42 The New York Review
What Replaces Prisons?
Michelle Kuo
Until We Reckon:
Violence, Mass Incarceration,
and a Road to Repair
by Danielle Sered.
New Press, 305 pp., $26.99
Nearly two decades ago, the activist and
scholar Angela Davis observed that
prison abolitionists were “dismissed as
utopians and idealists whose ideas are
at best unrealistic and impracticable,
and, at worst, mystifying and foolish.”
Today this is no longer the case—the
prison abolition movement has gone
mainstream. The recent killings by po-
lice officers of George Floyd, Breonna
Taylor, and Tony McDade—among
many others—have sparked a national
reckoning about the entire US justice
system that has reached news outlets,
city governments, and boardrooms. In
Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed,
the school district has terminated its
contract with the police department.
A majority of the city council, which
controls the budget, voted in June to
abolish the department outright and
replace it with a new system.
For Black Lives Matter activists,
whose platform calls for “an end to all
jails, prisons, immigration detention,
youth detention and civil commit-
ment facilities as we know them,” the
movements for police and prison abo-
lition are one and the same.^1 Current
efforts to defund police forces are part
of a larger push to dismantle an entire
criminal legal system that Americans
increasingly recognize is biased against
people of color. Police arrest minorities
at higher rates than whites. Prosecutors
charge them. Prisons trap them. These
interlocking mechanisms have made
the criminal legal system so unjust that
some activists and scholars have aban-
doned the phrase “justice system” al-
together. Mariame Kaba, a police and
prison abolitionist, emphasizes that a
society without such institutions is not
so far-fetched: affluent communities—
where police do not patrol school halls,
where misbehavior in school results in
counseling rather than jail, where people
do not worry for their safety, and where
addiction and mental illness are treated
rather than criminalized—are “living
abolition right now,” she has said.
That would indeed be the desired
goal for all communities, even if there’s
disagreement as to how to get there.
The political scientist Michael Javen
Fortner observed in a recent essay in
City Journal that some Black citizens
want more police rather than fewer,
to protect them from crime. He cites a
June 2020 Yahoo News/YouGov sur-
vey following Floyd’s death suggest-
ing that opinion is split: 50 percent of
Black respondents wanted “more cops
on the street,” but 49 percent said they
felt personally “less secure” when they
saw a cop.
Regardless of this division in opin-
ion, the Black Lives Matter movement
has helped to expose the profound gap
of lived experience between commu-
nities that endure police violence and
those that barely register the existence
of police. What began as a hashtag in
2013, after George Zimmerman was
acquitted in the fatal shooting of Tray-
von Martin, has grown into a move-
ment supported by many millions that
has also helped fuel public outrage at
the racial disparities in mass incarcer-
ation. The statistics are well known
by now but remain deeply disturbing:
African-Americans are incarcerated at
more than five times the rate of whites.
Black women are imprisoned at twice
the rate of white women, and studies
show that 44 percent of Black women
today have a family member in prison.If current numbers hold, one out of
three Black men born today will end
up in the correctional system at some
point in his life.
And prison itself is a horror: a cha-
otic and degrading environment where
the threat of violence is constant. Over-
extended and corrupt guards allow as-
saults, or assault inmates themselves.
In Alabama, inmate mortality has
more than doubled since 2010. Since
2014, Texas and Florida, which re-
spectively have the highest and third-
highest prison populations in the US,
have seen record inmate mortality
rates. Investigative reports depict in-
adequate or nonexistent mental health
care, overcrowding, and poor sanitation.
During the first month of the coronavi-
rus pandemic, Rikers Island had one
toilet for every twenty-nine people. In
Mississippi, where sixteen inmates died
in a single month in 2018, prisoners live
in “squalid conditions with standing
sewage in freezing temperatures,” ac-
cording to the Southern Poverty Law
Center. The practice of solitary con-
finement—sometimes for infractions as
minor as speaking disrespectfully to a
guard—is linked to nearly half of prison
suicides. In Texas, the average time pris-
oners spend in solitary is four years.
For all this, sociologists tend to agree
that the threat of harsh prison condi-
tions or lengthy sentences doesn’t act as
a deterrent to crime. Studies are partic-
ularly decisive on the issue of juvenile
crime, showing that prisons effectively
serve as “schools” in which young peo-
ple become criminals. In many states,
up to 80 percent will be rearrested
within three years of getting out of jail.What would a world with a vastly re-
duced reliance on prisons and police
look like? As astronomical police bud-
gets come under scrutiny—the NYPD’s
budget alone, $6 billion, is larger than
the GDP of fifty different countries—
cities are weighing where they ought to
divert some of those funds. Along with
solutions including violence prevention,
mental health support, employment,
and better housing and education, the
Black Lives Matter movement’s policy
platform has called for a reallocation of
funds from policing and incarceration
to restorative justice. In this approach,the perpetrator, if willing to admit to
his or her crime, can undertake a series
of dialogues with the victim or victims
to reach a consensus about making
amends. Depending on where and how
it is applied—in the US, so far it has
primarily been used with crimes com-
mitted by juveniles—restorative justice
may result in the offender receiving a re-
duced sentence, making other forms of
reparation, or not being charged at all.In 1989 New Zealand passed a ground-
breaking law undergirded by the prin-
ciples of restorative justice: for any case
in which a juvenile pleaded guilty, with
the exception of murder or manslaugh-
ter, a family group conference would
be convened, including the offender
and his or her family, the victim or his
or her representative, and a police of-
ficer, social worker, or other state me-
diator. The legislation represented a
victory for community organizers who
had decried the overrepresentation of
the indigenous Maori in New Zealand’s
jails and agitated for a means to resolve
conflicts in a way that reflected their
traditions and practices. The resulting
process has received high satisfaction
marks from offenders and victims.
Since the 1990s, Australia has also
broadly incorporated restorative jus-
tice into its juvenile justice system. And
in South Africa, in the 1990s, perpetra-
tors of the apartheid regime publicly
confessed to their crimes in exchange
for amnesty, as part of the country’s
Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
In the US, mediation between vic-
tims and juvenile offenders is not new.Like many “diversionary” programs, as
they’re known, for juvenile crime, it has
been used primarily in rich communi-
ties with the funding and political will
to keep their teenagers out of jail. In
the past ten years, though, community
organizations in St. Paul, Baltimore,
Fresno, Chicago, Oakland, San Fran-
cisco, and Los Angeles, as well as more
longstanding programs in Colorado
and Vermont, have worked with city
and state officials to offer restorative
justice alternatives to young people in
detention. In 2016 in Washington, D.C.,
the attorney general Karl Racine was
the first in the country to hire a small
team of in-house restorative justice
specialists to offer prison alternatives
in juvenile cases involving assault, rob-
bery, and other violent crimes. More
generally, state legislatures have begun
to embrace restorative justice as a way
to stop the so-called school-to-prison
pipeline, on the rationale that students
learn more from dialogue and solution-
making than they do from punishment.
Restorative justice for crimes com-
mitted by adults, however, remains
a fringe idea in the US. A program
created by a Boston federal judge in
2015, documented by the attorney and
scholar Lara Bazelon, was designed
for indigent adults charged with of-
fenses arising from drug addiction,
such as drug trafficking or assault.^2
Sentencing hearings are postponed for
twelve months, and sentences may be
reduced or cleared if offenders meet
with people who have lost loved ones
to addiction. There are also a number
of restorative justice initiatives in the
prison system itself, such as the Insight
Prison Project at San Quentin in Cali-
fornia, a yearlong program designed to
“help offenders fully understand and
take responsibility for the impact of
their actions.” (It is not explicitly tied
to sentencing, though participation
might be a factor in parole decisions.)
Violent crime is a fraught issue: Re-
publicans seize on it as a justification
for harsh sentences, while centrist pol-
iticians (and those further to the left)
often avoid discussing it. Most Demo-
crats argue for clemency only in the case
of nonviolent crimes, as Barack Obama
did when he was president. Indeed, as
the legal scholar John Pfaff points out,
many states have ensured political sup-
port for relaxed punishment of crimes
such as drug possession by lengthening
sentences for crimes like assault and
murder. (It is a common misconception
that mass incarceration in the US could
be ended solely by revising drug laws:
in fact, drug convictions account for
only 15 percent of the people in state
prisons, while convictions for violent
offenses account for 53 percent. If we
released all the nonviolent drug offend-
ers in the country, as the legal scholar
James Forman Jr. has noted, we would
still have the highest incarceration rate
in the world.) Meanwhile, few solutions
are ever considered for how to give
those who commit violent crimes a real
chance at reintegrating themselves into
society and leading productive lives.A Victim Offender Education Group meeting organized by the Insight Prison Project,
a restorative justice program at San Quentin State Prison, California, 2017Insight^ Prison^Project(^1) See Movement for Black Lives
(M4BL), “Vision for Black Lives,” at
m4bl.org/policy-platforms.
(^2) Lara Bazelon, Rectify: The Power
of Restorative Justice After Wrongful
Conviction (Beacon, 2018).