- Question
What would a world without prisons be like?
What would a society without prisons actually look like? This entry maps the positions on prison abolition — that it would mean upending the current justice system, and that it would mean confronting root causes like inequality, education and employment.
A world without prisons would mean upending our current system
This reading treats abolition as a structural change: without prisons, policing, courts and sentencing would have to be rebuilt around other responses to crime, so the question becomes what replaces an institution the whole system is organised around.
A world without prisons would mean confronting issues such as inequality, education and employment
This reading treats a world without prisons as one that would first have to address what sends people there, taking poverty, interrupted schooling and lack of work as the conditions a society would need to change before incarceration became unnecessary.