Incarceration suffers a loss

Sacramento County turned down a jail expansion, reversing the U.S. incarceration binge of the last two generations.

Along the same lines, here are some excerpts from an interview with Alec Karakatnsanis in The Intercept:

Anyone who observes court in the U.S. or works in the system understands that there is simply no way to process two million human beings from their families, homes, jobs, communities and into cages without coming up with shortcuts at every single step in the process. It’s just a really significant bureaucratic achievement to transfer that many people and their bodies and their lives into government-run cages. And to do that, the system basically has to ignore the main constitutional rights that are provided for in the Bill of Rights, because those documents were not written with a world of mass incarceration in mind. In fact, they were written precisely to avoid mass human caging.

.... The way that law is enforced reflects distributions of power in our society. It’s the same way that people are routinely arrested and jailed for street gambling, but it’s totally acceptable to gamble over international currencies and global supply of wheat, even though gambling over the global supply of wheat has caused starvation for tens of millions of people. These same activities, depending on who’s doing them, are seen as morally culpable or morally praiseworthy, even.

.... If you actually think that [our criminal legal system's] purpose is controlling certain populations, oppressing certain people, conserving the hierarchies of wealth and power, then it’s actually functioning very well. And the people who’ve been running our criminal legal system for decades aren’t stupid. They weren’t trying to do one thing but woefully failed, they were trying to do what the system has been doing, which is to keep certain people controlled.

....you always need to oppose hiring more police officers, giving them more money for body cameras, increasing the budgets even of “progressive” prosecutor offices. We need to shrink all of these systems, and we need to invest in noncarceral, community-based mutual aid and empowerment solutions. The kinds of reforms that are offered by most punishment bureaucrats all over the country are mistaken reforms.

I think the reason abolition sounds so strange to many people is that those people are envisioning a society that looks exactly like our current society, just with no police and prisons and jails — and that does seem ridiculous because our society creates so much desperation and violence. But in a society that is tackling things like white supremacy, economic deprivation, toxic masculinity, and that is providing connections between people, and where communities are responsible for each other, I actually don’t think it would be weird at all. You wouldn’t even need the things that we now think of as elemental parts of our society, like the local jail.