Prison populations are drawn from the places where opportunity is thinnest

The argument

This reading begins with who is actually imprisoned. Those held are drawn overwhelmingly from the poorest neighbourhoods, and they arrive with histories that recur so often they are unremarkable to anyone who works in the system: schooling that broke off early, no steady work, unstable housing, untreated addiction or illness, and childhoods marked by violence or state care. On this account the prison does not draw from the population at large; it collects people from a narrow set of circumstances, and the pattern is too consistent to be explained by individual character alone. If that is right, proponents argue, then the question of what a world without prisons would be like is really a question about those circumstances. A society could close its prisons while leaving everything that fills them untouched, but the conduct would continue and some other institution would end up holding the same people, whether a hospital, a hostel or the street. The prisonless world worth imagining is therefore one in which the conditions that reliably precede imprisonment have been altered: schools that keep hold of the children most likely to drop out, work that pays enough to live on, housing that does not depend on good fortune, and treatment available before conduct becomes criminal. Proponents put the point as a matter of sequence rather than sentiment. On this view prisons are not the cause of the problem and not the solution to it; they are where a society puts what it has failed to deal with earlier. A world without them would be one that had dealt with those things earlier, which makes abolition a description of a society that no longer produces the cases rather than a policy applied to the cases it produces. That is why the reading treats inequality, education and employment as the substance of the question.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue that the account proves less than it claims. That imprisoned people share disadvantaged backgrounds shows who gets caught and convicted as much as who offends, and most people in those circumstances never commit a serious offence, so the conditions cannot be the whole explanation. They add that the reading quietly changes the subject: asked what a world without prisons would be like, it answers by describing a world without poverty, which is a different and larger proposition that may never arrive. Serious harm also occurs in comfortable circumstances, including fraud and violence within families, and critics argue that a society which addressed deprivation would still have to decide what to do about those cases.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Shared disadvantage among those imprisoned shows who is caught, charged and convicted as much as who offends, and most people in those circumstances never commit a serious offence. [Rejecting P2] That some institution would hold the same people assumes the conduct is fixed, when the alternatives named differ precisely in what they do about it. [Rejecting P3] Defining a prisonless world as one in which deprivation has been solved changes the subject, since the question asked what such a world would be like rather than what would have to precede it. [Rejecting C] Serious harm also occurs in comfortable circumstances, including fraud and violence within families, so a society that addressed deprivation would still face the question of what to do about those cases.