Walls and Bars

"Born in Indiana, Debs was a socialist and labor organizer, a radical but also a politician. He ran for public office many times, including for President of the United States on the Socialist Party ticket. He also spent time in prison. One of the things you get in a lot of prison abolitionist writings, and certainly in Walls and Bars, is an emphasis on how often imprisonment is used as a method of political repression. It’s a way for those in power to neutralize popular leaders who dissent or are resisting the way society is currently organized. As a radical labor organizer, Debs was often strongly at odds with those in power and found himself in prison as a result. He was a very influential figure in the broadly American socialist tradition, though if you read this book you’ll hear familiar notes from Marx and earlier British socialists, as well. He does. Interestingly, he thinks that in a more humane society, a socialist society, there wouldn’t be prisons, and that’s the kind of society we should be trying to bring about. He does, however, have a lot to say about how, in the meantime, the internal life of prisons should be reorganized. He imagines a very different way of structuring them, where prisoners have much more self-determination, much more control over what’s happening inside, and participate in the running of the prison. The central thesis of the book is something like this: capitalism causes poverty, which causes crime, and the prison system then becomes necessary to protect capitalist control over productive assets and the conditions of work. So that’s largely what he’s trying to establish. Something that runs throughout the book is the thought that what we’ve got is a system that creates people who are impoverished and desperate and who live in precarious communities, strained in ways that lead them to resort to criminal conduct, either to meet their various needs or sometimes because they’re angry and resentful about their conditions. They find themselves in prison, many worse off as a result, and then they’re let out with little in the way of rehabilitation, and just return to the same thing. And so the cycle in and out of prison is perpetuated. It’s not surprising, then, that you have these high recidivism rates. It often is. I agree with you it doesn’t have to be. One could simply emphasize the nature of prison conditions, how they are dehumanizing, how incarceration makes people worse, how it invites people to abuse their power, how it’s not effective at preventing crime, and so on. One could insist on these points without any commitment to Marxist philosophy. I think that anybody who wants to make the case for abolition and be persuasive to people who are going to be immediately very skeptical, you’re going to need to justify your position to them with some kind of theory of crime. You need an account of why people are behaving in these ways. We know that people sometimes do terrible things. Why are they doing them? Why should we think we could create conditions where they wouldn’t behave in those ways, or do so only very rarely? Marxism and the broader socialist tradition give you one sort of answer. Not the only answer, but one answer to that question, which is that we have a system of exploitation that impoverishes the people who create the wealth that the wealthy then get all the benefits from. And these same beneficiaries are largely able to avoid the prison system: when they do commit crimes, at times horrific crimes which harm many more people, they are able to buy their way out of the system with lawyers, and so effectively avoid having to serve time. So this creates enormous resentment on the part of working-class people. I think this is a very compelling explanation of at least a lot of crime — not all crime, but a lot of crime. I think that abolitionists, many of them at least, would these days say, ‘Look, this is a long-term project’. They’re not really imagining an abrupt break from the global capitalist system, but something that we will work at over time. They might even imagine that we’ll do this by prefiguring the form of life that we want to bring about in smaller-scale communities, a proof of concept, in a way: ‘Let me show you that you can live in ways without such heavy reliance on policing and prisons and surveillance. And yet, it would be peaceful.’ That’s the kind of thing you might scale up and convince others to reorganize society on the basis of this success. Prison abolition needn’t be revolutionary, though it often does have that orientation. That’s absolutely right. It’s probably one of the reasons why a lot of abolitionists think of abolition as a long-term project, because in addition to fighting against an ethos of competition and domination which you might associate with capitalism, as we know it, you also have to fight against an ethos of retribution and retaliation and ramping up of punishments in response to people’s harmful wrongdoing. That takes work too, to get people to relinquish that way of responding. It’s natural to respond in that way: it’s a familiar human disposition to be angry and resentful and to want to strike back against those who do wrong, including those who harm our communities. But we must work through that—as we do with many other impulses that are anti-social or destructive—to a different way of thinking about human wrongdoing and the harm it does. We need to respond in a way that’s not only more effective, but also just more humane, in a way that understands human frailty, in a way that understands the environmental conditions that lead people to behave in these ways. We need to create the conditions for reconciliation between those who do wrong and those who are harmed or survive that wrongdoing. So prison abolition will inevitably involve an attack on the retributive framework."