as interesting as I found, but “change human nature to never crime” is even better.
There’s a great science fiction book called “The Demolished Man” by Alfred Bester about a future society where criminals were rehabilitated rather than imprisoned.