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Prisons - AFF

1ACs
Obviously dont read both racism and gender pick one and
then read framing.

1AC Racism
Harsh sentencing laws render those who commit minor crimes
dangerous felons who are now barred from mainstream society and
relegated to second-class status.
Michelle Alexander 10, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University,
2010, The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.,
http://www.kropfpolisci.com/racial.justice.alexander.pdf
Once a person is labeled a felon, he or she is ushered into a parallel universe in
which discrimination, stigma, and exclusion are perfectly legal, and privileges of
citizenship such as voting and jury service are off-limits. It does not matter whether you have
actually spent time in prison; your second-class citizenship begins the moment you
are branded a felon. Most people branded felons, in fact, are not sentenced to prison. As of 2008,
there were approximately 2.3 million people in prisons and jails, and a staggering
5.1 million people under "community correctional supervision"i.e., on probation or parole.89
Merely reducing prison terms does not have a major impact on the majority of
people in the system . It is the badge of inferiority the felony record that
relegates people for their entire lives, to second-class status . As described in
chapter 4, for drug felons, there is little hope of escape. Barred from public housing by
law, discriminated against by private landlords, ineligible for food stamps, forced to
"check the box" indicating a felony conviction on employment applications for
nearly every job, and denied licenses for a wide range of professions, people whose
only crime is drug addiction or possession of a small amount of drugs for
recreational use find themselves locked out of the mainstream society and
economypermanently.

Statistics show that African Americans are disproportionately


surveilled and abused by police officers
Nkechi Taifa 97, clinical instructor at Howard University School of Law and

Director of Howard Clinical Law Center's Public Service Program, Spring 1997, THE
INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION ON THE ELIMINATION OF ALL FORMS OF RACIAL
DISCRIMINATION (CERD): ARTICLE: Codification or Castration? The Applicability of
the International Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Racial Discrimination to the
U.S. Criminal Justice System, Howard Law Journal, 40 How. L.J. 641
Statistics reveal that African Americans are far more likely to be physically abused
and/or murdered by police officers charged to protect them. n157 Indeed, by the
admission of some police officers, race is [*671] used as a determinative factor in
deciding who to follow, detain, search, and arrest. n158 The lengthy history of police
brutality against people of color is legion, and is still very prevalent today. The Justice
Department's Civil Rights Division receives about 8,000 complaints each year, with 75 to 85 percent of them
involving problems with police. Most of these allegations are made by people of color. n159 " Police

brutality
as it relates to African Americans and minorities is real," observed Congressional
Black Caucus Chairperson Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA). " The bigger and
blacker you are, the more at risk you are ." n160 On March 3, 1991, eighty-one
seconds of videotape filmed by a private citizen brought into national focus the

blatant police brutality that is a tragic part of the African American experience.
Rodney King, unarmed and clearly no visible threat to the fifteen or more policemen that surrounded him,
received fifty-six blows and electric shocks from four White police officers. n161
Beamed into homes across the country was the image of Sergeant Stacey Koon twice firing a 50,000volt Taser "stun gun" at the prostrate King, while three other members of the LAPD "took
turns kicking him and smashing him in the head, neck, kidneys and legs with their
truncheons." n162 As a result of this severe beating, King received 11 skull fractures, a crushed cheekbone, a
broken ankle, internal injuries, a burn on his chest, and brain damage. n163 Unfortunately, this was not the first, nor

absent videotaped footage, it probably would have


been ignored. Statistics reveal that there are disproportionately high rates of
the use of excessive and deadly force by police against people of color. n164
the last incident of police brutality and,

Research has shown that a variety of factors contribute to the problem of police brutality, including racism and
prejudice, unfettered police discretion, the infamous police "code of silence," inadequate discipli- [*672] nary
measures by police departments and administrators, and the ineffectiveness of current remedies. n165

Drug use serves as a prime example of institutionalized and


condoned racism - Black men are arrested on drug charges 13
times as often as white men even though white men are more
likely to use and sell drugs.
Michelle Alexander 10, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University,
2010, The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.,
http://www.kropfpolisci.com/racial.justice.alexander.pdf

There is, of course, an official explanation for all of this: crime rates. This explanation has tremendous appeal
before you know the factsfor it is consistent with, and reinforces, dominant racial narratives about crime and

rates and patterns of drug crime do not


explain the glaring racial disparities in our criminal justice system. People of all
races use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. 10 If there are significant
differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white
youth, are more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than people of color. 11 One
study, for example, published in 2000 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported
that white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack
cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the
rate of black students.12 That same survey revealed that nearly identical percentages of
white and black high school seniors use marijuana. The National Household Survey
on Drug Abuse reported in 2000 that white youth aged 1217 are more than a third
more likely to have sold illegal drugs than African American youth .13 Thus the very
same year Human Rights Watch was reporting that African Americans were being
arrested and imprisoned at unprecedented rates , government data revealed that
blacks were no more likely to be guilty of drug crimes than whites and that white
youth were actually the most likely of any racial or ethnic group to be guilty of
illegal drug possession and sales. Any notion that drug use among blacks is more severe or dangerous
is belied by the data; white youth have about three times the number of drug-related
emergency room visits as their African American counterparts .14 The notion that
whites comprise the vast majority of drug users and dealers and may well be more likely
than other racial groups to commit drug crimesmay seem implausible to some, given the media
imagery we are fed on a daily basis and the racial composition of our prisons and jails.
Upon reflection, however, the prevalence of white drug crime including drug dealingshould
not be surprising. After all, where do whites get their illegal drugs? Do they all drive to the ghetto to purchase
them from somebody standing on a street corner? No. Studies consistently indicate that drug
markets, like American society generally, reflect our nation's racial and
socioeconomic boundaries. Whites tend to sell to whites; blacks to blacks. 15 University
criminality dating back to slavery. The truth, however, is that

students tend to sell to each other.16 Rural whites, for their part, don't make a special trip to the 'hood to purchase
marijuana. They buy it from somebody down the road.17 White high school students typically buy drugs from white
classmates, friends, or older relatives. Even Barry McCaffrey, former director of the White House Office of National
Drug Control Policy, once remarked, if your child bought drugs, "it was from a student of their own race

The notion that most illegal drug use and sales happens in the ghetto is
pure fiction. Drug trafficking occurs there, but it occurs everywhere else in America as well. Nevertheless,
black men have been admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is
more than thirteen times higher than white men. 19 The racial bias inherent in the
drug war is a major reason that 1 in every 14 black men was behind bars in 2006,
compared with 1 in 106 white men.20 For young black men, the statistics are even worse. One in 9
black men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five was behind bars in 2006 , and
far more were under some form of penal control such as probation or parole.21 These gross
generally."18

racial disparities simply cannot be explained by rates of illegal drug activity among African Americans.

The criminal justice system serves as a gateway into the larger system
of institutionalized racism and mass incarceration that permanently
marks people of color as members of Americas under caste.
Michelle Alexander 10, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University,
2010, The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.,
http://www.kropfpolisci.com/racial.justice.alexander.pdf
It may be helpful, in attempting to understand the basic nature of the new caste system , to
think of the criminal justice systemthe entire collection of institutions and
practices that comprise itnot as an independent system but rather as a gateway
into a much larger system of racial stigmatization and permanent marginalization.
This larger system, referred to here as mass incarceration, is a system that locks
people not only behind actual bars in actual prisons, but also behind virtual bars
and virtual wallswalls that are invisible to the naked eye but function nearly as
effectively as Jim Crow laws once did at locking people of color into a permanent
second-class citizenship. The term mass incarceration refers not only to the criminal
justice system but also to the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that
control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison . Once released, former
prisoners enter a hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent
social exclusion. They are members of America's new undercaste .

Critiquing Criminal Justice Institutions allows for a broader debate


about the unending racial stigmatization that African Americans are
forced to live through both in and out of prison.
Michelle Alexander 10, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University,
2010, The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.,
http://www.kropfpolisci.com/racial.justice.alexander.pdf
The language of caste may well seem foreign or unfamiliar to some. Public discussions about racial caste in
America are relatively rare. We avoid talking about caste in our society because we are ashamed of our racial
history. We also avoid talking about race. We even avoid talking about class. Conversations
about class are resisted in part because there is a tendency to imagine that one's class reflects upon one's character. What is
key to America's understanding of class is the persistent belief despite all evidence to the
contrarythat anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from a lower class to a higher
class. We recognize that mobility may be difficult, but the key to our collective self-image is the assumption that mobility is
always possible, so failure to move up reflects on one's character. By extension, the failure of a race or ethnic
group to move up reflects very poorly on the group as a whole. What is completely
missed in the rare public debates today about the plight of African Americans is that

a huge percentage of them are not free to move up at all. It is not just that they lack
opportunity, attend poor schools, or are plagued by poverty. They are barred by law
from doing so. And the major institutions with which they come into contact are designed to prevent their mobility. To put
the matter starkly: The current system of control permanently locks a huge percentage of
the African American community out of the mainstream society and economy. The
system operates through our criminal justice institutions, but it functions more like a
caste system than a system of crime control. Viewed from this perspective, the so-called
underclass is better understood as an undercastea lower caste of individuals who
are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society. Although this
new system of racialized social control purports to be colorblind, it creates and
maintains racial hierarchy much as earlier systems of control did. Like Jim Cro w (and
slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies,
customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status
of a group defined largely by race.

Colorblindness has legitimized mass incarceration by failing to see the


creation of a racial under caste only a massive shift in policy can
change dominant views.
Michelle Alexander 10, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University,

2010, The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.,
http://www.kropfpolisci.com/racial.justice.alexander.pdf
Saying that colorblindness is the problem may alarm some in the civil rights
community, especially the pollsters and political consultants who have become increasingly influential in civil
rights advocacy. For decades, civil rights leaders have been saying things like "we all want a
colorblind society, we just disagree how to get there" in defense of race-conscious
programs like affirmative action or racial data collection .35 Affirmative action has been framed
as a legitimate exception to the colorblindness principlea principle now endorsed by the overwhelming majority of
the American electorate. Civil rights leaders are quick to assure the public that when we reach a colorblind nirvana,

Far from being a worthy goal,


however, colorblindness has proved catastrophic for African Americans. It is not an
overstatement to say the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the
United States would not have been possible in the postcivil rights era if the nation
had not fallen under the spell of a callous colorblindness. The seemingly innocent
phrase, " I don't care if he's black . . ." perfectly captures the perversion of
M artin L uther K ing Jr. 's dream that we may, one day, be able to see beyond race
to connect spiritually across racial lines. Saying that one does not care about race is offered as an
exculpatory virtue, when in fact it can be a form of cruelty . It is precisely because we, as a nation,
have not cared much about African Americans that we have allowed our criminal
justice system to create a new racial undercaste. The deeply flawed nature of
colorblindness, as a governing principle, is evidenced by the fact that the public
consensus supporting mass incarceration is officially colorblind . It purports to see black and
race consciousness will no longer be necessary or appropriate.

brown men not as black and brown, but simply as menraceless menwho have failed miserably to play by the

The fact that so many black and brown men are


rounded up for drug crimes that go largely ignored when committed by whites is
unseen. Our collective colorblindness prevents us from seeing this basic fact. Our blindness also
prevents us from seeing the racial and structural divisions that persist in society :
the segregated, unequal schools, the segregated, jobless ghettos, and the
segregated public discoursea public conversation that excludes the current pariah
caste. Our commitment to colorblindness extends beyond individuals to institutions
rules the rest of us follow quite naturally.

and social arrangements. We have become blind, not so much to race, but to
the existence of racial caste in America.

Prisons dehumanize inmates by seizing their privacy, stripping


them of their personhood, and reducing all inmates to a
disposable number
Allegra M. McLeod 15, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center,

2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
*edited for gendered language
Prisons are places of intense brutality, violence, and dehumanization .70 In his seminal
study of the New Jersey State Prison, The Society of Captives, sociologist Gresham M. Sykes carefully
exposed how the fundamental structure of the modern U.S. prison degrades the
inmates basic humanity and sense of selfworth .71 Caged or confined and stripped of
his [their] freedom, the prisoner is forced to submit to an existence withou t the
ability to exercise the basic capacities that define personhood in a liberal society.72
The inmates movement is tightly controlled, sometimes by chains and shackles, and
always by orders backed with the threat of force ;73 his [their] body is subject to
invasive cavity searches on command;74 he [he/she] is denied nearly all personal
possessions; his [their] routines of eating, sleeping, and bodily maintenance are
minutely managed; he [he/she] may communicate and interact with others only on
limited terms strictly dictated by his jailers; and he [he/she]is reduced to an
identifying number, deprived of all that constitutes his [their] individuality.75 Sykess
account of the pains of imprisonment76 attends not only to the dehumanizing
effects of this basic structure of imprisonmentwhich remains relatively unchanged from the New
Jersey penitentiary of 1958 to the U.S. jails and prisons that abound today77 but also to its violent
effects on the personhood of the prisoner:

Solitary confinement degrades humans---often worse than


torture, it causes hallucinations, violent reactions and violates
the UN convention on torture.
Allegra M. McLeod 15, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center,
2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
As incarcerated populations have increased, solitary confinement has emerged as a primary
mechanism for internal jail and prison discipline, such that the actual number of
individuals confined to a small cell for twenty-three hours per day remains unknown
and may be significantly in excess of 80,000. 88 Some people are sentenced to
Super-Max facilities that only contain solitary cells; other people are placed in
solitary confinement as punishment for violating prison rules or for their own
protection. Stays in solitary confinement are often lengthy, even for relatively minor
disciplinary rule violations, and may be indefinite. For example, one young prisoner caught with
seventeen packs of Newport cigarettes was sentenced to fifteen days solitary confinement for each pack of
cigarettes, totaling more than eight months of solitary confinement.89 Another prisoner in New Jersey spent
eighteen years in solitary confinement. Although his solitary confinement status was subject to review every ninety
days, this prisoner explained that he eventually stopped participating in the reviews as he felt they were a sham,
with no real investigation, and lost hope that he would ever be able to leave.90

Solitary confinement has

become a widely tolerated and regular part of the rhythm of prison life ,91
yet this basic structure of prison discipline in the United States entails profound
violence and dehumanization ; indeed, solitary confinement produces effects
similar to physical torture. Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian first introduced to the
psychiatric and medical community in the early 1980s that prisoners living in isolation
suffered a constellation of symptoms including overwhelming anxiety, confusion,
hallucinations, and sudden violent and self-destructive outbursts.92 This pattern of
debilitating symptoms, sufficiently consistent among persons subject to solitary confinement (otherwise known as

the
United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has found that certain U.S. practies of
solitary confinement violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel,
Inhuman and Degrading Punishment.94 Numerous psychiatric studies likewise
corroborate that solitary confinement produces effects tantamount to torture .95
Bonnie Kerness, Associate Director of the American Friends Service Committees
Prison Watch, testified before the Commission on Safety and Abuse in Americas Prisons that while
visiting prisoners in solitary confinement, she spoke repeatedly with people who
begin to cut themselves, just so they can feel something. 96 Soldiers who are captured in war
the Special Housing Unit (SHU)), gave rise to the designation of SHU Syndrome.93 Partly on this basis,

and subjected to solitary confinement and severe physical abuse also report the suffering of isolation to be as awful

But despite its more apparent horrors, solitary


confinement is simply an extension of the logic and basic structure of prison-backed
punishmentpunitive isolation and surveillanceto the disciplinary regime of the prison itself.
as, and even worse than, physical torture.97

Solitary confinements justification and presumed efficacy flows from the assumed legitimacy of prison confinement

Prison or jail confinement isolates the detained individual from the


social world he inhabited previously, stripping that person of his capacity to move of
his own volition, to interact with others, and to exercise control over the details of
his own life. Once that initial form of confinement and deprivation of basic control over ones own life is
in the first instance.

understood to be legitimate, solitary confinement merely applies the same approach to discipline within prison
walls.

But the basic physical isolation and confinement is already countenanced by


the initial incarceration.

Abolition of prisons as the dominant mode of thinking is


needed in order to address racism reforms will only help the
system to grow.
Angela Davis, and Dylan Rodriguez 00, Davis teaches in the History of
Consciousness program at the University of California and has been actively
involved in prison-related campaigns and Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at
University of California - Riverside and was involved in the formation of Critical
Resistance, 2000, The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation,
http://www.bowdoin.edu/news/events/archives/images/Prison%20Abolition.pdf

There are multiple histories of prison abolition. The Scandinavian scholar/activist


Thomas Mathieson first published his germinal text, The Politics of Abolition, in
1974, when activist movements were calling for the disestablishment of prisons -- in
the aftermath of the Attica Rebellion and prison uprisings throughout Europe. He
was concerned with transforming prison reform movements into more radical
movements to abolish prisons as the major institutions of punishment. There was a
pattern of decarceration in the Netherlands until the mid-1980s, which seemed to
establish the Dutch system as a model prison system, and the later rise in prison
construction and the expansion of the incarcerated population has served to

stimulate abolitionist ideas. Criminologist Willem de Haan published a book in 1990


entitled The Politics of Redress: Crime, Punishment, and Penal Abolition. One of the
most interesting texts, from the point of view of U.S. activist history is Fay Honey
Knopp's volume Instead of Prison: A Handbook for Prison Abolitionists, which was
published in 1976, with funding from the American Friends. This handbook points
out the contradictory relationship between imprisonment and an "enlightened, free
society." Prison abolition, like the abolition of slavery, is a long-range goal and the
handbook argues that an abolitionist approach requires an analysis of "crime" that
links it with social structures, as opposed to individual pathology, as well as
"anticrime" strategies that focus on the provision of social resources. Of course,
there are many versions of prison abolitionism -- including those that propose to
abolish punishment altogether and replace it with reconciliatory responses to
criminal acts. In my opinion, the most powerful relevance of abolitionist theory and
practice today resides in the fact that without a radical position vis-a-vis the rapidly
expanding prison system, prison architecture, prison surveillance, and prison
system corporatization, prison culture, with all its racist and totalitarian
implications, will continue not only to claim ever increasing numbers of people of
color, but also to shape social relations more generally in our society. Prison needs
to be abolished as the dominant mode of addressing social problems that are better
solved by other institutions and other means. The call for prison abolition urges us
to imagine and strive for a very different social landscape.

Abolition is not an institutional change but instead challenges


the moral legitimacy behind the idea of confinement
Allegra M. McLeod 15, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center,
2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
In contrast to leading scholarly and policy efforts to reform criminal law, abolition decidedly does not seek
merely to replace incarceration with alternatives that are closely related to imprisonment, such
as punitive policing, noncustodial criminal supervision, probation, civil
institutionalization, and parole.25 Abolition instead entails a rejection of the
moral legitimacy of confining people in cages , whether that caging is deemed
civil or whether it follows a failure to comply with technical terms of supervised release
or a police order.26 So too the positive project of abolition addressed in this Article is decidedly not an
effort to replicate the institutional transfer that occurred in the aftermath of the
deinstitutionalization of mental institutions .27 An abolitionist framework requires
positive forms of social integration and collective security that are not organized
around criminal law enforcement, confinement, criminal surveillance, punitive policing, or
punishment.

Racism must be rejected in every instance without surcease. It


justifies atrocities, and is truly the capital sin.
Memmi 2k Albert, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Unv. Of Paris, Albert
(RACISM, translated by Steve Martinot, pp.163-165)
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without
remission, probably never achieved, yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be
undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be
indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To

give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other
people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the
slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the
persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that
the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which [person] man is not [themself]
himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable
negativity of the condition of the dominated ; that is it illuminates in a certain
sense the entire human condition . The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and
always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from
animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge.
However, it remains true that ones moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice
among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking,
that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism

One cannot found a moral order, let alone


a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of
the other and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an
ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is the
truly capital sin. fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of humanitys spiritual traditions counsel
respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers . It is not just a question of theoretical
counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a question of
theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of
is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy.

the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing
injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think
that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of
remaining the strongest.

One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society
contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat
others with respect so that they treat you with respect. Recall, says the bible, that you were
once a stranger in Egypt, which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger

It is an ethical and a practical appeal


indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is
the condition for all theoretical and practical morality . Because, in the end, the ethical
choice commands the political choice . A just society must be a society
accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict,
violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday
to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.
yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday.

The federal system of incarceration creates a perpetual cycle


of discriminationonce felons, people are stripped of basic
rightsonly total elimination of the system will solve,
sentencing reform is not enough
Michelle Alexander 10, associate professor of law at Stanford Law School, civil

rights lawyer, advocate and legal scholar, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness, 2010, p. 93-6
The Prison Label Most people imagine that the explosion in the U.S. prison population during the past twenty-five
years reflects changes in crime rates. Few would guess that our prison population leaped from approximately
350,000 to 2.3 million in such a short period of time due to changes in laws and policies, not changes in crime
rates. Yet

it has been changes in our laws particularly the dramatic increases in the

length of prison sentencesthat have been responsible for the growth of our prison
system, not increases in crime. One study suggests that the entire increase in
the prison population from 1980 to 2001 can be explained by sentencing
policy changes .88 Because harsh sentencing is a major cause of the prison
explosion, one might reasonably assume that substantially reducing the length of
prison sentences would effectively dismantle this new system of control . That
view, however, is mistaken . This system depends on the prison label, not prison
time. Once a person is labeled a felon, he or she is ushered into a parallel
universe in which discrimination, stigma, and exclusion are perfectly legal, and
privileges of citizenship such as voting and jury service are off-limits . It does not matter
whether you have actually spent time in prison; your second-class citizenship begins the moment you are branded
a felon. Most people branded felons, in fact, are not sentenced to prison. As of 2008, there were approximately 2.3
million people in prisons and jails, and a staggering 5.1 million people under community correctional

Merely reducing prison terms does not have a major


impact on the majority of people in the system. It is the badge of inferiority the
felony recordthat relegates people for their entire lives, to secondclass status . As
described in chapter 4, for drug felons, there is little hope of escape. Barred from public
housing by law, discriminated against by private landlords, ineligible for food
stamps, forced to check the box indicating a felony conviction on employment
applications for nearly every job, and denied licenses for a wide range of professions, people
whose only crime is drug addiction or possession of a small amount of drugs for
recreational use fi nd themselves locked out of the mainstream society and
economypermanently. No wonder, then, that most people labeled felons find their way back into prison.
supervisioni.e., on probation or parole.89

According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics study, about 30 percent of released prisoners in its sample were
rearrested within six months of release. 90 Within three years, nearly 68 percent were rearrested at least once for a
new offense.91 Only a small minority are rearrested for violent crimes; the vast majority are rearrested for property

For those released on probation or


parole, the risks are especially high. They are subject to regular surveillance and monitoring
by the police and may be stopped and searched (with or without their consent) for any reason or no reason at
offenses, drug offenses, and offenses against the public order.92

all. As a result, they are far more likely to be arrested (again) than those whose behavior is not subject to constant
scrutiny by law enforcement. Probationers and parolees are at increased risk of arrest because their lives are
governed by additional rules that do not apply to everyone else.

Myriad restrictions on their travel


and behavior (such as a prohibition on associating with other felons), as well as various requirements of
probation and parole (such as paying fi nes and meeting with probation offi cers ), create opportunities for
arrest. Violation of these special rules can land someone right back in prison. In fact, that is what happens a good
deal of the time. The extraordinary increase in prison admissions due to parole and
probation violations is due almost entirely to the War on Drugs. With respect to parole, in
1980, only 1 percent of all prison admissions were parole violators. Twenty years later, more than one third (35
percent) of prison admissions resulted from parole violations.93 To put the matter more starkly: About as many
people were returned to prison for parole violations in 2000 as were admitted to prison in 1980 for all reasons.94 Of
all parole violators returned to prison in 2000, only one-third were returned for a new conviction; twothirds were
returned for a technical violation such as missing appointments with a parole offi cer, failing to maintain
employment, or failing a drug test.95 In this system of control, failing to cope well with ones exile status is treated
like a crime. If you fail, after being released from prison with a criminal recordyour personal badge of inferiority
to remain drug free, or if you fail to get a job against all the odds, or if you get depressed and miss an appointment
with your parole offi cer (or if you cannot afford the bus fare to take you there), you can be sent right back to prison

This disturbing phenomenon of


people cycling in and out of prison , trapped by their second-class status, has been
described by Loc Wacquant as a closed circuit of perpetual marginality.96 Hundreds of
where society apparently thinks millions of Americans belong.

thousands of people are released from prison every year, only to find themselves locked out of the mainstream
society and economy. Most ultimately return to prison, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Others are released
again, only to find themselves in precisely the circumstances they occupied before, unable to cope with the stigma

Reducing the amount of time people spend


behind barsby eliminating harsh mandatory minimumswill alleviate some of the
of the prison label and their permanent pariah status.

unnecessary suffering caused by this system, but it will not disturb the closed
circuit. Those labeled felons will continue to cycle in and out of prison, subject to
perpetual surveillance by the police, and unable to integrate into the mainstream
society and economy. Unless the number of people who are labeled felons is
dramatically reduced, and unless the laws and policies that keep ex-offenders
marginalized from the mainstream society and economy are eliminated,
the system will continue to create and maintain an enormous undercaste.

1AC Gender
Contention __ is Gender
Prisons are running rampant with sexual victimization, female
prisoners suffer brutal treatment equivalent to torture in
maximum security facilities
Dave W. Frank, 14, Attorney at Christopher C. Myers & Associates , Ohio
Northern UniversityClaude W. Pettit College of Law, 2/14/14, Commentary:
Abandoned: Abolishing Female Prisons to Prevent Sexual Abuse and Herald an End
to Incarceration, http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1322&context=bglj

A few months before the U.S. Department of Justices 2012 inspection of Julia
Tutwiler Prison for Women,65 it released the first national survey to
comprehensively document the extent of sexual abuse in U.S. prisons.66 In this
report, the Department of Justice relied on reports by former prisoners rather than
reports by prison officials67 or inmates still in prisona departure from the methods
used in previous national surveys. 68 The 2012 survey gave a clear picture of what
many had suspected:69 Prisoners commonly suffer brutality [that] is the
equivalent of torture. 70 Within the U.S. system of mass incarceration, nearly one
out of six women and close to one out of ten of all prisoners has been sexually
victimized,71 according to the Justice Department.72 Anal tearing, vaginal tearing,
chipped teeth, and lost teeth are the most common injuries experienced by former
prisoners who report sexual victimization.73 Among former prisoners who reported
unwilling sexual activity with staff, approximately one quarter were coerced into
such activity through blackmails or bribes by staff, and nearly one half were coerced
through offers of favors or special privileges by staff.74 Sexual victimization by staff
most often occurs in a closet, office, or locked room, while inmate-on inmate
assault, which constitutes the majority of victimization, most often occurs in the
victims cell.75 A Human Rights Watch report affirmed that being a woman
prisoner in a U.S. state prison can be a terrifying experience. 76 Further,
the likelihood of female prisoner sexual victimization, according to the DOJ survey,
generally increases in accordance with the length of prison sentences and level of
confinement.77 The majority of sexual abuse occurs in prisons , a much smaller
percentage occurs in local jails, and almost none occurs at post-release community
treatment facilities.78 Female sexual victimization, accordingly, is highest in
maximum-security facilities like Tutwiler and lowest in facilities that allow daytime
release. 79 A prisons ability to control, confine, and inspect a prisoner necessarily
defines its ability to abuse her body.80 Efforts toward reform that intensify or
expand incarceration only recast the problem.81 If prison is the total governance of
the prisoner, greater control of physical bodies will not reduce the instance of a
problem shown to increase with a punishments severity. Unlike the U.S. Prison Rape
Elimination Act, the U.K proposal would by its nature end sexual abuse in female
prisons and drive incarceration and punishment into obsolescence.

Male Guards regularly abuse female prisoners--- forced sex,


harassment, groping, and hostility form a highly sexualized and
patriarchal environment
Angela Y. Davis 03, Professor of Feminist Studies at University of CA Santa Cruz,

2003, Are Prisons Obsolete?, http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wpcontent/uploads/2010/11/Angela-Davis-Are_Prisons_Obsolete.pdf


As the level of repression in women's prisons increases , and, paradoxically, as the influence of
domestic prison regimes recedes, sexual abusewhich, like domestic violence, is yet another
dimension of the privatized punishment of women has become an institutionalized
component of punishment behind prison walls. Although guard- on-prisoner sexual
abuse is not sanctioned as such, the wide- spread leniency with which offending
officers are treated suggests that for women, prison is a space in which the threat of
sexualized violence that looms in the larger society is effectively sanctioned as a
routine aspect of the land- scape of punishment behind prison walls. According to a
1996 Human Rights Watch report on the sexual abuse of women in U.S. prisons: Our findings indicate that
being a woman prisoner in U.S. state prisons can be a terrifying experience. If you
are sexually abused , you cannot escape from your abuser . Grievance or
investigatory procedures, where they exist, are often ineffectual, and correctional
employees continue to engage in abuse because they believe they will rarely be
held accountable, administratively or criminally. Few people outside the prison walls know
what is going on or care if they do know. Fewer still do anything to address the
problem. The following excerpt from the summary of this report, entitled All Too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of
Women in U.S. State Prisons, reveals the extent to which women's prison environments are violently sexualized,

male
correctional employees have vaginally, anally, and orally raped female
prisoners and sexually assaulted and abused them. We found that in the course of
committing such gross mis- conduct, male officers have not only used actual or
threatened physical force, but have also used their near total authority to provide or
deny goods and privileges to female prisoners to compel them to have sex or, in other
cases, to reward them for having done so. In other cases, male officers have violated their most
basic professional duty and engaged in sexual contact with female prisoners absent
the use of threat of force or any material exchange. In addition to engaging in sexual relations
with prisoners, male officers have used mandatory pat-frisks or room searches to
grope women's breasts, buttocks, and vaginal areas and to view them
inappropriately while in a state of undress in the housing or bathroom areas. Male
correctional officers and staff have also engaged in regular verbal degradation
and harassment of female prisoners, thus contributing to a custodial
environment in the state prisons for women that is often highly sexualized and
excessively hostile."
thus recapitulating the familiar violence that characterizes many women's private lives: We found that

Prisons dehumanize inmates by seizing their privacy, stripping


them of their personhood, and reducing all inmates to a
disposable number
Allegra M. McLeod 15, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center,
2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf

*edited for gendered language


Prisons are places of intense brutality, violence, and dehumanization .70 In his seminal
study of the New Jersey State Prison, The Society of Captives, sociologist Gresham M. Sykes carefully
exposed how the fundamental structure of the modern U.S. prison degrades the
inmates basic humanity and sense of selfworth .71 Caged or confined and stripped of
his freedom, the prisoner is forced to submit to an existence withou t the ability to
exercise the basic capacities that define personhood in a liberal society.72 The
inmates movement is tightly controlled, sometimes by chains and shackles, and
always by orders backed with the threat of force ;73 his [their] body is subject to
invasive cavity searches on command;74 he [he/she] is denied nearly all personal
possessions; his [their] routines of eating, sleeping, and bodily maintenance are
minutely managed; he [he/she] may communicate and interact with others only on
limited terms strictly dictated by his jailers; and he [he/she]is reduced to an
identifying number, deprived of all that constitutes his [their] individuality.75 Sykess
account of the pains of imprisonment76 attends not only to the dehumanizing
effects of this basic structure of imprisonmentwhich remains relatively unchanged from the New
Jersey penitentiary of 1958 to the U.S. jails and prisons that abound today77 but also to its violent
effects on the personhood of the prisoner:

Solitary confinement degrades humans---often worse than


torture, it causes hallucinations, violent reactions and violates
the UN convention on torture.
Allegra M. McLeod 15, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center,
2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
As incarcerated populations have increased, solitary confinement has emerged as a primary
mechanism for internal jail and prison discipline, such that the actual number of
individuals confined to a small cell for twenty-three hours per day remains unknown
and may be significantly in excess of 80,000. 88 Some people are sentenced to
Super-Max facilities that only contain solitary cells; other people are placed in
solitary confinement as punishment for violating prison rules or for their own
protection. Stays in solitary confinement are often lengthy, even for relatively minor
disciplinary rule violations, and may be indefinite. For example, one young prisoner caught with
seventeen packs of Newport cigarettes was sentenced to fifteen days solitary confinement for each pack of
cigarettes, totaling more than eight months of solitary confinement.89 Another prisoner in New Jersey spent
eighteen years in solitary confinement. Although his solitary confinement status was subject to review every ninety
days, this prisoner explained that he eventually stopped participating in the reviews as he felt they were a sham,

Solitary confinement has


become a widely tolerated and regular part of the rhythm of prison life ,91
yet this basic structure of prison discipline in the United States entails profound
violence and dehumanization ; indeed, solitary confinement produces effects
similar to physical torture. Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian first introduced to the
psychiatric and medical community in the early 1980s that prisoners living in isolation
suffered a constellation of symptoms including overwhelming anxiety, confusion,
hallucinations, and sudden violent and self-destructive outbursts.92 This pattern of
with no real investigation, and lost hope that he would ever be able to leave.90

debilitating symptoms, sufficiently consistent among persons subject to solitary confinement (otherwise known as

the
United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has found that certain U.S. practies of
solitary confinement violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel,
the Special Housing Unit (SHU)), gave rise to the designation of SHU Syndrome.93 Partly on this basis,

Inhuman and Degrading Punishment.94 Numerous psychiatric studies likewise


corroborate that solitary confinement produces effects tantamount to torture .95
Bonnie Kerness, Associate Director of the American Friends Service Committees
Prison Watch, testified before the Commission on Safety and Abuse in Americas Prisons that while
visiting prisoners in solitary confinement, she spoke repeatedly with people who
begin to cut themselves, just so they can feel something .96 Soldiers who are captured in war
and subjected to solitary confinement and severe physical abuse also report the suffering of isolation to be as awful

But despite its more apparent horrors, solitary


confinement is simply an extension of the logic and basic structure of prison-backed
punishmentpunitive isolation and surveillanceto the disciplinary regime of the prison itself.
as, and even worse than, physical torture.97

Solitary confinements justification and presumed efficacy flows from the assumed legitimacy of prison confinement

Prison or jail confinement isolates the detained individual from the


social world he inhabited previously, stripping that person of his capacity to move of
his own volition, to interact with others, and to exercise control over the details of
his own life. Once that initial form of confinement and deprivation of basic control over ones own life is
in the first instance.

understood to be legitimate, solitary confinement merely applies the same approach to discipline within prison
walls.

But the basic physical isolation and confinement is already countenanced by


the initial incarceration.

Specifically, the strip search represents the routinization of sexual


abuse and coercion within prisons.
Angela Y. Davis 03, Professor of Feminist Studies at University of CA Santa Cruz,

2003, Are Prisons Obsolete?, http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wpcontent/uploads/2010/11/Angela-Davis-Are_Prisons_Obsolete.pdf


Sexual abuse is surreptitiously incorporated into one of the most habitual aspects of
women's imprisonment, the strip search. As activists and prisoners themselves have pointed out,
the state itself is directly implicated in this routinization of sexual abuse both
in permitting such conditions that render women vulnerable to explicit sexual
coercion carried out by guards and other prison staff and by incorporating into
routine policy such practices as the strip search and body cavity search. Australian
lawyer/activist Amanda George has pointed out that at a November 2001 conference on women in prison held by
the Brisbane-based organization Sisters Inside, Amanda George described an action performed before a national
gathering of correctional personnel working in women's prisons. Several women
seized control of the stage and, some playing guards, others playing the roles of prisoners,
dramatized a strip search. According to George, the gathering was so repulsed by this
enactment of a practice that occurs routinely in women's prisons everywhere that
many of the participants felt compelled to disassociate themselves from
such practices, insisting that this was not what they did. Some of the guards , George said,
simply cried upon watching representations of their own actions outside the
prison context. What they must have realized is that " without the uniform, without the
power of the state, (the strip search would be sexual assault ."99 But why is an
understanding of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse in women's prisons an important element of a radical analysis
of the prison system, and especially of those forward-looking analyses that lead us in the direction of abolition?

the call to abolish the prison as the dominant form of punishment cannot
ignore the extent to which the institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and
practices that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but that
retain all their ghastly vitality behind prison walls . The destructive combination of
racism and misogyny, however much it has been challenged by social movements, scholarship, and art
over the last three decades, retains all its awful consequences within women's prisons. The
Because

relatively uncontested presence of sexual abuse in women's prisons is one of many


such examples. The increasing evidence of a U.S. prison industrial complex with global resonances leads us to
think about the extent to which the many corporations that have acquired an investment in the expansion of the
prison system are, like the state, directly implicated in an institution that perpetuates violence against women.

The prison system turns female prisoners into fallen women whose
only purpose is domestic service and subjugation to men.
Angela Y. Davis 03, Professor of Feminist Studies at University of CA Santa Cruz,
2003, Are Prisons Obsolete?, http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wpcontent/uploads/2010/11/Angela-Davis-Are_Prisons_Obsolete.pdf
According to dominant views, women convicts were irrevocably fallen women ,
with no possibility of salvation. If male criminals were considered to be public individuals who had
simply violated the social contract, female criminals were seen as having transgressed
fundamental moral principles of womanhood. The reformers, who, following
Elizabeth Fry, argued that women were capable of redemption , did not really contest
these ideological assumptions about women's place. In other words, they did not
question the very notion of "fallen women." Rather, they simply opposed the idea
that "fallen women" could not be saved. They could be saved, the reformers contended, and toward
that end they advocated separate penal facilities and a specifically female approach to
punishment. Their approach called for architectural models that replaced cells with
cottages and "rooms" in a way that was supposed to infuse domesticity into prison life. This
model facilitated a regime devised to reintegrate criminalized women into the
domestic life of wife and mother . They did not, however, acknowledge the
class and race underpinnings of this regime. Training that was, on the surface,
designed to produce good wives and mothers in effect steered poor women (and
especially black women) into "free world" jobs in domestic service . Instead of stay-at-home skilled
wives and mothers, many women prisoners, upon release, would become maids, cooks,
and washerwomen for more affluent women. A female custodial staff, the reformers also argued,
would minimize the sexual temptations, which they believed were often at the root of female criminality.

Prisons inherently perpetuate rape culture and foster sexual


assault and rape within their institutions, affirming the
patriarchal norms that dominate society reforms cant solve.
Josh Kitto, 15, freelance political journalist who has written for the Guardian,

Vice, and Truthout. He is particularly interested in LGBTQ and feminist issues,


protest movements, prisons, immigration, and counterterrorism policy, 2/24/15,
Rape culture: would prison abolition help women?,
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/josh-kitto/rape-culture-would-prisonabolition-help-women
Prisons both require and foster violence, criminology professor Sarah Lamble argues. The
entire system of incarceration, from prisons and the police to immigration detention
centres, are simply another one of rape culture's functions. I n turn, rape and assault
provides a perverse stability to the prison system. This further prevents the
realisation of transformative justice for surv ivors. Often upending the patriarchal
violence ingrained within the prison system is considered more disruptive than the
violence itself. As Michael Denzel Smith states: The fact that we do little to enforce those
laws is the tacit recognition that in order for the current system to remain intact, a
degree of violence against women is necessary. What's more, relocating rapists

incubates rape culture. Statistics on UK prison rape are more vague than in the US, with Justice Secretary
Christ Grayling blocking a Howard League investigation into the issue - the Ministry of Justice says questions about
assault are intrusive. Research suggests guards routinely sexually coerce women prisoners (a third of who are
survivors of sexual abuse). There are also revelations of endemic sexual assault and harassment of women

the response to prison


rape is to move the victim to protective custody', or solitary confinement. But this
is also a tool employed to silence women who report sexual assault by guards.
Further, Solitary Watch estimate half of trans women in New York prisons have been
sexually assaulted by guards while in solitary confinement. But showing that prisons are
detainees at Yarl's Wood immigration detention centre, for example. In the US,

sites of systemic sexual violence does not establish that immediate abolition would lead to quantitatively fewer

The question is then if these carceral functions cannot provide the framework
for eliminating rape and assault, what alternative structures can be established?
One option is restorative justice, involving facilitated meetings between the
perpetrator and victim - to enable answers for any questions the victim has of the
perpetrator, or acknowledgement of the harm caused. The New Zealand-based Project Restore
rapes.

is prominent in advocating this approach, which stems out of Maori accountability practices. In theory, this might
provide some conciliation - equilibrium can be restored to the disrupted families, communities, and networks, if only
by having the perpetrator acknowledge fault. However, even Project Restore concedes the limits of such an
approach. It does not, by itself, create conditions that enable safety and resistance to violence and oppression - or
provide reparations to victims. Indeed, these projects gained traction within neoliberal approaches seeking cheaper
alternatives to incarceration. Even the name, 'restorative justice, reveals the limits of its intended effect. Rather
than accountability for the victim and recognition of their needs, the peace of communities and families that failed

Another alternative is
'transformative justice', which focuses on developing 'community accountability'
structures to disrupt cycles of abuse and assault. This framework has been developed by women
to protect the victim from violence is intended to restore things as they were.

of colour-led US groups like INCITE!, Sista II Sista, and Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA), who organise

The idea is that support groups from the community


facilitate a process between the victim and the perpetrator, and a process of
dialogue and admission of responsibility by the perpetrator then approximates the
necessary steps to repair harm. The support groups then monitor whether these steps are maintained.
against interpersonal and state violence.

'Transformative justice' is centred in developing the community's autonomy in order to prevent violence. It sees
retribution as reactive, and incarceration as unable and incapable of unpacking more difficult questions about state
violence, or the complicity of communal networks that feel obligated to intervene to stop drink driving, for example,
but not child abuse. But a 'transformative' solution cannot simply involve a sentimentalised restorative justice
system with a neoliberal renovation i.e. one that prioritises restoring unequal power relations for the sake of 'peace'
or expense, or transferring arbitrary judicial functions to communities, assuming this accounts for all of the
survivor's needs.

Patriarchy causes poverty, environmental degradation, wars,


and extinction ontological shift is key
Jytte Nhanenge- Development Consultant studies development policies in Africa;
February 2007; Ecofeminism: Towards Integrating The Concerns of Women, Poor
People and Nature Into Development
Chapter 2 argued that the modern, mechanistic, scientific world-view to a large extend is
responsible for the four crises. Its over-reward of quantitative activities means that the quality of
life for society and nature is deteriorating. Chapter 5 and 6 discussed that science - especially the
discipline of economics and its technology, together with the scientific program of Third World development consistently are dominating and exploiting women, Others and nature . The root cause
relates to the fact that only masculine or yang forces are included in the scientific view
of reality. Feminine or yin forces are oppositely excluded. This dualised patriarchal
ideology must logically manifest in domination of women, Others and nature . Science,
economics, technology, politics and social organization consequently only include half of
reality. The other half is considered of little value and as a resource for exploitation. Hence
not only women, Others and nature, but also all other feminine or yin issues are considered
as being subordinate. This imbalance has meant that there is an exaggerated focus on

masculine human characteristics, like rationality, individualism, competition, egoism, greed


and profit-maximization. At the same time the feminine human characteristics of emotion,
community, cooperation and conservation have been overlooked. This has lead to
unethical human behaviour and dominant relationship among many people, specifically
between men and women, adults and children, white and coloured people, modern and traditional people, rich and

an almost complete lack of


relationship between human beings and nature . Deficiency of balance between yang and yin has
moreover meant that feminine experiences including indigenous knowledge cannot
officially be included in the current masculine knowledge system. The product is a distorted
knowledge system. Since this knowledge system is the foundation of modern political,
economic and social organisation, it has resulted in absence of care and concern for
creation and maintenance of sustainable social and natural inter-relations . The exclusion of
feminine attributes has consequently created disharmony, which has culminated in the crises of war
and violence, poverty and inequality, environmental destruction and human
repression. The main sufferers from these crises are women, Others and nature. 515 Since these crises
continuously are intensifying, and extinction of the human race has become an
issue of public concern, it is increasingly important to change the masculine
perception of reality. This dissertation suggests that the solution must be a replacement of
the exclusive, masculine world-view by an inclusive ontology , which has a dynamic tension
poor people. The priority on masculine traits has also resulted in

between masculine and feminine elements. In chapter 3 Smuts' holism, the general systems theory and the
Chinese I Ching (yin/yang) schemes were suggested as possible alternatives. They present a shift from a
reductionist to a holistic perception of reality, hence all three models would logically include the perception of

Such a transformation would require a re-definition of the


current basic scientific concepts like its definition of a person; its quantitative knowledge
generation; its perception of human communities, and essentially its militaristic manner of
enforcing peace. The aim of this chapter is, in a limited way, to try and suggest what should be included in
women, Others and nature.

these new, holistic concepts.

Highly militaristic views of the world endorsed by patriarchy


serves as the root cause to all other impacts
Warren chair of the philosophy department at Macalester College and Cady professor of philosophy at Hamline University, 94 [Karen and Duane, Feminism and Peace:
Seeing Connections, Hypatia, Volume 9, Issue 2, p. 16]
Operationalized, the evidence of patriarchy as a dysfunctional system is found in the behaviors to which it gives
rise, (c), and the unmanageability, (d), which results. For example ,

in the United States, current estimates


are that one out of every three or four women will be raped by someone she knows;
globally, rape, sexual harassment, spouse-beating, and sado-masochistic
pornography are examples of behaviors practiced, sanctioned, or tolerated
within patriarchy . In the realm of environmentally destructive behaviors, strip-mining, factory
farming, and pollution of the air, water, and soil are instances of behaviors
maintained and sanctioned within patriarchy . They, too, rest on the faulty beliefs
that it is okay to "rape the earth," that it is "man's God-given right" to
have dominion (that is, domination) over the earth , that nature has only instrumental
value, that environmental destruction is the acceptable price we pay for "progress."And the presumption of warism,
that war is a natural, righteous, and ordinary way to impose dominion on a people or nation, goes hand in hand with

Much
of the current" unmanageability" of contemporary life in patriarchal societies, (d), is
then viewed as a consequence of a patriarchal preoccupation with activities, events,
and experiences that reflect historically male-gender identified beliefs, values,
attitudes, and assumptions. Included among these real-life consequences are
precisely those concerns with nuclear proliferation, war, environmental
patriarchy and leads to dysfunctional behaviors of nations and ultimately to international unmanageability.

destruction, and violence toward women , which many feminists see as the
logical outgrowth of patriarchal thinking. In fact, it is often only through observing these
dysfunctional behaviors-the symptoms of dysfunctionality that one can truly see that and how patriarchy serves to
maintain and perpetuate them. When patriarchy is understood as a dysfunctional system, this "unmanageability"
can be seen for what it is-as a predictable and thus logical consequence of patriarchy.'1 The theme that global
environmental crises, war, and violence generally are predictable and logical consequences of sexism and
patriarchal culture is pervasive in ecofeminist literature (see Russell 1989, 2). Ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak, for
instance, argues that " militarism

and warfare are continual features of a


patriarchal society because they reflect and instill patriarchal value s and
fulfill needs of such a system. Acknowledging the context of patriarchal conceptualizations that feed
militarism is a first step toward reducing their impact and preserving life on Earth" (Spretnak 1989, 54). Stated in
terms of the foregoing model of patriarchy as a dysfunctional social system, the claims by Spretnak and other
feminists take on a clearer meaning:

Patriarchal conceptual frameworks legitimate impaired


thinking (about women, national and regional conflict, the environment) which is
manifested in behaviors which, if continued, will make life on earth difficult, if
not impossible . It is a stark message, but it is plausible. Its plausibility lies in understanding the conceptual
roots of various woman-nature-peace connections in regional, national, and global contexts.

Only complete abolition can solve the impacts--- it spills over


to the abolition of all prisons and prompts a massive
discussion on gender in society.
Dave W. Frank, 14, Attorney at Christopher C. Myers & Associates , Ohio
Northern UniversityClaude W. Pettit College of Law, 2/14/14, Commentary:
Abandoned: Abolishing Female Prisons to Prevent Sexual Abuse and Herald an End
to Incarceration, http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1322&context=bglj
Female prison abolition would end the sexual abuse common in those
facilities and begin a movement to end all incarceration in the U.S . The
alternatives to prison advocated by the U.K. reformers, such as increasing social
services support and community involvement, are the proper replacements for
current confinement practices. Alternatives to incarceration that reproduce the
methodology and motivations of imprisonment are not enough. These alternatives
merely displace the vengeance, violence, control, surveillance, and cruelty that
underlie our current incarceration system. Punishment that takes place in the
community, rather than inside a jail, still encourages society to persecute rather
than aid a disfavored minority people accused and convicted of crimes. As
Clarence Darrow wrote in Resist Not Evil, [i]n the rule of force the weak must
always fall. 162 Insistence on imprisonment or prison-like punishments , especially
when alternatives exist, reveals vengeance as the true purpose carceral
confinement. The U.S. should renounce this self-imposed duty to punish, and
instead bring an end to the collective sexual victimization of female prisoners. The
proposal of female prison abolition in the U.S. as the best solution to eradicating
sexual abuse in these facilities relies on a few key premises. First, the U.S. cannot
reasonably guarantee incarcerated women will be free from sexual victimization .163
Second, alternatives to incarceration sufficiently address the aims of correction. 164
Third, the continued incarceration of U.S. women in facilities where they face a
substantial danger of sexual victimization is unconscionable . 165 Any argument for
the value of carceral punishment in spite of the danger of sexual victimization is not
compelling.166 If the sexual victimization of women is inherent to the U.S. prison

system, and if an alternative model is available, and further, if that alternative


model addresses the legitimate needs of society, then the U.S. should favor the
alternative as a replacement for incarceration.167 An alternative approach based on
the U.K. model of community care and support is the solution needed.

Abolition is not an institutional change but instead challenges


the moral legitimacy behind the idea of confinement
Allegra M. McLeod 15, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center,
2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
In contrast to leading scholarly and policy efforts to reform criminal law, abolition decidedly does not seek
merely to replace incarceration with alternatives that are closely related to imprisonment, such
as punitive policing, noncustodial criminal supervision, probation, civil
institutionalization, and parole.25 Abolition instead entails a rejection of the
moral legitimacy of confining people in cages , whether that caging is
deemed civil or whether it follows a failure to comply with technical terms of
supervised release or a police order.26 So too the positive project of abolition addressed in this Article is
decidedly not an effort to replicate the institutional transfer that occurred in the
aftermath of the deinstitutionalization of mental institutions.27 An abolitionist
framework requires positive forms of social integration and collective security that
are not organized around criminal law enforcement, confinement, criminal surveillance, punitive
policing, or punishment.

The federal system of incarceration creates a perpetual cycle


of discriminationonce felons, people are stripped of basic
rightsonly total elimination of the system will solve,
sentencing reform is not enough
Michelle Alexander 10, associate professor of law at Stanford Law School, civil

rights lawyer, advocate and legal scholar, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness, 2010, p. 93-6
The Prison Label Most people imagine that the explosion in the U.S. prison population during the past twenty-five
years reflects changes in crime rates. Few would guess that our prison population leaped from approximately
350,000 to 2.3 million in such a short period of time due to changes in laws and policies, not changes in crime

it has been changes in our laws particularly the dramatic increases in the
length of prison sentencesthat have been responsible for the growth of our prison
system, not increases in crime. One study suggests that the entire increase in
the prison population from 1980 to 2001 can be explained by sentencing
policy changes .88 Because harsh sentencing is a major cause of the prison
explosion, one might reasonably assume that substantially reducing the length of
prison sentences would effectively dismantle this new system of control . That
view, however, is mistaken . This system depends on the prison label, not prison
time. Once a person is labeled a felon, he or she is ushered into a parallel
universe in which discrimination, stigma, and exclusion are perfectly legal, and
privileges of citizenship such as voting and jury service are off-limits . It does not matter
rates. Yet

whether you have actually spent time in prison; your second-class citizenship begins the moment you are branded
a felon. Most people branded felons, in fact, are not sentenced to prison. As of 2008, there were approximately 2.3
million people in prisons and jails, and a staggering 5.1 million people under community correctional

Merely reducing prison terms does not have a major


impact on the majority of people in the system. It is the badge of inferiority the
felony recordthat relegates people for their entire lives, to secondclass status . As
described in chapter 4, for drug felons, there is little hope of escape. Barred from public
housing by law, discriminated against by private landlords, ineligible for food
stamps, forced to check the box indicating a felony conviction on employment
applications for nearly every job, and denied licenses for a wide range of professions, people
whose only crime is drug addiction or possession of a small amount of drugs for
recreational use fi nd themselves locked out of the mainstream society and
economypermanently. No wonder, then, that most people labeled felons find their way back into prison.
supervisioni.e., on probation or parole.89

According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics study, about 30 percent of released prisoners in its sample were
rearrested within six months of release. 90 Within three years, nearly 68 percent were rearrested at least once for a
new offense.91 Only a small minority are rearrested for violent crimes; the vast majority are rearrested for property

For those released on probation or


parole, the risks are especially high. They are subject to regular surveillance and monitoring
by the police and may be stopped and searched (with or without their consent) for any reason or no reason at
offenses, drug offenses, and offenses against the public order.92

all. As a result, they are far more likely to be arrested (again) than those whose behavior is not subject to constant
scrutiny by law enforcement. Probationers and parolees are at increased risk of arrest because their lives are
governed by additional rules that do not apply to everyone else.

Myriad restrictions on their travel

and behavior (such as a prohibition on associating with other felons), as well as various requirements of
probation and parole (such as paying fi nes and meeting with probation offi cers ), create opportunities for
arrest. Violation of these special rules can land someone right back in prison. In fact, that is what happens a good
deal of the time. The extraordinary increase in prison admissions due to parole and
probation violations is due almost entirely to the War on Drugs. With respect to parole, in

1980, only 1 percent of all prison admissions were parole violators. Twenty years later, more than one third (35
percent) of prison admissions resulted from parole violations.93 To put the matter more starkly: About as many
people were returned to prison for parole violations in 2000 as were admitted to prison in 1980 for all reasons.94 Of
all parole violators returned to prison in 2000, only one-third were returned for a new conviction; twothirds were
returned for a technical violation such as missing appointments with a parole offi cer, failing to maintain
employment, or failing a drug test.95 In this system of control, failing to cope well with ones exile status is treated
like a crime. If you fail, after being released from prison with a criminal recordyour personal badge of inferiority
to remain drug free, or if you fail to get a job against all the odds, or if you get depressed and miss an appointment
with your parole offi cer (or if you cannot afford the bus fare to take you there), you can be sent right back to prison

This disturbing phenomenon of


people cycling in and out of prison , trapped by their second-class status, has been
described by Loc Wacquant as a closed circuit of perpetual marginality.96 Hundreds of
where society apparently thinks millions of Americans belong.

thousands of people are released from prison every year, only to find themselves locked out of the mainstream
society and economy. Most ultimately return to prison, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Others are released
again, only to find themselves in precisely the circumstances they occupied before, unable to cope with the stigma

Reducing the amount of time people spend


behind barsby eliminating harsh mandatory minimumswill alleviate some of the
unnecessary suffering caused by this system, but it will not disturb the closed
circuit. Those labeled felons will continue to cycle in and out of prison, subject to
perpetual surveillance by the police, and unable to integrate into the mainstream
society and economy. Unless the number of people who are labeled felons is
dramatically reduced, and unless the laws and policies that keep ex-offenders
marginalized from the mainstream society and economy are eliminated,
the system will continue to create and maintain an enormous undercaste.
of the prison label and their permanent pariah status.

Plan Texts
Thus the plan: The United States Federal Government should
abolish federal prisons.

Framing
Utilitarianism disregards respect for the individual and
perpetuates societal inequality by evaluating utility as a whole
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of
Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel,
Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy and Public Affairs,
Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)
The inclusion of all sentient beings in the calculation of interests severely
undermines the force of any claim that utilitarianism is an "egalitarian" doctrine,
based in some notion of equal concern and respect for persons . But let us assume Kymlicka
can restore his thesis by insisting that it concerns, not utilitarianism as a general moral doctrine, but as a more
limited thesis about political morality. (Here I pass over the fact that none of the utilitarians he relies on to support
his egalitarian interpretation construe the doctrine as purely political. The drift of modern utilitarian theory is just

utilitarianism is not seen as a political doctrine, to be appealed to by


legislators and citizens, but a nonpublic criterion of right that is indirectly applied [by
whom is a separate issue] to assess the nonutilitarian public political conception of justice. )
the other way:

Still, let us assume it is as a doctrine of political morality that utilitarianism treats persons, and only persons, as

Even in this form it cannot be that maximizing utility is "not a goal" but a "byproduct," "entirely derived from the prior requirement to treat people with equal
consideration" (CPP, p. 31) Kymlicka says, "If utilitarianism is best seen as an egalitarian doctrine, then there
equals.

is no independent commitment to the idea of maximizing welfare" (CPP, p. 35, emphases added). But how can this
be? (i) What is there about the formal principle of equal consideration (or for that matter occupying a universal
point of view) which would imply that we maximize the aggregate of individuals' welfare? Why not assume, for
example, that equal consideration requires maximizing the division of welfare (strict equality, or however equal
division is to be construed); or, at least maximize the multiple (which would result in more equitable distributions
than the aggregate)? Or, why not suppose equal consideration requires equal proportionate satisfaction of each
person's interests (by for example, determining our resources and then satisfying some set percentage of each
person's desires) . Or finally we might rely on some Paretian principle: equal consideration means adopting
measures making no one worse off. For reasons I shall soon discuss, each of these rules is a better explication of
equal consideration of each person's interests than is

the utilitarian aggregative method, which in

effect collapses distinctions among persons. (2) Moreover, rather than construing individuals'
"interests" as their actual (or rational) desires, and then putting them all on a par and measuring according to
intensity, why not construe their interests lexically, in terms of a hierarchy of wants, where certain interests are, to
use Scanlon's terms, more "urgent" than others, insofar as they are more basic needs? Equal consideration would
then rule out satisfying less urgent interests of the majority of people until all means have been taken to satisfy
everyone's more basic needs. (3) Finally, what is there about equal consideration, by itself, that requires
maximizing anything? Why does it not require, as in David Gauthier's view, optimizing constraints on individual

to say we ought
to give equal consideration to everyone's interests does not, by itself, imply much of
anything about how we ought to proceed or what we ought to do. It is a purely
formal principle, which requires certain added, independent assumptions, to yield any substantive
conclusions. That (i) utilitarian procedures maximize is not a "by-product" of equal
consideration. It stems from a particular conception of rationality that is explicitly incorporated into the
procedure. That (2) individuals' interests are construed in terms of their (rational) desires
or preferences, all of which are put on a par, stems from a conception of individual
welfare or the human good: a person's good is defined subjectively , as what he wants or
would want after due reflection. Finally (3), aggregation stems from the fact that, on the classical view, a
single individual takes up everyone's desires as if they were his own,
sympathetically identifies with them, and chooses to maximize his "individual"
utility. Hare, for one, explicitly makes this move. Just as Rawls says of the classical view, Hare "extend[s] to
utility maximization? Or why does it not require sharing a distribution? The point is just that,

society the principle of choice for one man, and then, to make this extension work, conflat[es] all persons into one
through the imaginative acts of the impartial sympathetic spectator" (TJ, p. 27). If these are independent premises
incorporated into the justification of utilitarianism and its decision procedure, then

maximizing aggregate

utility cannot be a "by-product" of a procedure that gives equal consideration to


everyone's interests. Instead, it defines what that procedure is. If anything is a byproduct here, it is the appeal to equal consideration . Utilitarians appeal to impartiality in order to
extend a method of individual practical rationality so that it may be applied to society as a whole (cf. TJ, pp. 26-27).
Impartiality, combined with sympathetic identification, allows a hypothetical observer to experience the desires of
others as if they were his own, and compare alternative courses of action according to their conduciveness to a

The significant fact is that, in this


appeals to equal consideration have nothing to do with impartiality between
persons. What is really being given equal consideration are desires or experiences
of the same magnitude. That these are the desires or experiences of separate
persons (or, for that matter, of some other sentient being) is simply an incidental fact that has no
substantive effect on utilitarian calculations. This becomes apparent from the fact that we can
single maximand, made possible by equal consideration and sympathy.
procedure,

more accurately describe the utilitarian principle in terms of giving, not equal consideration to each person's
interests, but instead equal consideration to equally intense interests, no matter where they occur. Nothing is lost in

persons enter into utilitarian


calculations only incidentally. Any mention of them can be dropped without loss of
the crucial information one needs to learn how to apply utilitarian procedures. This
indicates what is wrong with the common claim that utilitarians emphasize
procedural equality and fairness among persons, not substantive equality and
fairness in results. On the contrary, utilitarianism, rightly construed, emphasizes neither procedural nor
this redescription, and a great deal of clarity is gained. It is in this sense that

substantive equality among persons. Desires and experiences, not persons, are the proper objects of equal concern
in utilitarian procedures. Having in effect read persons out of the picture at the procedural end, before decisions on

it is little wonder that utilitarianism can result in such


substantive inequalities. What follows is that utilitarian appeals to democracy and the
democratic value of equality are misleading. In no sense do utilitarians seek to give persons equal
distributions even get underway,

concern and respect.

Policy decisions directed at maintaining human survival


through whatever means will encourage genocide, war, and the
destruction of moral values
Callahan 73 Co-Founder and former director of The Hastings Institute, PhD in
philosophy from Harvard University (Daniel, The Tyranny of Survival, p 91-93)

The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In

the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed
against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of
Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger
defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs . During World War II, native

Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by
the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can

survival of the Aryan race was one of the official


legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless
justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The

apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the
many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not

The main rationale


Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society
is the need for survival. For Jacques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow
only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value.
B. F.

almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put
forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and
bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical
efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a
normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no
better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a
willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of

it is possible to
counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There seems
nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these reasons

to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for
sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress . It is
easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk
about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands
of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when
that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human

potential tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not


treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease,
rights and values. The

provoking a destructive single-mindedness that will stop at nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral
dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the
precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a
right to lifethen how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process,
destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of
survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival.
It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories. Yet it would be the defeat of all defeats if, because human
beings could not properly manage their need to survive, they succeeded in not doing so.

Utilitarianism destroys value to life by forcing the individual to


take risks on a cost-benefit basis in an effort to increase
overall utility of an entity, while demoralizing the individuals
own system of values
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke,
Rights Against Risks,, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562,
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)
From the individual's point of view, the balancing of costs and benefits that
utilitarianism endorses renders the status of any individual risk bearer
profoundly insecure. A risk bearer cannot determine from the kind of risk
being imposed on him whether it is impermissible or not. The identical risk may be

justified if necessary to avoid a calamity and unjustified if the product of an act of profitless carelessness, but

nature and extent of the underlying benefits of the risky action are fre
quently unknown to the risk bearer so that he cannot know whether or not
he is being wronged. Furthermore, even when the gain that lies behind the risk is wellknown, the status of a risk bearer is insecure because individuals can justifiably
be inflicted with ever greater levels of risk in conjunction with increasing
gains. Certainly, individual risk bearers may be entitled to more protection if the risky action exposes
the

many others to the same risk, since the likelihood that technological risks will cause greater harm
increases as more and more people experience that risk. This makes the risky action less likely to be

that insight seems scant comfort to an individual, for


it reinforces the realization that, standing alone, he does not count for much .
justifiable. Once again, however,

A strategy of weighing gains against risks thus renders the status of any specific risk victim substantially
contingent upon the claims of others, both those who may share his victim status and those who stand
to gain from the risky activity. The anxiety to preserve some fundamental place for the individual that
cannot be overrun by larger social considerations underlies what H.L.A. Hart has aptly termed the

despite its famous slogan,


"everyone [is] to count for one,"59 utilitarianism ultimately denies each
individual a primary place in its system of values. Various versions of utilitarian ism
"distinctively modern criticism of utilitarianism,"58 the criticism that,

evaluate actions by the consequences of those actions to maximize happiness, the net of pleasure over

goal of maximizing
some mea sure of utility obscures and diminishes the status of each
individual. It reduces the individual to a conduit, a reference point that registers the appropriate "utiles,"
but does not count for anything independent of his monitoring function.61 It also produces moral
requirements that can trample an individual, if necessary, to maximize utility,
since once the net effects of a proposal on the maximand have been taken
into account, the individual is expendable . Counting pleasure and pain equally across
pain, or the satisfaction of desires.60 Whatever the specific formulation, the

individuals is a laudable proposal, but counting only plea sure and pain permits the grossest inequities

In sum,
utilitarianism makes the status of any individual radically contingent . The
among individuals and the trampling of the few in furtherance of the utility of the many.

individual's status will be preserved only so long as that status con tributes to increasing total utility.
Otherwise, the individual can be discarded.

The only way to preserve individualism is to allow all persons


to have the right to own themselves regardless of any negative
consequentialist impacts
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke,
Rights Against Risks,, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562,
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)
2. Liberal Theories in the "Rights" Tradition. A second group of theories avoids the modern
criticism of utilitarianism by making the individual central . Contemporary theorists as diverse
as John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Richard Epstein, Charles Fried, and Ronald Dworkin continue a tradition variously

"rights" tradition.62 They all define the requirements of


justice in terms of recognizing and preserving the essential characteristics of
individuals as free and autonomous moral agents.63 In this approach, the individual
is defined prior to articulating the terms under which that individual can be acted
upon or interacted with, and those terms are consequently specified so as to protect
and preserve what is essential to the individual . In this context, rights have been called
"trumps" since they constrain what society can do to the individual.64 These theories all
aspire to make the individual more secure than he is under utilitarianism . In the rights
described as the Kantian, natural rights, or

tradition, the crucial criteria for assessing risks derive from the impact of those risks on risk victims, and the criteria
are defined independently of the benefits flowing from risk creation. To be plausible, such a program cannot totally
prohibit risk creation, but the ostensible advantage of this program over utilitarianism is that risk creation is
circumscribed by criteria exclusively derived from considerations of the integrity of the individual, not from any
balancing or weighing process.65 The root idea is that nonconsensual risks are violations of "individual entitlements
to personal security and autonomy."66 This idea seems highly congruent with the ideology of environmentalism
expressed in our national legislation regulating technological risk. Indeed, two scholars have recently suggested a
modern rendering of Kant's categorical imperative: " All

rational persons have a right not to be


used without their consent even for the benefit of others ."67 If imposing risk amounts to using
another, this tradition seems to be the place to look to secure the status of the individual.

Case 2AC

Abolition Solvency
Abolition is a gradual process, that will transform criminal law
and peoples livelihoods
Allegra M. McLeod 15, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center,

2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
If prison abolition is conceptualized as an immediate and indiscriminate opening of
prison doorsthat is, the imminent physical elimination of all structures of incarcerationrejection of
abolition is perhaps warranted. But abolition may be understood instead as a
gradual project of decarceration, in which radically different legal and institutional
regulatory forms supplant criminal law enforcement. These institutional alternatives
include meaningful justice reinvestment to strengthen the social arm of the
state and improve human welfare; decriminalizing less serious infractions ;
improved design of spaces and products to reduce opportunities for offending;
urban redevelopment and greening projects ; proliferating restorative forms of redress;
and creating both safe harbors for individuals at risk of or fleeing violence and
alternative livelihoods for persons otherwise subject to criminal law
enforcement. When abolition is conceptualized in these termsas a transformative goal
of gradual decarceration and positive regulatory substitution wherein penal
regulation is recognized as morally unsustainable then inattention to abolition in
criminal law scholarship and reformist discourses comes into focus as a more
troubling absence.16 Further, the rejection of abolition as a horizon for reform mistakenly
assumes that reformist critiques concern only the occasional, peripheral excesses of
imprisonment and prison-backed policing rather than more fundamentally
impugning the core operations of criminal law enforcement , and therefore requiring a
departure from prison-backed criminal regulation to other regulatory frameworks.

Even if abolition has problems, its important to image to set


the agenda for decarcerative politics
Angela Y. Davis 03, Professor of Feminist Studies at University of CA Santa Cruz,

2003, Are Prisons Obsolete?, http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wpcontent/uploads/2010/11/Angela-Davis-Are_Prisons_Obsolete.pdf


Creating agendas of decarceration and broadly casting the net of alternatives helps
us to do the ideological work of pulling apart the conceptual link between crime and
punishment. This more nuanced understanding of the social role of the punishment system requires us to give
up our usual way of thinking about punishment as an inevitable consequence of crime. We would recognize
that "punishment" does not follow from "crime" in the neat and logical sequence
offered by discourses that insist on the justice of imprisonment, but rather
punishmentprimarily through imprisonment (and sometimes death)is linked to the
agendas of politicians, the profit drive of corporations, and media representations of
crime. Imprisonment is associated with the racialization of those most likely to be
punished. It is associated with their class and, as we have seen, gender structures
the punishment system as well. If we insist that abolitionist alternatives trouble these relationships, that
they strive to disarticulate crime and punishment, race and punishment, class and punishment, and gender and
punishment, then

our focus must not rest only on the prison system as an isolated

institution but must also be directed at all the social relations that support the
permanence of the prison. An attempt to create a new conceptual terrain for
imagining alternatives to imprisonment involves the ideological work of
questioning why "criminals" have been constituted as a class and, indeed, a class of
human beings undeserving of the civil and human rights accorded to others. Radical
criminologists have long pointed out that the category "law- breakers" is far greater than the
category of individuals who are deemed criminals since, many point out, almost all of us
have broken the law at one time or another. Even President Bill Clinton admitted that he had
smoked marijuana at one time, insisting, though, that he did not inhale. However, acknowledged disparities in the
intensity of police surveillanceas indicated by the present-day currency of the term "racial profiling" which ought
to cover far more territory than "driving while black or brown"account in part for racial and class-based disparities
in arrest and imprisonment rates. Thus,

if we are willing to take seriously the consequences of


a racist and class-biased justice system, we will reach the conclusion that enormous
numbers of people are in prison simply because they are , for example, black Chicano,
Vietnamese, Native American or poor, regardless of their ethnic background. They are sent to
prison, not so much because of the crimes they may have indeed commit- ted, but
largely because their communities have been criminalized . Thus, programs for
decriminalization will not only have to address specific activities that have been
criminalizedsuch as drug use and sex workbut also criminalized populations and
communities. It is against the backdrop of these more broadly conceived abolitionist alternatives that it makes
sense to take up the question of radical transformations within the existing jus- tice system. Thus, aside from
minimizing, through various strategies, the kinds of behaviors that will bring people into contact with the police and

there is the question of how to treat those who assault the rights and
bodies of others. Many organizations and individuals both in the United States and other countries offer
alternative modes of making justice. In limited instances, some governments have attempted
to implement alternatives that range from conflict resolution to restorative or
reparative justice. Such scholars as Herman Bianchi have suggested that crime needs to be defined
in terms of tort and, instead of criminal law, should be reparative law. In his words,
"(The lawbreaker) is thus no longer an evil-minded man or woman, but simply a
debtor, a liable person whose human duty is to take responsibility for his or her
acts, and to assume the duty of repair.
justice systems,

AT: State Prisons Alt Cause


Federal prisons are the largest proportion of prisoners in the
US
Pew Trusts 15, Federal Prison System Shows Dramatic Long-Term Growth: Policy

decisions contribute to steep rise in inmate population and costs, February 27,
2015, http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/factsheets/2015/02/federal-prison-system-shows-dramatic-long-term-growth
From 1980 to 2013, the number of offenders incarcerated in federal prisons
increased from approximately 24,000 to more than 215,000, making the federal
system the largest in the nation .1 Policy choices contributed significantly to this
expansion as lawmakers added criminal laws to the books, lengthened sentences,
and abolished parole.2 To accommodate the growing inmate population, the number of federal
prisons nearly tripled, driving a surge in corrections spending.3 Taxpayers spent almost as
much on federal prisons in 2013$6.7 billionas they spent to fund the entire U.S.
Department of Justice in 1980, after adjusting for inflation.4 Despite these expenditures, recent data show
that a third of all offenders who leave federal prisons under community supervision return to custody for violating
the terms of their release.5

More Util
Owning oneself is a moral imperative utilitarianism imposes
interpersonal obligations to society, which destroys morality
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of

Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel,


Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy and Public Affairs,
Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)
Kymlicka distinguishes two interpretations of utilitarianism: teleological and egalitarian. According to Rawls's
teleological interpretation, the "fundamental goal" (LCC, p. 33) of utilitarianism is not
persons, but the goodness of states of affairs . Duty is defined by what best brings about these
states of affairs. " [M] aximizing the good is primary, and we count individuals equally only because that maximizes

Our primary duty isn't to treat people as equals, but to bring about valuable
states of affairs" (LCC, p. 27). It is difficult to see, Kymlicka says, how this reading of
utilitarianism can be viewed as a moral theory. Morality, in our everyday view at
least, is a matter of interpersonal obligations-the obligations we owe to each other.
But to whom do we owe the duty of maximizing utility? Surely not to the impersonal
ideal spectator . . . for he doesn't exist. Nor to the maximally valuable state of affairs itself, for states
value.

of affairs don't have moral claims." (LCC, p. 28-29) Kymlicka says, "This form of utilitarianism does not merit serious
consideration as a political morality" (LCC, p. 29). Suppose we see utilitarianism differently, as a theory whose
"fundamental principle" is "to treat people as equals" (LCC, p. 29). On this egalitarian reading, utilitarianism is a
procedure for aggregating individual interests and desires, a procedure for making social choices, specifying which
trade-offs are acceptable. It's a moral theory which purports to treat people as equals, with equal concern and
respect. It does so by counting everyone for one, and no one for more than one. (LCC, p. 25)

Utilitarianism promotes inequity and inherently discriminates


against minority like slavery
Odell, 04 University of Illinois is an Associate Professor of Philosophy (Jack,
Ph.D., On Consequentialist Ethics, Wadsworth, Thomson Learning, Inc., pp. 98103)
A classic objection to both act and rule utilitarianism has to do with inequity , and is

related to the kind of objection raised by Rawls, which I will consider shortly. Suppose we have two fathers-Andy and
Bob. Suppose further that they are alike in all relevant respects, both have three children, make the same salary, have the
same living expenses, put aside the same amount in savings, and have left over each week fifteen dollars. Suppose that every week
Andy and Bob ask themselves what they are going to do with this extra money, and Andy decides anew each week (AU) to divide it
equally among his three children, or he makes a decision to always follow the rule (RU) that each child should receive an equal
percentage of the total allowance money. Suppose further that each of his children receive five degrees of pleasure from this and no
pain. Suppose on the other hand, that Bob, who strongly favors his oldest son, Bobby, decides anew each week (AU) to give all of
the allowance money to Bobby, and nothing to the other two, and that he instructs Bobby not to tell the others, or he makes a
decision to follow the rule (RU) to always give the total sum to Bobby. Suppose also that Bobby gets IS units of pleasure from his
allowance and that his unsuspecting siblings feel no pain. The end result of the actions of both fathers is the same-IS units of
pleasure. Most, if not all, of us would agree that although Andy's conduct is exemplary, Bob's is culpable. Nevertheless, according to
both AU and RU the fathers in question are morally equal. Neither father is more or less exemplary or culpable than the

Both act and rule


utilitarianism violate the principle of just distribution. What Rawls does is to
elaborate objection (H). Utilitarianism, according to Rawls, fails to appreciate the
importance of distributive justice, and that by doing so it makes a mockery of the
concept of "justice." As I pointed out when I discussed Russell's views regarding partial goods, satisfying
the interests of a majority of a given population while at the same time thwarting
the interests of the minority segment of that same population (as occurs in societies
that allow slavery) can maximize the general good, and do so even though the
minority group may have to suffer great cruelties. Rawls argues that the utilitarian commitment
to maximize the good in the world is due to its failure to ''take seriously the distinction between persons." One
person can be forced to give up far too much to insure the maximization of the
other. I will refer to the objection implicit in this kind of example as (H) and state it as: ' (H)

good, or the total aggregate satisfaction, as was the case for those young Aztec women chosen by their society
each year to be sacrificed to the Gods for the welfare of the group.

**Other Possible Advantages

Targeting the homeless


The homeless are targeted by the Prison Industrial Complex--their circumstances are abused by the police to constantly
arrest them.
Critical resistance 04, abolitionist website, 2004, Information Sheets,
http://criticalresistance.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Ab-Toolkit-Part-2.pdf
THERE ARE MANY THINGS THAT THREATEN THE SAFETY OF THE HOMELESS. Not
having a reliable place to live creates many of those problems. Without a place to
rest or keep clean, it's hard to meet the basic expectations for holding a job.
Homeless people are forced to sleep, cook, use the bath- room, and store
possessions in public. Homeless people are left open to having these activities
criminalized. More and more, our society uses police, prisons, and courts to punish the homeless. People's basic needs, and the causes of homelessness, all go ignored. Advocates for the
homeless can work toward abolition by seeing the PIC as getting in the way of
people's safety and basic needs. .Housing costs are way too high for many people, including the
working poor. Minimum wage income is not enough to cover fair market rent in any city or county in the US. (See
the "Rental Housing" report). .A

study found that out of 57 cities surveyed , not a single


one had enough shelter beds for all of the homeless. .Not having a mailing
address makes it hard to register to vote, receive government benefits, or apply for
a job. .Homeless people are punished for non-harmful activities like loitering. These
"quality of life" laws are mostly enforced against homeless people . Tourists drinking in
public, or napping on a blanket in a park probably wouldn't be arrested. But a homeless person sleeping on a piece

'In one year, 43,000 people were cited for breaking "quality
of life" laws in San Francisco. People who are cited usually have to pay a fine. If they can't pay the fine,
they are put in jail. .Homeless people in Baltimore, for example, spend an average of 35 days
per year in jail. 'Because some homeless people end up having criminal records,
they have an even harder time finding housing and jobs.
of cardboard probably would be.

Targeting queer people


Queer people are routinely harassed by police officers---their identities
are abused both by guards and other prisoners.
Andrew Cohen 13, fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, legal analyst, and

contributing editor at The Atlantic, 12-14-13, Government Watchdog: We Have a


Growing Federal Prison 'Crisis',
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/12/government-watchdog-wehave-a-growing-federal-prison-crisis/282341/
QUEER PEOPLE FACE HIGHER SURVEILLANCE AND REPRESSION BASED ON THEIR ACTIONS AND APPEAR- ANCES .
Some queer people are not safe at home and end up spending more of their time on
the street, which can mean facing the threat of police harassment every day. For
queer people who are locked up, their identities are abused and denied. All of the
gender "cages" in our society, mixed with surveillance , policing, and
imprisonment , put queer people at risk of violence . The risks are even higher
for queer youth, queers of color, queer sex workers, transgendered people, lowincome queers, and other marginalized queers. Abolition would mean putting an end
to tracking people's bodies and behavior based on gender and sexuality. .Many queer youth are denied a
caring home because of their sexuality. They are put in foster care homes that are hostile, where they often
experience violence. Or they are forced onto the streets. '100% of queer youth in group homes have experienced
heterosexist verbal abuse in their foster care. 70% have experience physical violence there. 035-50% of homeless

'"Quality of life" laws also target queer youth . They are fined or jailed
just for being outside. 'Policing and surveillance often target public displays of
affection by queers. Cops often read transgendered people as sex workers. '49% of
attacks on transgendered people in San Francisco are committed by police. .Prisoners are forced into
living conditions segregated "male" and "female." . A prisoner who doesn't identify
with either of those gender labels, or who identifies with a gender that guards and
police don't agree "match" the prisoner's genitals, is often forced into solitary
confinement or a cell with people of different genders . However prisoners are
classified, it's not based on their choice, or with concern for their safety. 'People using hormones are
often denied access, or regular access, to hormones in prison. 'Queer people in
prison are at high risk of verbal and physical abuse, from guards and other
prisoners.
youth are queer.

Social/Enviro problems
Prisons are also social and environmental catastrophes---purposely
built in poor communities of color, they use water and land, only to
give back sewage and hazardous chemicals.
Andrew Cohen 13, fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, legal analyst, and
contributing editor at The Atlantic, 12-14-13, Government Watchdog: We Have a
Growing Federal Prison 'Crisis',
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/12/government-watchdog-wehave-a-growing-federal-prison-crisis/282341/

ENVIRONMENI'AL RACISM CAN MEAN NOT ENFORCING ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS, when people of color are the ones
mostly harmed. It can also mean choosing to build toxic waste disposal sites only in communities of color.

Communities of color and poor communities suffer an unfair number of


environmentally destructive land uses-- land uses that take from the community but don't give back
to it. Prisons don't only harm the communities where prisoners come from. Prisons
are also environmental and social disasters for the towns where prisons
are built . Part of abolishing the PIC also means building communities that have the power to decide how their
resources are best used. Many US states build most prisons where the poor and people of
color live. .Communities are often shut out of the process of deciding whether a prison should be built in their

town. 'In Mendota California, the Federal Bureau of Prisons refused to translate its 1000 page environmental impact
report into Spanish. 8696 of Mendota residents are native Spanish speakers. IT's IMPORTANT THAT WE
UNDERSTAND WHY PRISONS MAKE BAD NEIGHBORS. It's not because of the peo- ple who are locked inside. It's not

prison
buildings themselves are environmental haz- ards. . Prisons use up scarce water
resources and create huge amounts of sewage waste. 'To dispose of waste
products, boilers in prisons can burn coal and diesel. These release the same
chemicals as hazardous waste incinerators. .Prison guards usually commute to the
prison from dozens of miles away. This creates huge amounts of air pollution. This is
because of the prisoners' family members (who rarely move to the prison town anyway). It's because

one of the reasons why the San Joaquin Valley in California (which has several prisons) surpassed Ins Angeles as

'Prisons use up land that was once used to grow


food. This valuable land no longer creates jobs or public resources.
having the second wol$t air in the country.

Financially inefficient
The Federal Bureau of Prisons is financially inefficient---it has received
an increase in inmates and a decrease in funding
Andrew Cohen 13, fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, legal analyst, and

contributing editor at The Atlantic, 12-14-13, Government Watchdog: We Have a


Growing Federal Prison 'Crisis',
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/12/government-watchdog-wehave-a-growing-federal-prison-crisis/282341/
The first part of the prison crisis is financial and the math behind it is relatively simple: the
number of federal inmates has increased dramatically over the past few years while
the government funding available to safely house those federal inmates has
decreased. " It's a zero sum game ," Horowitz says. "Every dollar spent on prisons is a
dollar that is going to come from somewhere else in the Department. That forces
leadership to look hard at what tools it has." From the report: After enjoying an increase in its
discretionary budget from $21.5 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2001 to $28.9 billion in FY 2011,
the Departments discretionary budget decreased in FY 2012 to $28.3 billion, and by 10
percent in FY 2013 to $25.5 billion. During this same period, the prison population in
the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facilities grew from about 157,000 inmates in
FY 2001 to about 219,000 inmates presently.

Empirics prove---incarceration is vastly inefficient and costly.


Louis Michael Seidman 10, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law,
Georgetown University Law Center, 2010, Hyper-Incarceration and Strategies of
Disruption: Is There a Way Out?,
http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1140&context=fwps_papers
A deficiency of the economic model is that it seems descriptively inaccurate, or at least quite incomplete.

Anyone who has studied the politics of crime control knows that it is driven at least
as much by anger and fear as by careful cost-benefit calculations.16 Policy makers
can talk openly about the costs and benefits of , say, increasing the speed limit on
highways, but no one says publicly that there is an optimal level of rape and
murder. It is not surprising then, that our actual policies depart substantially from the results
we would attain if we focused solely on economic efficiency. For example, Bruce
Western estimates that from 1993 to 2001, increases in incarceration rates
produced a 2 to 5 percent drop in serious crime at a cost of $53 billion .17 This figure
represents just the direct economic costs of imprisonment. It includes none of the huge
costs to individual lives and communities imposed by our gargantuan imprisonment
program. Whether any particular drop in crime is worth the cost obviously depends on how one values crime
avoidance, but almost everyone would say that this is an exorbitant price to pay for
relatively insignificant benefits. Of course, not everyone agrees with Westerns analysis,18 practice of
incarcerating superannuated prisoners who continue to serve very long sentences into their dotage involves a great
deal of waste.19

Topicality

Prisons = Surveillance
Surveillance means to keep watch over prisoners and prisons
Random House Dictionary 15, accessed at
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/surveillance on 7/6/15
surveillance
noun
1.a watch kept over a person, group, etc., especially over a suspect , prisoner, or
the like:
The suspects were under police surveillance.
2. continuous observation of a place, person, group, or ongoing activity in
order to gather information:
video cameras used for covert surveillance.
See also electronic surveillance.
3. attentive observation, as to oversee and direct someone or something:
increased surveillance of patients with chronic liver disease.

Prisoners are constantly under surveillance, both in and out of


prison
Timothy J. Flanagan, 95, PRESIDENT AND PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY,
FRAMINGHAM STATE UNIVERSITY, 4/6/1995, Long-Term Imprisonment,

The prison context affords very little privacy, and in Durham the women are confined together, for long periods at a
time, in a small unit that permits low opportunities for seclusion. As

in other prisons, their activities

are also under constant surveillance by staff. Of particular concern to the women was the
censorship of all mail, both in and out of the prison, and the close supervision of visits. Together,
these measures were said to severely inhibit meaningful communication with family and friends and to deny the
women any opportunity to reveal their emotions to those closest to them.

CI- Fed Prisons = Custody


Counter-interpretation:
a. Surveillance is keeping people in custody
Collins English Dictionary 12, accessed at
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/surveillance on 7/6/15
surveillance
noun
1. close observation or supervision maintained over a person, group, etc, esp one
in custody or under suspicion

b. Federal prisons are places where people confined for


continuous custody
Bureau of Justice Statistics no date, Terms & Definitions: State And

Federal Prisoners And Prison Facilities


Custody, http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tdtp&tid=13
To have custody of a prisoner, a state or the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) must
physically hold that person in one of its facilities. A locality, state, or the BOP may hold
inmates over whom a different government maintains jurisdiction.
Custody count
The number of offenders in custody. To have custody of a prisoner, a state or the Federal Bureau of
Prisons (BOP) must physically hold that person in one of its facilities. A locality, state, or the BOP may
have custody of a prisoner over whom a different government maintains jurisdiction.
Design capacity
The number of inmates that planners or architects intended for the facility.
Federal prisons
Prison facilities run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Prisoners housed in these facilities

are under the legal authority of the federal government. This excludes private
facilities under exclusive contract with BOP.
Imprisoned population
The population of inmates confined in prison or other facilities under the jurisdiction of the state or
Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Imprisonment rate
The number of prisoners under state or federal jurisdiction sentenced to more than one year, per
100,000 U.S. residents.
Incarcerated population
Incarcerated population is the population of inmates confined in a prison or a jail. This may also include
halfway-houses, bootcamps, weekend programs, and other facilities in which individuals are locked up
overnight.
Institutional corrections
Institutional corrections refers to those persons housed in secure correctional facilities. There are many
different types of correctional facilities, operated by different government entities. Local jails are
operated by county or municipal authorities, and typically hold offenders for short periods ranging
from a single day to a year. Prisons serve as long-term confinement facilities and are only run by the
50 state governments and the federal Bureau of Prisons. Private correctional facilities also operate
under contracts for a wide variety of local, state and federal agencies. Other correctional facilities are
operated by special jurisdictions such as the U.S. Armed Forces, U.S. territories and federal agencies
such as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Jurisdiction

Jurisdiction generally refers to a unit of government or to the legal authority to exercise governmental
power. In corrections, it refers to the government which has legal authority over an inmate (state or
federal). Prisoners under a given state's jurisdiction may be housed in another state or local
correctional facility.
Jurisdiction count
Includes prisoners under legal authority of state or federal correctional authorities who are housed in
prison facilities (e.g., prisons, penitentiaries and correctional institutions; boot camps; prison farms;
reception, diagnostic, and classification centers; release centers, halfway houses, and road camps;
forestry and conservation camps; vocational training facilities; prison hospitals; and drug and alcohol
treatment facilities for prisoners), regardless of which state they are physically held in. This number
also includes prisoners who are temporarily absent (less than 30 days), out to court, or on work
release; housed in local jails, private facilities, and other states' or federal facilities; serving a sentence
for two jurisdictions at the same time. This count excludes prisoners held in a state or federal facility
for another state or the Federal Bureau of Prisons. However, prisoners housed in another state and
under the legal authority of the governing state are included.
Movement
In corrections, a movement refers to an admission or a release from a status such as prisoner, parolee,
or probationer. Unless specifically noted, a transfer between facilities does not count as a movement.
Operational capacity
The number of inmates that can be accommodated based on a facility's staff, existing programs, and
services.
Parole
Parole refers to criminal offenders who are conditionally released from prison to serve the remaining
portion of their sentence in the community. Prisoners may be released to parole by a parole board
decision (discretionary release/discretionary parole), according to provisions of a statute (mandatory
release/mandatory parole), through other types of post-custody conditional supervision, or as the
result of a sentence to a term of supervised release. In the federal system, a term of supervised
release is a sentence to a fixed period of supervision in the community that follows a sentence to a
period of incarceration in federal prison, both of which are ordered at the time of sentencing by a
federal judge. Parolees can have a number of different supervision statuses including active
supervision, which means they are required to regularly report to a parole authority in person, by mail,
or by telephone. Some parolees may be on an inactive status which means they are excluded from
regularly reporting, and that could be due to a number of reasons. For instance, some may receive a
reduction in supervision, possibly due to compliance or meeting all required conditions before the
parole sentence terminates, and therefore may be moved from an active to inactive status. Other
supervision statues include parolees who only have financial conditions remaining, have absconded, or
who have active warrants. Parolees are also typically required to fulfill certain conditions and adhere to
specific rules of conduct while in the community. Failure to comply with any of the conditions can result
in a return to incarceration.
Prison
Compared to jail facilities, prisons are longer-term facilities owned by a state or by the
Federal Government. Prisons typically hold felons and persons with sentences of more than a
year; however, the sentence length may vary by state. Six states (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont,
Delaware, Alaska, and Hawaii) have an integrated correctional system that combines jails and prisons.
There are a small number of private prisons, facilities that are run by private prison corporations whose
services and beds are contracted out by state or federal governments.
Prisoners

Prisoners are inmates confined in long-term facilities run by the state or federal
government or private agencies. They are typically felons who have received a sentence of

incarceration of 1 year or more. (Sentence length may vary by state because a few states have one
integrated prison system in which both prison and jail inmates are confined in the same types of
facilities.)

PTX - AFF

Plan NOW
The time is NOW, Obama is already speaking about the issue of
prisons
Angela Davis, 14, leading advocate for prison abolition, a professor emerita at
University of California, Santa Cruz, and the subject of the recent documentary,
"Free Angela and All Political Prisoners," 3/6/14 Angela Davis on Prison Abolition,
the War on Drugs and Why Social Movements Shouldnt Wait on Obama,
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/6/angela_davis_on_prison_abolition_the

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, yes. I think that this is a pivotal moment. There are openings.
And I think its very important to point out that people have been struggling over
these issues for years and for decades. This is also a problematic moment. And
those of us who identify as prison abolitionists, as opposed to prison reformers,
make the point that oftentimes reforms create situations where mass incarceration
becomes even more entrenched; and so, therefore, we have to think about what in
the long run will produce decarceratio n, fewer people behind bars, and hopefully,
eventually, in the future, the possibility of imagining a landscape without prisons,
where other means are used to address issues of harm, where social problems, such
as illiteracy and poverty, do not lead vast numbers of people along a trajectory that
leads to prison. JUAN GONZLEZ: Im wondering, in termthe first term of
President Obama was often referred to by some through the myth of post-racial
America, represented by the election of President Obama. But even he has shied
away, until recently, dealing with some of the racial inequities of our system,
especially the prison system. Im wondering if you can see a movement or
transformation in the president himself in how he deals with some of these issues?
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, this is his second term. He really has nothing to lose. And it
really is about time that he began to address what is one of the most critical issues
in this country. Its pretty unfortunate that Obama has waited until now to speak
out, but its good that he is speaking out. And I think we can use this opportunity to
perhaps achieve some important victories.

Plan Popular
Bipartisan support for decarceration, Republicans have been
getting on board with the Dems
Ovetta Wiggins, 6-18, reporter for the Washington Post, 6/18/15, How

Republicans are experimenting with criminal justice reform,


http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/how-republicans-areexperimenting-with-criminal-justice-reform/2015/06/18/a26e04fa-12ab-11e5-9518f9e0a8959f32_story.html
Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) rattled off numbers for the mostly white, mostly older crowd of Maryland Republicans,
explaining how blacks are arrested for marijuana offenses in Baltimore at a higher rate than whites. If you do
surveys, the statistics are pretty close between black and white marijuana use, the Republican presidential hopeful
said at a state party fundraiser last week. Im not saying its racism. Many of the officials [in Baltimore] are black.
So its not racism. But something is wrong with the war on drugs when we decide to lock people up for five, 10, 15
years for making mistakes. The crowd broke into applause.

As the crime rate falls and the number


of high-profile cases in which police officers are accused of racial bias escalates,
Republicans increasingly are joining what had long been a Democratic conversation:
how to reduce the size of the prison population and help ex-offenders turn their
lives around. In Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan this year became the latest Republican state leader to
back bills intended to reduce recidivism and help ex-offenders find jobs. And while
Hogan also vetoed a bill that would have expanded felon voting rights, advocates
say he and other Republicans have shown a willingness to rethink long-held theories
about how to reduce crime. Theres a change in climate in criminal justice reform,
said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a national advocacy group that has worked to change

The shift by Republicans is largely motivated by


costs, Democrats say. Fiscally conservative Republicans see prison expenses as a
drain on strained budgets and are starting to work with Democrats to find less
costly approaches. The declining crime rate, Mauer said, has made the debate less emotional and less
the way Americans view crime and punishment.

political for lawmakers.

The stars are aligned -- the time for reducing incarceration


rates is NOW -- bipartisan support for prison reform
Russel Berman, 7-10, a senior associate editor at The Atlantic, where he

covers political news. He was previously a congressional reporter forThe Hill and a
Washington correspondent for The New York Sun, 7/10/15, Is This Obama's Moment
for Criminal-Justice Reform?,
http://www.govexec.com/management/2015/07/obamas-moment-criminal-justicereform/117481/
no shortage of proposals for reform in recent years, Congress has done
virtually nothing. That may, finally, be about to change, as an emboldened
President Obama eyes what might be the last major addition to his domestic legacy
in the White House. Speaking at a press conference last week, the president was asked how he might
Yet despite

follow the remarkable string of victories he earned in late June, which included a congressional win on trade, a pair
of legacy-setting Supreme Court decisions, and a widely-praised eulogy in Charleston. He ticked off several
unchecked boxes on his economic agenda, including a major infrastructure bill and enactment of his proposals to

the big-ticket item Obama mentioned that


actually holds the most promise in the Republican Congress is a long-awaited
boost job training and access to community college. But

overhaul of the nations criminal-justice system. Weve seen some really


interesting leadership from some unlikely Republican legislators very sincerely
concerned about making progress there, the president observed. Hes right. The
bipartisan coalition pushing to reduce incarceration rates in the worlds most
crowded prison system has been building for years, bringing together ardent foes
like the Koch Brothers and the ACLU, and Rand Paul and Cory Booker, among others .
Various proposals to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug crimes, and to keep young,
nonviolent offenders from receiving long, crippling prison sentences have circulated for a while without going
anywhere. Yet that movement is cresting now, providing what lawmakers and advocates say is a genuine

I am very optimistic that we will get


something done. If you had told me a couple years ago, I would not have believed
it, said Representative Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat who is not known as
a congressional Pollyanna. As usual, however, Cummingss rosy view comes with a
key caveat repeated by other advocates I interviewed: the looming presidential
election. I think the stars have aligned, Cummings said. I do believe, however,
that if we dont get it done now, I dont know that the stars will align like this again.
Obama talked up the prospect of criminal-justice reform just a few days after
lawmakers in the House unveiled the most ambitious and comprehensive proposal
to modernize the system to date. Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that Obama was
opportunity to enact legislation before the end of the year.

soon likely to commute the sentences of dozens of nonviolent drug offendersan act of presidential clemency
unprecedented in scope that would seek to galvanize the push for reform in Congress.

Reform Popular
Federal prison reform popular, Horowitzs statement is enough
to sway opposition to reform
Andrew Cohen, 14, commentary editor of the Marshall Project, the legal analyst
for 60 Minutes and CBS Radio News, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, and
a contributing editor at The Atlantic, 11/17/14, Obamas Prison Crisis,
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/11/17/a-crisis-at-the-bureau-of-prisonspersists-says-doj-watchdog

Michael Horowitz, the Justice Departments Inspector General, is nothing if not


consistent. Last December, in his annual State-of-the-Department message, he
warned of growing federal prison crisis. And now he is back, 50 weeks later in his
same year-ender message, warning of a persistent crisis at the Bureau of Prisons
consisting of two main parts. From his memorandum, released Monday morning:
First, despite a slight decrease in the total number of federal inmates in fiscal year
(FY) 2014, the Department projects that the costs of the federal prison system will
continue to increase in the years ahead, consuming a large share of the
Departments budget. Second, federal prisons remain significantly overcrowded
and therefore face a number of important safety and security issues. These two
sentences, I suspect, will drive a great deal of the coming political debate over
criminal justice reform at the federal level. First, they represent a continuing failure
on the part of the Justice Department (and Obama Administration) to reign in the
Bureau of Prisons, a vast bureaucracy whose officials have been repeatedly warned
by Congress (and the federal courts, for that matter) that they need to change the
way they do business. Eric Holder has been an outspoken critic of the federal prison
policies at issue here and yet they, to use Horowitzs word, persist. Thats on
Holder and also on BOP Director Charles Samuels. Second, Horowitzs warning
ought to give cover to any politician (like Sen. Rand Paul, the Republican from
Kentucky) who already is inclined to endorse sentencing reform and give pause to
any politician (like Sen. Charles Grassley, the Republican from Iowa) who is not.
There is very little room to spin the figures the Justice Department is tossing out
here and very little reason to accuse Horowitz of doing so. It is not a mystery, or a
Washington parlor game, that the Justice Department budget is zero sum; that
funds used to house a growing number of inmates are funds that cannot be used on
other law enforcement priorities. So lets take the first Horowitz sentence first. The
Bureau of Prisons budget now ($6.9 billion) is nearly twice what it was ($3.8 billion)
in 2000, Horowitz tells us, an increase at almost twice the rate of growth of the rest
of the Department. Worse, he writes, even though federal prison officials have
been warned that their part of the budget is draining funding away from other
Justice Department programs (like those that support victims groups) they asked for
more money this past budget cycle. (Here is a handy online guide to inmates
statistics in the federal system. As of last Thursday, the last updated figures, there
are 213,461 federal inmates, or roughly 10 percent of the nations total number of
prisoners, which most observers place at 2.2 million. Here is an interactive guide to
incarceration at the state level. Many states have many of the same problems
costs, overcrowding, poor health care for inmates we see in the federal system).

Legislation Key
Prisons are becoming increasingly expensive due to the
growing population, and programs to decrease the expense
are not effective- continued legislative reforms key
Andrew Cohen, 14, commentary editor of the Marshall Project, the legal analyst
for 60 Minutes and CBS Radio News, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, and
a contributing editor at The Atlantic, 11/17/14, Obamas Prison Crisis,
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/11/17/a-crisis-at-the-bureau-of-prisonspersists-says-doj-watchdog
Horowitz didnt mince words, either, about what is costing so much. The federal
prison population is aging at a fast pace. From FY 2009 to FY 2013, the population
of sentenced inmates age 50 and over in BOP-managed facilities increased 25
percent, while the population of sentenced inmates under the age of 30 decreased
by 16 percent, he notes. As a result, the cost for providing healthcare services to
inmates increased 55 percent from FY 2006 to FY 2013. And here is his kicker:
The BOP spent over $1 billion on inmate healthcare services in FY 2013, which
nearly equaled the entire budget of the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) or the Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). And if it is not elderly prisoners
its those who are sick. New prescription drug treatments, particularly for chronic
hepatitis C (HCV), could exponentially increase costs in the coming years , Horowitz
warns. The BOP currently spends $6,600 per patient for a standard HCV treatment
regimen. However, the treatment regimen newly approved by the Food and Drug
Administration could cost an additional $20,000 to $40,000 per patient meaning
that the BOP could face additional costs for these patients of approximately $220
million to $440 million. What to do about all this? Horowitz says the Bureau of
Prisons has to do more to release ill or elderly prisoners through the use of its
Compassionate Release Program, which the Office of Inspector General determined
in April 2013 was poorly managed and implemented inconsistently. Horowitz also
says the Bureau of Prisons now must do more to release inmates back to their
native countries through the International Prisoner Transfer Program, which the
Inspector General determined in December 2011 was not being efficiently
administered by federal prison officials. Combine a renewed commitment to these
existing programs with legislative and administrative sentencing reforms , Horowitz
asserts, and the costs of federal prisons will begin to ease . What he is saying, year
after year it seems, is that we need to make sure that fewer Americans are being
sent to federal prison while sending home more quickly those who no longer need
to be there. This is what Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat, meant when he
told me Monday afternoon that the policies that created these costs have been
disproven and are simply unjust.

Crime DA AFF

Recidivism high now


Prisoners are locked into a cycle of marginality that causes
them to almost always be arrested after their release from
prison.
Michelle Alexander 10, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University,
2010, The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.,
http://www.kropfpolisci.com/racial.justice.alexander.pdf
No wonder, then, that most people labeled felons find their way back into prison.
According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics study , about 30 percent of released
prisoners in its sample were rearrested within six months of release .90 Within three
years, nearly 68 percent were rearrested at least once for a new offense.91 Only a small
minority are rearrested for violent crimes; the vast majority are rearrested for
property offenses, drug offenses, and offenses against the public order .92 For those
released on probation or parole, the risks are especially high. They are subject to
regular surveillance and monitoring by the police and may be stopped and
searched (with or without their consent) for any reason or no reason at all. As a
result, they are far more likely to be arrested (again) than those whose behavior is not subject
to constant scrutiny by law enforcement. Probationers and parolees are at increased risk of
arrest because their lives are governed by additional rules that do not apply to
everyone else. Myriad restrictions on their travel and behavior (such as a prohibition on associating
with other felons), as well as various requirements of probation and parole (such as paying fines and meeting with

create opportunities for arrest. Violation of these special rules can land someone
In fact, that is what happens a good deal of the time. The
extraordinary increase in prison admissions due to parole and probation violations is
due almost entirely to the War on Drugs. With respect to parole, in 1980, only 1 percent of all prison
probation officers),

right back in prison.

admissions were parole violators. Twenty years later, more than one third (35 percent) of prison admissions resulted
from parole violations.93 To put the matter more starkly: About as many people were returned to prison for parole
violations in 2000 as were admitted to prison in 1980 for all reasons.94 Of all parole violators returned to prison in
2000, only one-third were returned for a new conviction; two-thirds were returned for a technical violation such as

In this
system of control, failing to cope well with one's exile status is treated like a crime . If
missing appointments with a parole officer, failing to maintain employment, or failing a drug test.95

you fail, after being released from prison with a criminal recordyour personal badge of inferiorityto remain drug
free, or if you fail to get a job against all the odds, or if you get depressed and miss an appointment with your
parole officer (or if you cannot afford the bus fare to take you there), you can be sent right back to prisonwhere

This disturbing phenomenon of people


cycling in and out of prison, trapped by their secondclass status, has been
described by Loic Wacquant as a "closed circuit of perpetual marginality ."96
Hundreds of thousands of people are released from prison every year, only to find
themselves locked out of the mainstream society and economy. Most ultimately
return to prison, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Others are released again,
only to find themselves in precisely the circumstances they occupied before, unable
to cope with the stigma of the prison label and their permanent pariah status.
society apparently thinks millions of Americans belong.

Only a massive overhaul in prison policy can end the cycle of


suffering that a life behind bars introduces.
Michelle Alexander 10, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University,
2010, The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.,
http://www.kropfpolisci.com/racial.justice.alexander.pdf
Reducing the amount of time people spend behind barsby eliminating harsh mandatory
minimumswill alleviate some of the unnecessary suffering caused by this system, but
it will not disturb the closed circuit. Those labeled felons will continue to cycle
in and out of prison, subject to perpetual surveillance by the police, and
unable to integrate into the mainstream society and economy . Unless the
number of people who are labeled felons is dramatically reduced ,- and unless the
laws and policies that keep ex-offenders marginalized from the mainstream society
and economy are eliminated, the system will continue to create and maintain an
enormous undercaste.

Empirics prove---the PIC only increases rates of recidivism--releasing prisoners early has been found to decrease the
reoccurrence of crime.
Mark Morris, 76, editor of Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, part
of the Prison Research Education Action Project, 1976, Instead of Prisons: A
Handbook for Abolitionsists,
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/chapter2.shtml
One commonly cited occurrence which illustrates the dubious nature of the
protection theory followed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1963 known as Gideon v.
Wainwright, which affirmed the right of indigent felony defendants to counsel. Those
convicted without counsel and sent to prison were ordered released. As a result, the State
of Florida released 1,252 indigent felons before their sentences were completed .
There was fear that such a mass exodus from prison might result in an increase in
crime. However, after 28 months, the Florida Department of Corrections found that
the recidivism rate for these ex-prisoners was only 13.6 percent, compared to 25
percent for those released after completing their full sentence s. An American Bar
Association committee commenting on the case observed: Baldly stated, . . . if we, today, turned loose
all of the inmates of our prisons without regard to the length of their sentences, and
with some exceptions, without regard to their previous offenses, we might reduce the
recidivism rate over what it would be if we kept each prisoner incarcerated until his
sentence expired. [66] For more than a century, statisticians have demonstrated
that regardless of imprisonment, the crime rate remains constant . Removing some
few people from society simply means an unapprehended majority continue in
criminal activity. If that one to three percent who end up in prison were released, they would not significantly
increase the lawbreaking population.

Ex-Prisoners are cast out of society---they have significantly


less chances of getting a job, getting married, or receive
governmental benefits, which results increased rates of
recidivism.
Becky Pettit and Bruce Western 04, Pettit Professor of Sociology at
University of Washington, Western Professor of Sociology at Princeton University,

2004, Mass I Imprisonment a and t the L Life C Course: Race a and C Class I
Inequality i in U U.S. I Incarceration, AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, 2 2004,
VOL. 6 69 (April: 151169)
Edited for gendered language.
Imprisonment significantly alters the life course. In most cases, men [and women]
entering prison will already be off-time . Time in juvenile incarceration and jail and
weak connections to work and family divert many prison inmates from the usual
path followed by young adults. Spells of imprisonmentthirty to forty months on average
further delay entry into the conventional adult roles of worker, spouse and parent .
More commonly military service, not imprisonment, is identified as the key institutional experience that redirects
life trajectories (Hogan 1981; Elder 1986; Xie 1992). Elder (1987:543) describes military service as a legitimate
timeout that offered disadvantaged servicemen in World War Two an escape from family hardship. Similarly,
imprisonment can provide a chance to re-evaluate lifes direction (Sampson and Laub 1993, 223; Edin, Nelson, and

the effects of imprisonment are clearly negative. Exprisoners earn lower wages and experience more unemployment than similar men
who have not been incarcerated (Western, Kling and Weiman 2001 review the literature). They are
also less likely to get married or cohabit with the mothers of their children (Hagan and
Dinovitzer 1999; Western and McLanahan 2000). By eroding employment and marriage
opportunities, incarceration may also provide a pathway back into crime (Sampson and
Laub 1993; Warr 1998). The volatility of adolescence may thus last well into midlife among
men serving prison time. Finally, imprisonment is an illegitimate timeout that confers an enduring stigma.
Employers of low-skill workers are extremely reluctant to hire men [people]with
criminal records (Holzer 1996; Pager 2003). The stigma of a prison record also creates legal
barriers to skilled and licensed occupations, rights to welfare benefits, and voting
rights (Office of the Pardon Attorney 1996; Hirsch et al. 2002; Uggen and Manza 2002). In short, going to
prison is a turning point in which young crime-involved men [ex-prisoners] acquire a
new status involving diminished life chances and an attenuated form of citizenship.
Paranal 2001). Typically, though,

The life course significance of imprisonment motivates our analysis of the evolving probability of prison
incarceration over the life cycle.

Felony Charges Turn


Felony charges are more likely to keep people in the system
and increase crime
Michelle Alexander 10, associate professor of law at Stanford Law School, civil

rights lawyer, advocate and legal scholar, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness, 2010, p. 89-90
Once convicted of felony drug charges, ones chances of being released from the
system in short order are slim, at best. The elimination of judicial discretion through mandatory
sentencing laws has forced judges to impose sentences for drug crimes that are often longer than those violent
criminals receive. When judges have discretion, they may consider a defendants background and impose a lighter
penalty if the defendants personal circumstances extreme poverty or experience of abuse, for examplewarrant
it. This flexibilitywhich is important in all criminal casesis especially important in drug cases, as studies have
indicated that many drug defendants are using or selling to support an addiction. 75

Referring a defendant
to treatment, rather than sending him or her to prison, may well be the most
prudent choicesaving government resources and potentially saving the defendant
from a lifetime of addiction. Likewise, imposing a short prison sentence (or none at all) may increase the
chances that the defendant will experience successful re-entry. A lengthy prison term may increase
the odds that reentry will be extremely difficult, leading to relapse, and reimprisonment. Mandatory drug sentencing laws strip judges of their traditional role
of considering all relevant circumstances in an effort to do justice in the individual
case.

Crime Link Turns


Empirics prove---the PIC only increases rates of recidivism--releasing prisoners early has been found to decrease the
reoccurrence of crime.
Mark Morris, 76, editor of Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, part
of the Prison Research Education Action Project, 1976, Instead of Prisons: A
Handbook for Abolitionsists,
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/chapter2.shtml
One commonly cited occurrence which illustrates the dubious nature of the
protection theory followed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1963 known as Gideon v.
Wainwright, which affirmed the right of indigent felony defendants to counsel. Those
convicted without counsel and sent to prison were ordered released. As a result, the
State of Florida released 1,252 indigent felons before their sentences were
completed. There was fear that such a mass exodus from prison might result in an
increase in crime. However, after 28 months, the Florida Department of Corrections
found that the recidivism rate for these ex-prisoners was only 13.6 percent,
compared to 25 percent for those released after completing their full sentence s. An
American Bar Association committee commenting on the case observed: Baldly
stated, . . . if we, today, turned loose all of the inmates of our prisons without regard
to the length of their sentences, and with some exceptions, without regard to their
previous offenses, we might reduce the recidivism rate over what it would be if we
kept each prisoner incarcerated until his sentence expired. [66] For more than a
century, statisticians have demonstrated that regardless of imprisonment, the crime
rate remains constant. Removing some few people from society simply means an
unapprehended majority continue in criminal activity. If that one to three percent
who end up in prison were released, they would not significantly increase the
lawbreaking population.

AT: Prisons prevent crime


The idea that prisons keep people safe is a total MYTH-in
reality they do little to protect society, they only function to
control certain segments of society
Mark Morris, 76, editor of Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, part
of the Prison Research Education Action Project, 1976, Instead of Prisons: A
Handbook for Abolitionsists,
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/chapter2.shtml

Myth: Prisons protect society from "criminals." Reality: Prisons fail to protect
society from "criminals," except for a very small percentage and only
temporarily. Prisons "protect" the public only from those few who get caught
and convicted, thereby serving the primary function of control over certain
segments of society. According to Norman Carlson, director of the Federal
Bureau of Prisons, "The goal of our criminal justice system is to protect law-abiding
citizens from crime, particularly crimes of violence, and to make them secure in
their lives and property." [59] Despite shifts in "correctional" emphases,

restraint or keeping the "criminal" out of circulation continues to be a key


purpose of prisons. However, it is questionable how much real protection
prisons afford, because only a small percent of all law-breakers end up in
prison and most of these few remain in prison for a relatively short period of
time. Prisons have pacified the public with the image of "safety," symbolized by
walls and cages located in remote areas. But prisons are a massive deception:
seeming to "protect," they engender hostility and rage among all who are
locked into the system, both prisoner and keeper. Society is victimized by the
exploitation of its fear of crime. Indeed, rather than protecting society from
the harmful, prisons are in themselves harmful. It is likely that persons who
are caged will become locked into a cycle of crime and fear, returning to
prison again and again. Prisons are selectively damaging to specific groups in
society; namely, Blacks and other minorities.

The prison system fails, they dont protect society and


disproportionately affect a small group of people the poor, the
minorities, and the young
Mark Morris, 76, editor of Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, part
of the Prison Research Education Action Project, 1976, Instead of Prisons: A
Handbook for Abolitionsists,
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/chapter2.shtml

The failure of prisons to protect is bound up with the reality of who actually
gets caught. According to the system managers, true protection would
require a high degree of effectiveness. [60] The system, however, is highly
ineffective. Few lawbreakers are apprehended and most studies show that
only one to three percent of all reported crime results in imprisonment. In one

study, out of 100 major crimes (felonies): 50 were reported to the police; suspects
were arrested in 12 of the cases; six persons were convicted; one or two went to
prison. [61] Those who find themselves entrapped in the criminal (in)justice

systems most often are a select group, usually stereotype "criminals"-a


threat in some way to those in power: the poor, minorities, the young. Very
few of the total lawbreaking population are ever caught, [62] and an
estimated one-half to three-fourths [63] of all crime is never reported. How
can prison-as-protection be anything but an illusion? The objection is often

raised: "Better to be protected at least from that small minority of lawbreakers who
are convicted." What, then, is the nature of this protection ? Society may have

intended prisons to be "protective" mechanisms, but like infected tonsils


they have become overloaded carriers of precisely the germs or problems
against which they were directed . A removal operation is necessary for the
protection and health of the body politic. Ron Bell, chaplain at Somerset,
New Jersey County Jail,Fortune News, June 1974 The prison, the reformatory,

and the jail have achieved only a shocking record of failure. There is
overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than
prevent it. Their very nature insures failure. -Corrections, National Advisory

Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, p. 597 People who feel
reassured by the high walls of the prison, its sentries, control towers and its
remoteness from population centers are naive. Most prisoners leave their
institutions at some point. In the United States, 95 percent are released after

an average imprisonment of 24 to 32 months.... So the protection offered by


the prison during the incarceration of the offender is surely a short term
insurance policy and a dubious one at that. [64] We can see then, that if
prison protects at all, warehousing is only temporary, for most all prisoners
are ultimately released back into society, [65] usually within two to three
years. Moreover, the deterrent effect of prisons, on individuals and on the
larger society, is highly questionable. There is no insurance of further
"protection" from criminal activity beyond release.

There are strategies for decarceration and alternative


solutions for the decarceration of prisons-prisons arent key to
preventing crime-only takes 10 years before prisons could be
closed
Mark Morris, 76, editor of Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, part
of the Prison Research Education Action Project, 1976, Instead of Prisons: A
Handbook for Abolitionsists,
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/chapter5.shtml
A second strategy for decarcerating prisons was enthusiastically cheered at the First
National Conference on Alternatives to Incarceration.[2] Ira Lowe, for 25 years a
Washington, D. C. trial lawyer and civil libertarian, whose clients have ranged from
antiwar activist Tom Hayden to John Ehrlichman of Watergate, briefly outlined a tenyear release time-plan. Basing rapidity of release on potential threat to public
safety, he prefaced his remarks by pointing out that "the judiciary and all of us must

accept the fact that there is no such thing as good and bad torture; no such thing as
a good prison. We must accept the fact that they must be emptied . Once we set
that as a goal we can begin to act." Lowe's plan calls for (1) a moratorium on all
prison sentences beginning immediately. (2) Attorneys and judges would propose
and structure alternative sanctions. (3) Victimless crimes would carry no more
sentences. (4) No prison sentences at all would be allowed until the government
proves beyond a reasonable doubt that they have tried alternatives unsuccessfully.
(5) Attorneys would be required to present alternatives to the court and (6) all
probation reports would recommend alternatives. Lowe further advocated dividing
current inmates into four classes with an equal number of task forces of law
enforcement officials, aided by citizens, assigned to administer a weeding out
process and administration of punishments. Each task force to start at once: (1)
The first group-approximately 15 to 20 percent of the prison population- perpetrators
of "victimless crimes" such as gambling, prostitution, marijuana use and
homosexuality-would be identified and released from prison immediately. Release of
this group should take less than a year. (2) The second group-between 45 and 55
percent of the prison population-persons who even prison officials would clearly
consider releasable, offenders of nonviolent crimes such as crimes against property
without weapons or violence, would be released from prison and allowed to
complete their term of sentence by performing a public service to society and,
where applicable, specific restitution to their victim(s). This task force could
accomplish its purpose within five years. (3) Lowe believes that of the remaining
30 percent, about half are borderline cases and eventually releasable. The third task
force, then, would cull out this 15 percent for in-community sanction s, "not taking
chances of releasing anyone who is a physical danger." Lowe recommends a seven
year weeding out process for this group. (4) The fourth group, the final 15 percent,
should be given full medical and psychological study. In the new environment some
knowledge may result on how to deal with such persons and hopefully how to
prevent others from following their patterns. A ten year transition period for
this last group's transfer would be required. And the prisons could be
closed.

Prisons dont cure prisoners- banning indeterminate


sentencing is a key step to decarceration and abolition of
prisons
Mark Morris, 76, editor of Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, part
of the Prison Research Education Action Project, 1976, Instead of Prisons: A
Handbook for Abolitionsists,
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/chapter5.shtml

According to one California ex-prisoners' group, [6] indeterminate sentencing comes


under widespread attack because it violates four basic principles of justice : (1)
Lack of equity. Men and women do very different amounts of time for commission of
the same crime. No psychiatrist, ex-prison guard, or any other human being can say
with reasonable accuracy when a person is "rehabilitated." (2) Lack of
predictability. The uncertainty in a prisoner's mind as to when s/he will be released
is a prime source of anxiety, frustration, bitterness and violence in prisons. (3)
Length of time served. Under the indeterminate sentence law, terms in California

have lengthened. They are now among the longest served anywhere in the world.
(4) Procedural due process. When decisions are being made affecting a person's
liberty, it is essential that the relevant evidence and arguments be fairly tested for
accuracy. Without procedures insuring due process, it is unlikely the truth will be
found. Richard McGee, for 23 years director of the California Department of
Corrections and one of the strongest advocates of indeterminate sentencing and the
medical model, did a complete about face when he finally realized its basic
assumptions had been proven false. In an interview with an ex-prisoners' group, he
advocated abolishing indeterminate sentences along with parole boards: Those are
the most radical things I've said in some time .... I was an early advocate of the
indeterminate sentence ... but I have reversed myself completely .... We assumed
we knew how to treat criminality but we found out we don't know ... we let people
believe that we know when a prisoner should be let go . The mistake made in
pushing for indeterminate sentencing is that we used a false analogy , a medical
analogy. The assumption was that a prison is like a hospital, where the inmate is
cured and released when the doctors, or the prison officials, say so. But prison
officials don't cure prisoners and it is the parole board, not the officials,
who decide when a prisoner is released ... the indeterminate sentence has
proven out generally, to mean an increased sentence , roughly 24 to 40 months
more time, for the prisoners ... with abolition of the indeterminate sentence and of
the parole board, we should give it all back to the courts who are equipped by
training to deal with it. -The Outlaw, July 1974 Voices against indeterminacy
Many other prisoner-related groups and organizations advocate abolishing
indeterminate sentences and/or the present parole system. Among them:
Whatever sanction or short sentence is imposed is to be fixed by law. There is to
be no discretion in setting sentences, no indeterminate sentences, and
unsupervised street release is to replace parole." -Struggle for Justice, p. 144 The
Western Association of Prisons in America completed a four-day meeting on
September 16 with a call for the elimination of parole and use of the indeterminate
sentence. Any release from an institution should be "a complete discharge, rather
than a conditional release," stated the association. Claiming the indeterminate
sentence has left administrators with too much discretion to authorize an
individual's release, the association alleged that it has "encouraged excessive and
unequal confinement in the name of treatment." To counteract the indeterminate
sentence, the organization called for a reduction in the maximum terms associated
with some crimes and advised that standards be set and adhered to. -Free World
Times, October 1973 Indeterminate sentences must be ended. Maintaining
incarceration because it is predicted that the prisoner presents some future danger
must also come to an end. -Statement of Ex-Prisoners Advisory Group, Toward a
New Corrections Policy: Two Declarations of Principles The indeterminate sentence
has not had the salutary effects predicted. Instead it has resulted in the exercise of
a wide discretion without the guidance of standards and in longer periods of time
served in prison .... There should, therefore, be strict limitations on the judicial and
quasi-judicial exercise of discretion in the fixing of terms of imprisonment; the
definite sentence would automatically eliminate administrative parole board
procedures which now consist largely of an untrammeled discretion which reduce
prisoners to little more than supplicants. The ultimate goal should be no
indeterminacy whatsoever in sentences. -A Program for Prison Reform, p. 12 The
interim or transitional replacements for the old systems of indeterminate sentences

and parole are crucial. Even minor legislative revisions to criminal codes drastically
affect the lives of millions of individuals who are caught in the criminal (in)justice
systems. Thus, proposed interim penal codes must be carefully scrutinized and
approved by those whose lives are directly affected. In 1975 there appeared to be
a healthy movement developing toward abolishing indeterminate sentences and
parole. Examining some of the issues raised by results in Maine and California helps
us to define some of the paradoxes and problems inherent in interim reforms.

Prison Spending T/O


Prison spending trades off with other crime fighting efforts
such as counterterror and the FBI- turns the disad
Mike, Adams, 15, Mike Adams writes for stoners and smut enthusiasts in HIGH
TIMES, Playboys The Smoking Jacket and Hustler Magazine, 7/1/15,
Groundbreaking Legislation Would Abolish Federal Sentences for Drug Crimes,
http://www.hightimes.com/read/groundbreaking-legislation-would-abolish-federalsentences-drug-crimes

A group of national lawmakers are working to eliminate the use of the federal prison
system for minor drug offenders, submitting a proposal earlier this week aimed at
designating these facilities for serious offenders only. On Thursday, Representatives
Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin and Bobby Scott of Virginia introduced a bill that
some are calling one of the most groundbreaking pieces of sentencing reform to
ever be considered in the United States. The bill, which is called the Safe,
Accountable, Fair, and Effective (SAFE) Justice Act of 2015, would begin to chip
away at the federal prison crisis across the nationa problem that has manifested
over a 500-percent upsurge in incarceration rates over the past few decades. The
goal of the latest measure is to do away with federal sentences for minor drug
possession by allowing those cases to be dealt with on a state-by-state basi s. It also
seeks to put restrictions on mandatory minimums, setting aside these penalties for
major drug traffickers, while only applying life sentences for the most abominable
cases. The bill would also expand on compassionate release programs for low-risk
elderly and terminally ill offenders. The SAFE Act simply begs the reduction of
over-federalization and over-criminalization by providing more flexibility between
state and federal law when it comes to prosecuting drug-related crim e. The proposal
encompasses numerous factors, ranging from the creation of a citizen complaint
process to establishing probationary sentences, all in an effort to diminish prison
overcrowding and to save citizens billions of dollars. Taxpayers will pour $6.9
billion into the Bureau of Prisons this year, with substantial increases each year into
the foreseeable future unless Congress fixes the system, former U.S.
Representative Newt Gingrich and political activist Pat Nolan wrote in The
Washington Times. The inspector general of the Department of Justice has
said that this level of spending is 'unsustainable.' Federal prisons are
squeezing out spending for counterterrorism agencies, victim services,
the FBI, and other important crime-fighting initiatives. " Perhaps most
importantly, this bill would ensure that citizens who buy drugs on the black market
would no longer be in violation of federal law. Offenders would simply be held
accountable under the statutes of their respective state. This combined with the
reduction of mandatory minimum sentences, in theory, could be sufficient enough
to drastically reduce the number of people stuck in U.S. penitentiaries for drug
crimes. Today, we know what works in the correctional field and what doesnt, and
the debate is no longer about whether we need reform, Gingrich and Nolan
continued. There is bipartisan consensus that reforms are imperative. Now is the
time for conservatives to lead the charge." This legislation has bipartisan backing,
as well as the support of all of the usual suspects, including Families Against
Mandatory Minimums and the American Civil Liberties Union.

AT: Serial Killers


The dangerous few that society highlights devise only a
miniscule portion of those incarcerated.
Allegra M. McLeod 15, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center,

2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
If there are indeed some small subset of people properly denominated the
dangerous few, they are only those who are intent on perpetrating acts of vicious
harm against others such that they are an imminent threat to all those around them
regardless of their circumstances. An abolitionist framework is not necessarily committed to
denying the existence of these dangerous few persons, though the dangerous few
are vastly outnumbered by many millions of nondangerous individuals
living under criminal supervision and any such dangerousness on the part of those incarcerated
currently is exacerbated by features of prison society that a wider embrace of an abolitionist ethic and framework

Because any such dangerous few persons constitute at most only a


small minority of the many millions of people under criminal supervision in the
United Statesthe one of every thirty-five American adults under criminal
supervision of some form 65the question of the danger these few may pose can
be deferred for some time as decarceration could by political necessity only proceed
gradually. And so the question of the dangerous few ought not to eclipse or
overwhelm the urgency of a thorough consideration of abolitionist analyses and
reformist projects of displacement of criminal regulation by other regulatory
approaches. In any event, an abolitionist ethic recognizes that even if a person is so
awful in her violence that the threat she poses must be forcibly contained , this
course of action ought to be undertaken with moral conflict,
circumspection, and even shame, as a choice of the lesser of two evils,
rather than as an achievement of justice. To respond to victims of violence
justly would be to make them whole and to address forms of collective vulnerability so
those and other persons are less likely to be harmed again. Even when confronting the
dangerous few, on an abolitionist account, justice is not meaningfully achieved by caging,
degrading, or even more humanely confining, the person who assaulted the
vulnerable among us.
would improve.

Prisons are used to perpetuate the idea of dangerous people


instead of looking into the problems of people-this leads to the
destruction of THOUSANDS of lives
Mark Morris, 76, editor of Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, part
of the Prison Research Education Action Project, 1976, Instead of Prisons: A
Handbook for Abolitionsists,
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/chapter7.shtml
The selective and arbitrary process of labeling dangerousness is inherently political. Such labels are the basis of
"preventative detention" and other forms of "treatment" which result in the violent (non)solution of caging. It is
crucial that abolitionists examine the political implications and reliability of "dangerous" labels and predictions:

We might expect the origins of the word "danger" to be related to... its current use

in denoting physical objects and events that might damage property or injure
people. Surprisingly ... the term seems to have shaped out of linguistic roots that
signified relative position in a social structure , a relationship between roles on a
power dimension. The root is found in Latin in a derivative of dominium, meaning
lordship or sovereignty .... The implication ... leads us ... into the conception of
danger as a symbol denoting relative power in social organization .... Those persons
or groups that threaten the existing power structure are dangerous. In any historical
period, to identify an individual whose status is that of member of the "dangerous classes," (i.e., the classes that
threaten the dominium or power structure) the label "criminal "has been handy. -Theodore R. Sarbin, The Myth of

People do not come into the world labeled "chattel " and "not
chattel," "schizophrenic" and "not schizophrenic," " dangerous" and "not dangerous."
We-slave traders and plantation owners, psychiatrists and judges- so label them.
-Thomas Szasz, "On Involuntary Psychiatry," New York Times, August 4, 1975 Prisons have been used to
limit the movement of persons labeled as "dangerous," "psychotic" or "disturbed," a
labeling process which began in the community, in the bad schools and continued
thru each stage of the criminal justice system. The result has been the destruction
of thousands of lives. We have been so concerned with containment, with limiting
movement, that we haven't looked for the real troubles in people, in communities,
in our social and economic system. -John Boone, Former Director of Corrections, State of
the Criminal Type, pp. 16-17

Massachusetts, Fortune News, May 1975 It is no wonder that today preventive detention proposals are so intensely
opposed by Black organizations. They recognize correctly that their movement for freedom and self-determination
is seen as "dangerous" by established white America. We approach the concept of "dangerousness" with
considerable skepticism, for it has little meaning apart from its social and political concept. -Struggle for Justice, p.
78 Men in prison are dangerous because they are threatened with sophisticated forms of extinction in the hands of
simple minded wage earners who claim they are "only doing their duty" or "just following orders" as five or six of
them are wrestling you to the floor to stick a needle in your arm or ass. -Howard A. Lund, prisoner, NEPA News,
March 1974 The defenders of these treatment models refuse to acknowledge that society, thru its injustices which
are magnified inside prison walls, remains the principle impetus to violent behavior. Almost inevitably, those
prisoners who refuse to accept the authoritarian, dehumanizing conditions of prison and who organize disruptive
political behavior, exhibit repeated, angry "acting out" behavior, and flood the courts with litigation are the
prisoners deemed candidates for DSU (Departmental Segregation Unit) or other "special offender" programs.
-Donna Parker, NEPA News, June 1974

Terrorism DA

AT: Terrorism DA
The discourse of terrorism is inexorably linked with our
critique of the racist construct of the criminal- the DA links to
our critique.
Angela Davis 11, professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons,
and Torture (Open Media Series), ebook no pages
In your essay Race and Criminalization you write: The figure of the criminalthe racialized
figure of the criminalhas come to represent the most menacing enemy of
American Society. Virtually anything is acceptabletorture, brutality, vast
expenditures of public fundsas long as it is done in the name of public safety. Do
you think the terrorist is our new racialized criminal? I remember that when I wrote that
essay I was thinking about the criminal as surrogate for communist in the era of law and order . I thought
about this new discursive figure of the criminal, which absorbed much of the
discourse of the communist enemy. In the aftermath of 9/11, the figure of the
terrorist mobilizes collective fear in ways that recapitulate and consolidate
previous ideologies of the national enemy. Yes, the terrorist is the contemporary
enemy. The rhetoric, the attendant anxieties, and the diversionary
strategies produced by the deployment of the figure of the terrorist are very
similar to, and rely in very concrete ways on, the production of the criminal
as pervasive threat.

Reform CP - AFF

Perm Do Both
The idea of abolition does not exclude reform but instead
views it as a stepping stone to complete abolition.
Angela Y. Davis 05, Professor in the History of Consciousness program at the

University of California, 2005, The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation,


http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/davisinterview.html
The seemingly unbreakable link between prison reform and prison development -referred to by Foucault in his analysis of prison history -- has created a situation in which progress
in prison reform has tended to render the prison more impermeable to change
and has resulted in bigger, and what are considered "better," prisons. The most difficult question for
advocates of prison abolition is how to establish a balance between reforms that are
clearly necessary to safeguard the lives of prisoners and those strategies designed to promote the
eventual abolition of prisons as the dominant mode of punishment. In other words, I do
not think that there is a strict dividing line between reform and abolition. For example, it
would be utterly absurd for a radical prison activist to refuse to support the demand
for better health care inside Valley State, California's largest women's prison, under
the pretext that such reforms would make the prison a more viable institution.
Demands for improved health care, including protection from sexual abuse and challenges to the
myriad ways in which prisons violate prisoners' human rights, can be integrated into an
abolitionist context that elaborates specific decarceration strategies and helps to
develop a popular discourse on the need to shift resources from punishment to
education, housing, health care, and other public resources and services.

Reform Fails
Only complete abolition of federal prisons solves--imprisonment is inextricably linked to violence and
depersonalization.
Allegra M. McLeod 15, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center,
2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
It is insufficient to simply seek to reform the most egregious instances of violence
and abuse that occur in prison while retaining a commitment to prison backed
criminal law enforcement as a primary social regulatory framework. Of course, less violence in these
places would undoubtedly render prisons more habitable, but the degradation associated
with incarceration in the United States is at the heart of the structure of
imprisonment elucidated decades ago by Sykes: Imprisonment in its basic structure entails
caging or imposed physical constriction, minute control of prisoners bodies
and most intimate experiences , profound depersonalization, and
institutional dynamics that tend strongly toward violence . These
dehumanizing aspects of incarceration are unlikely to be meaningfully eliminated in
the U.S., following decades of failed efforts to that end, while retaining a
commitment to the practice of imprisonment. This is especially so in the United States for reasons
related to the specific historical and racially subordinating legacies of American incarceration and punitive policing.

Two hundred and forty years of slavery and ninety years of legalized segregation,
enforced in large measure through criminal law administration, render U.S. carceral
and punitive policing practices less amenable to the reforms undertaken , for example, in
Scandinavian countries, which have more substantially humanized their prisons.127

Reformism doesnt fix a flawed system because the prison


system cant be fixed-abolition is key
Lex Horan, 10, skilled in facilitating conversations and trainings around

numerous topics, including the prison system, LGBT issues (particularly trans
politics), class privilege, and organizational development/strategic planning, April
2010, Against a Better Prison: Gender Responsiveness and the Changing Terrain of
Abolition, http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1415&context=etd_hon_theses
Reformist activism builds on a few basic premises that determine the types of
changes that are included on reformist agendas. Of course, there is no single
reformist perspective on the prison system that can be assessed as a coherent
whole: reformist organizations and campaigns vary widely in the extent of their
critiques of the prison system and in the changes they call for. However, for the
sake of this project, I am defining reformist work according to the interpretations
of the prison system that inform it. There are a few key premises that I will focus on
in my discussion of gender responsiveness, and which I propose are inherent in all
reformist perspectives: namely, that the harms of imprisonment are indicators of

flaws (or brokenness) in the prison system, and that prisons can be improved in
order to function more effectively or more justly. 83 A reformist perspective
conceptualizes prisons as perfectible and often pursues changes that aim to make
prisons better. This language is ubiquitous in theories of gender responsiveness.
In the preface to the report Gender-Responsive Strategies, authors Bloom, Owen,
and Covington summarize their findings: Policies, programs, and procedures that
reflect these empirical, genderbased differences can accomplish the following:
Make the management of women offenders more effective . Enable correctional
facilities to be more suitably staffed and funded. Decrease staff turnover and
sexual misconduct. Improve program and service delivery. Decrease the
likelihood of litigation against the criminal justice system. Increase the genderappropriateness of services and programs. (Bloom, Owen, and Covington 2003, vi,
emphasis added) The preface concludes, Managing women offenders more
effectively in correctional settings and providing more effective programs and
services will benefit the women, increase community safety, and help build a more
effective criminal justice system (viii, emphasis added). This is quintessential
reformist language. Its repeated deployment of words like effective, improve,
and manage speaks to its underlying conception of the prison system as an
imperfect but redeemable set of institutions. Moreover, there is a clear investment
in maintaining the institutional stability of both individual prisons and the prison
system more broadly. While the report gestures briefly to the reality of sexual abuse
(misconduct), it seems that the authors are more concerned with minimizing staff
turnover, securing suitable funding for prisons, and decreasing litigation than they
are with addressing deplorable conditions facing prisoners. This position belies the
investment that gender responsiveness, and many other reformist programs, has in
bolstering the prison system against external threats. The effort to improve
prisons stems from a slippage whereby the harms associated with imprisonment are
attributed to the failures or ineffectiveness of the 84 prison system . Staff abuse,
insufficient health care, corruption, lack of oversight, and high recidivism
rates are all understood to be symptoms of a system that is working
incorrectly . Gender responsiveness theories are situated firmly within these
assumptions, asserting that the criminal legal system is failing women. GenderResponsive Strategies is filled with such examples. Because most prison
classification schemas and risk assessments were originally designed for men,
women are often overclassifiedthat is, placed in higher security facilities than
their actual level of violence or escape potential should call for (Bloom, Owen, and
Covington 2003, 19). Prison staff are inadequately trained to address female
offender issues (16). Womens prisons have fewer programming opportunities than
mens prisons. Staff sexual misconduct is a serious issue in womens prisons (25).
Since most women in prison are mothers, imprisonment poses a strain on family
relationships and increases the pressure during reentry when women are released
from prison.

California proves that while prisons fail the prison-industrial


complex does what it is designed to do, reforms only worsen
the problem-the system MUST be eliminated
Lex Horan, 10, skilled in facilitating conversations and trainings around
numerous topics, including the prison system, LGBT issues (particularly trans

politics), class privilege, and organizational development/strategic planning, April


2010, Against a Better Prison: Gender Responsiveness and the Changing Terrain of
Abolition, http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1415&context=etd_hon_theses
The discourse of a failing prison system is nowhere more present than in
California in the midst of its prison crisis. Progressives and prison reformers 85
consistently use the states 70% recidivism rate and thirty-three prisons filled to
bursting to argue that California prisons must be doing something wrong. However,
to describe the prison system as failing (or to articulate a parallel call for more
effective or evidence-based prison policy) is to assume a set of foundational
intentions of the prison system that are far from given. For recidivism and
skyrocketing rates of imprisonment to be read as indicators of failure, one must
assume that the primary goal of the prison system is to diminish and prevent future
imprisonment (and perhaps even by extension to eliminate itself altogether).
Critiques of the notion of the failing prison system have been articulated by many
different actors. Critical Resistance argues that The PIC [prison industrial complex]
isnt a broken system. It works extremely well to do what is designed to do (kill
and disappear those people who pose the biggest challenges to those with the most
power: poor people, people of color, queer and gender queer people, young people,
etc.). This system doesnt need fixing. It needs to be eliminated (Critical
Resistance, PIC Talking Points). While nearly all reformist examinations of the
prison system point to the disproportionate incarceration of Black people, other
people of color, and poor people, this phenomenon is often framed as an
unintended consequence of the U.S.s massive war on drugs, or at best as an
inevitable outcome of a racialized distribution of poverty. However, in The
Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation, Angela Davis and Dylan Rodrguez
situate the prison industrial complexs targeting of poor Black people at the very
center of that systems working, not as an aberration or an unfortunate
demographic error but as integral to the U.S. social and racial order . Davis takes her
own experiences as a political prisoner as a point of departure: If prison was the
state- 86 sanctioned destination for activists such as myself, it was also used as a
surrogate solution to social problems associated with poverty and racism (Davis
and Rodrguez 200, 212). Rodrguez, speaking to Davis, goes even further, asserting
that[t]he logic of the prison-industrial complex is closer to what you, George
Jackson, and others were forecasting back then as mass containment, the effective
elimination of large numbers of (poor, black) people from the realm of civil society
(213). This vantage point, produced by radical thinkers situated in the U.S. state
constituted by the post-1970 prison boom, makes a clear argument about the
foundations of the U.S. prison industrial complex.

Reforms only fuel the prison system and perpetuates


discrimination against POC and women, abolition is key
Nathan Goodman, 14, the Lysander Spooner Research Scholar in Abolitionist
Studies at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS). In addition to writing at C4SS,
he blogs at Dissenting Leftist, 11/29/14, Prisons: The Case for Abolition,
http://s4ss.org/from-nl-1-3-prisons-the-case-for-abolition-nathan-goodman/

Attempts to reform the prison system are likely to fuel the prison system
because of the perverse incentives that structure our political system. Prison
guards, private prison companies like the Corrections Corporation of America,
contractors that provide services in prisons, and firms that profit off prison labor are
all concentrated interest groups that benefit from incarceration. Meanwhile, the
costs of operating prisons are widely dispersed across a population that has little
incentive to research prisons and largely thinks prisons are necessary for their
protection. Those most substantially harmed by the prison system are prisoners ,
who are not able to vote or go lobby their representatives. Felon
disenfranchisement limits their political power even after they are released from
prison. Their family members and neighbors have their political power limited,
because prisoners are often counted on the census for the area they are
incarcerated, not the area they were forcibly taken from. This means that regions
that profit from prisons have increased political representation, while regions that
are scarred by mass incarceration are disenfranchised. This phenomenon is called
prison based gerrymandering. Political incentives have given us a prison system
that may be immune to humane reform. Given the violence and harm caused by the
prison system, the goal should be something more radical: prison abolition. We
should use every tool at our disposal to help keep people out of the states brutal
prison system. This can mean filming cops, helping people encrypt possibly
incriminating communications and transactions, or urging juries to nullify unjust
laws. We should support those caged by this system. This can mean writing them
letters or donating to their legal defense fund or commissary. But perhaps most
importantly, we should acut to end the states monopoly on law, security, and
justice. As Bruce Benson documents in The Enterprise of Law, prisons and criminal
law displaced a system of customary tort law. A customary legal system based on
restitution for victims was replaced by an authoritarian system that diverted
resources towards the states rulers and their cronies. That authoritarian plunder is
precisely how our current justice system operates, and it has disastrous
consequences. Police have incentives to focus on victimless crimes like drug
dealing and sex work, because investigating such crimes allows them to profit from
civil asset forfeiture in a way they cannot in rape or murder cases. This emphasis on
vice crimes leads to discriminatory enforcement and the criminalization of
entrepreneurship that is essential for some peoples survival, particularly those who
are excluded from the formal economy. Moreover, criminal law is not based on
demonstrating harm, but on state edict. Therefore, a litany of crimes can be created
on the whims of rent seeking special interest groups and moralist busybodies alike.
So we see a long parade of bootleggers and Baptists producing authoritarian law
after authoritarian law, filling the states cages. Ultimately, this leaves many
people unable to rely on the states system of law enforcement. Communities of
color see police as an occupying army rather than their protectors. Drug dealers
and sex workers are surely unable to trust police, as their professions are treated as
crimes. Immigrants fear that contact with police means they will be swept up by the
federal governments Secure Communities program and deported. Surveys show
that a majority of transgender individuals are uncomfortable seeking police
assistance. Sexual assault survivors correctly fear that police will dismiss them and
victim blame them. If a rape kit is taken, it will likely join a massive backlog of
untested rape kits while police resource are funneled towards militarization and vice
enforcements lucrative legal plunder. Prison abolitionists should create
entrepreneurial alternatives to the states monopoly on law, security, and justice.

The Audre Lorde Project in New York City runs the Safe OUTside the System
Collective[5] to help combat hate violence without calling the police. Such
community projects are one way to fill the void. Private security firms are another.
Cryptography and other innovations have potential to help us build the new law in
the shell of the old faster than we ever could before. The states legal system is a
predatory system. It is a system of plunder and violence that exacerbates
inequality, ruins lives, and enables the very crimes it claims to punish. Its time to
abolish prisons. And to abolish prisons, we must abolish the state.

AT: PICs

Must Oppose All Forms- Cant Tinker


Abolition cannot include replacing prison with other
alternatives
Allegra M. McLeod 15, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center,

2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
In contrast to leading scholarly and policy efforts to reform criminal law, abolition decidedly does not seek
merely to replace incarceration with alternatives that are closely related to imprisonment, such
as punitive policing, noncustodial criminal supervision, probation, civil
institutionalization, and parole.25 Abolition instead entails a rejection of the
moral legitimacy of confining people in cages , whether that caging is
deemed civil or whether it follows a failure to comply with technical terms of
supervised release or a police order.26 So too the positive project of abolition addressed in this Article is
decidedly not an effort to replicate the institutional transfer that occurred in the
aftermath of the deinstitutionalization of mental institutions.27 An abolitionist
framework requires positive forms of social integration and collective security that
are not organized around criminal law enforcement, confinement, criminal surveillance, punitive
policing, or punishment.

AT: PIC out of Violent Offenders


Abolition must be total- cant carve out exceptions for certain
offenders
Allegra M. McLeod 15, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center,

2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
In short, there are many who have committed acts of violence but who, under
circumstances of social coexistence enabled by positive abolition, would pose no
threat of harm to themselves or others. A commitment to any significant
decarceration, let alone abolition, entails more than simply eliminating
incarceration for nonviolent, nonserious, nonfelony convictions ,63 or less
serious felony convictions classified as violent.64 Even people convicted of serious,
violent felonies are not properly understood as the dangerous few and should be
able to live their lives outside of cages. A commitment to any significant degree of
decarceration requires a willingness to abandon managing perceived risks of violence by banishing and relegating to civil death any person convicted of serious
crime. Reducing social risk by physically isolating and caging entire populations is
not morally defensible , even if abandoning such practices may increase some
forms ofsocial disorder.
If there are indeed some small subset of people properly denominated the
dangerous few, they are only those who are intent on perpetrating acts of vicious
harm against others such that they are an imminent threat to all those around them
regardless of their circumstances. An abolitionist framework is not necessarily
committed to denying the existence of these dangerousfew persons, though the
dangerous few are vastly outnumbered by many millions of nondangerous
individuals living under criminal supervision and any such dangerousness on the
part of those incarcerated currently is exacerbated by features of prison society that
a wider embrace of an abolitionist ethic and framework would improve. Because any
such dangerous few persons constitute at most only a small minority of the
many millions of people under criminal supervision in the United States
the one of every thirty-five American adults under criminal supervision of some
form65the question of the danger these few may pose can be deferred for some
time as decarceration could by political necessity only proceed gradually. And so the
question of the dangerous few ought not to eclipse or overwhelm the urgency of a
thorough consideration of abolitionist analyses and reformist projects of
displacement of criminal regulation by other regulatory approaches.

AT: Kritiks

AT: Neoliberalism
Prisons have evolved alongside neoliberalism-the plan strikes
against the critical neoliberal tenant of personal
responsibility
Lex Horan, 10, skilled in facilitating conversations and trainings around
numerous topics, including the prison system, LGBT issues (particularly trans
politics), class privilege, and organizational development/strategic planning, April
2010, Against a Better Prison: Gender Responsiveness and the Changing Terrain of
Abolition, http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1415&context=etd_hon_theses
Many thinkers have pointed to a complex intersection of factors that gave rise to
the prison boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Their analyses call attention to state and
market restructuring in the face of political and economic crisis and imprisonment
as a state response to threats raised by social movements of the 1960s. The prison
system as we know it today has been created alongside (and many would argue, as
a part of) U.S. economic and political shifts towards neoliberalism that began in the
early 1970s. The neoliberal turn can be traced to political and economic crises of
the late 1960s and early 1970s. Christian Parenti argues that the expansion of
police forces and prisons must also be situated as a response to the domestic
economic and social crises 60 that faced the United States beginning in the late
1960s. Parentis sketch of the United States in the early 1970s emphasizes that
labor had made unprecedented gains in bargaining power that threatened the
owning class, and the revolutionary upheavals of the 1960s were significant cause
for alarm for the political establishment (Parenti 1999). To manage the dual threats
of the economic crisis of stagflation and the menace of political power of labor
and Black liberation struggles, Nixon began to slowly turn the country on a
trajectory that Ronald Regan would pick up in the 1980s. Locked together at the
core of this shift were enormous cuts to social spending and unprecedented new
investments in police and prisons. Neoliberalism was the political-economic order
inaugurated through these changing state and private priorities. In A Brief History
of Neoliberalism, David Harvey defines neoliberal ideology as the belief that
human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial
freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong
private property rights, free markets, and free trade (Harvey 2005, 2). Although
neoliberal rhetoric calls for freedom from state intervention, the neoliberal state
takes an active role in creating new markets, sustaining apparatuses like the
military, police, and prisons to protect capital, and managing frequent economic
crises. Harvey characterizes the neoliberal turn in terms of a massive statefacilitated upward redistribution of capital: Redistributive effects and increasing
social inequality have in fact been such a persistent feature of neoliberalization as
to be regarded as structural to the whole project (16). While the neoliberal state
is clearly an active one, it is also characterized by a staunch disavowal of big
government, synonymous with any state programs oriented towards public
wellbeing. Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls this the antistate state, a 61 formation that
rejectsboth in rhetoric and policystate programs and activities that work to

ensure public wellbeing, especially for vulnerable members of society (Gilmore


2007, 245). A major aspect of neoliberalism has been the defunding, dismantling,
and privatization of those welfare- or service-oriented branches of the state that
make up the social safety net. Gilmore calls this a series of abandonments of the
weakest members of society (for example, children) as the state has disavowed its
responsibility for the alleviation of adversity and inequality (Gilmore 2007, 52).
Social spending cuts were central to the economic logic of Reaganomics.
Specifically, Parenti notes, In 1982 alone Reagan cut the real value of welfare by 24
percent, slashed the budget for child nutrition by 34 percent, reduced funding for
school milk programs by 78 percent, urban development action grants by 35
percent, and educational block grants by 38 percent (Parenti 1999, 40-41).
Abandonments like these have been widely justified with rhetoric of personal
responsibility, a central tenet of the neoliberal project. Harvey argues that a
personal responsibility systemis substituted for social protections (pensions,
health care, protections against injury) that were formerly an obligation of
employers and the state (Harvey 2005, 168). Welfare and personal responsibility
become incompatible with one another, since relying on the state is positioned as a
fundamental failure to care for oneself. No apologies are necessary for cuts to state
services because these cuts reduce dependency and produce self-sufficient citizens
who can take responsibility for themselves.

AT: Law K
We must call upon the law to change the prison industrial
complex
Angela Davis 11, professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the

University of California, Santa Cruz, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons,


and Torture (Open Media Series), ebook no pages
Which then raises the question of the role of law itself. Does law really make a significant
difference in this case? What about the potential for challenging these abuses? Is the existence of law
in the case of the domestic prison system a potential lever, or ground, by which we
can act? While it would be a mistake to consider law as the ultimate arbiter of
social problems, it does have strategic significance in the struggle for progress and
radical transformation. But law can also be one of the most difficult obstacles to change, precisely because
it is assumed to be the final word. Legal challenges have indeed enabled at various moments specific reforms of the

Of course we
must call upon law both at the national and international level, but we should also
recognize the limitations of law. The myriad legal challenges to the death penalty have not yet
prison, but more frequently than not, these reforms have ultimately solidified the institution.

succeeded in abolishing it. I would agree that we have a stake, but do we have the means of challenging the
actions, if we dont have the law? I dont know. Im somewhat ambivalent here because I dont know whether I am

where there have been major victories, in


the cases of U.S. prisoners, for example, those victories have been, for the most
part, victories over the lawusually with the pivotal assistance of organized mass
movements. Law does not operate within a vacuum . Yes, we rely on it when it can be used
to accomplish what we call progressive goals , but by itself, it is powerless. It acquires its power
willing to concede so much power to the law. In instances

from ideological consensus. As someone who has been involved in work against the prison system for quite a
number of years, I think we need to urge individuals and organizations already committed to working against the
race and class inequalities and the generalized repression produced by the domestic prison to reframe their antiprison work in order to address and oppose the ongoing atrocities in U.S.-controlled detention centers in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantnamo Bay.

Prisons - Neg

Case Answers

General
Education is an alt cause to prisons, schools are feeder
institutions for jails and creates the justification for the use of
prisons
Erica R. Meiners, 07, Educational Inquiry and Curriculum Studies, College of
Education, Women's and Gender Studies, Faculty Affiliate Latino and Latin American
Studies, and Faculty Affiliate Justice Studies, 3/26/07, The Right to be Hostile:
Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies, Google Books pg. 7 & 8
Expanding what counts as education reform is central to prison abolition, not solely
because of my location as a preservice teacher educator, but because schools are
"feeder institutions" for jails and prisons. Architecture, curriculum, socialization
processes, and literally the presence of police or other structures that serve only
punitive functions at specific schools results in the outcome that select youth are
prepared through schools to be institutionalized. When children attend schools
that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and
intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison. If this is the
predicament we face today, what might the future hold if the prison system
acquires an even greater presence in our society? In the nineteenth century,
antislavery activists insisted that as long as slavery continued, the future of
democracy was bleak indeed. In the twenty-first century, antiprison activists insist
that a fundamental requirement for the revitalization of democracy is the long overdue abolition of the prison system. (Davis, 2003, 38-39) Davis's suggestion is that
education reform is not just a central component of rethinking our
systems of punishment and justice, but also our democracy . This book is
written for educators in order to consider our collusion, active and passive, in
maintaining practices that perpetuate relationships between schools and jails and to
start conversations that imagine futures without overflowing punitive institutions.

Abolitionism Fails
Prisons keep people safe, there is no evidence that proves
alternatives to the prison system are effective
Robert Whelan, 04, deputy director of Civitas, a community of researchers and

supporters committed to discovering how best to strengthen democracy, uphold


limited government, maintain personal freedom, achieve opportunity for all, and
encourage free enterprise, 8/23/04, Prisons are good for society,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3609979/Prisons-are-good-forsociety.html
And what an advantage that would be to the rest of us. The Home Office estimates
that the average offender commits 140 offences in a year. If we were to double the
prison population from 65,000 to 130,000, we would be protecting the public from
more than nine million offences. The advantages of such a policy are so obvious
that it is difficult to think of a counter-argument. This makes no difference, because
the criminal justice system is run by people who do not intend to consider the
possibility. If you were to raise the point at a gathering of these good people, you
would be treated as if you had made a racist remark. People wouldn't attack you,
they would just start talking across you. As for the supposed advantages of the
"alternatives to prison", we are still waiting for the evidence that they exist.
Community sentencing, tagging, fines - how wonderful it would be if they worked ,
then we could allow criminals to walk the streets without apprehension.
Unfortunately, there is very little to be said for any of these alternative s. Although
the criminal justice professionals believe passionately that they reduce reoffending
rates, there is little evidence that they do any good. Tagging is, in the Home
Office's tactful phrase, "broadly neutral" in its effect on behaviour, ie, makes no
difference. (The young thug called Slasher who nearly killed a woman in a London
park was tagged.) Probation does not reduce reoffending, compared with those
sentenced to a combination of prison and probation, or community service. Some
studies show higher reoffending rates for probationers. Fines are often not paid and
little effort is put into chasing them. Cognitive behavioural therapy, in which this
Government has invested so much, is so useless it should be scrapped. "I am not
at all in favour of this modern fashion for turning bad people into good people
overnight," says one of Oscar Wilde's dowagers. "As a man sows, so should he
reap." Well, she need have no worry. Prison doesn't make bad people good, and
neither do the alternatives, in the majority of cases. Of course, people can change.
They may experience a religious conversion, conquer a drug habit or undergo a
revolution in their lifestyle that changes their behaviour. Getting married is the best
way out of crime for young men. But, in the meantime, while we wish all the best to
those who are working to reform criminals, we look to the prisons to keep them out
of harm's way. Our harm, that is.

Abolitonists hyperbolize the harms of prisons and the


ineffectiveness of reforms
Joshua A. Miller, 14, editor of The Good Society, direct the JCI Prison Scholars
Program, and teach philosophy, 7/29/14, Prison Abolition, Reform, and End-State
Anxieties http://www.anotherpanacea.com/?s=prison+abolition

This is where I find abolitionism frustrating: the project of prison abolition seems like
an end-state rather than an end-in-view. It deliberately ignores (1) the wishes of
victims, citizens, and even many of the incarcerated (all of whom are understood to
be duped and epistemically blinded by the ideology of carcerality unless they adopt
abolitionism.) It doesnt start with our current carcerality and work away
from it, but rather starts with a rejection of the current context and the
constraints it creates (2). Its inflexible (3) in the sense that it does not allow that
some limited carcerality (a la Norway?) might still be reasonable. Though theres the
sense that that is the direction that abolitionism must proceed, it does not currently
emphasize the development of the skills and abilities (4) that alternatives to
incarceration would require. And though it does aim to foreclose carcerality forever,
I do think abolitionists are most concerned to promote plurality, cooperation, and
empowerment (5) for some of the most dominated people in our world today, which
is why I cant help feeling the pull of abolition even as the other objections I mention
raise red flags. Meliorism, on the other hand, has all the problems that the
abolitionists describe. Reformers work with and within the system to resist it, which
requires all sorts of rhetorical and practical compromises. By chipping at the edges
and living too comfortably with constraints and realism, (2) meliorists leave the
status quo mostly untouched. We adopt democratic projects and processes (1), but
leave the fundamental injustices in place. We develop capacities (4) but usually we
cant create the institutions and conditions (5) where those capacities will be
actualized. We are, at base, flexible (3) with evil, and thereby compromised by it,
while the righteous know that evil requires inflexibility and even sacrifice. Angela
Davis puts it this way at the start of Are Prisons Obsolete?: As important as some
reforms may be-the elimination of sexual abuse and medical neglect in womens
prison, for example-frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the
stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison. Debates about strategies of
decarceration, which should be the focal point of our conversations on the prison
crisis, tend to be marginalized when reform takes the center stage. The most
immediate question today is how to prevent the further expansion of prison
populations and how to bring as many imprisoned women and men as possible back
into what prisoners call the free world.' No reformer wants to produce the
stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond prison, but much of the rest of Daviss
book is devoted to the claim that reform is inextricable from that consequence.
Ultimately, she equates prison reform with the absurdity of slavery reform.
Americas prisons are historically and in current practice entangled with the Black
Codes, the convict-lease system, Jim Crow, sexism, and antiblack racism; therefore,
reformers are merely (hopefully unknowingly) fluffing the pillows while white
supremacy and patriarchy is maintained: If the words prison reform so easily slip
from our lips, it is because prison and reform have been inextricably linked since
the beginning of the use of imprisonment as the main means of punishing those
who violate social norms. Yet consider: Davis assumes that the majority of the
increase in incarceration has been driven by the drug war , and that alternatives to
incarceration will foreground drug treatment and decriminalization of drugs. In fact,
though the largest group ofarrests are tied to drug use, the largest group of
prisoners are incarcerated for violence; this reflects sentencing differences and the
kinds of treatment diversion programs for which she call s. Theres good evidence
that the drug war, poverty, and racist policing produce some of that violence, but

not all of it. Plus, prison populations are already shrinking , but at least some of this
decline is due to the increase of post-release strategies that export carceral logics
into a parolees (or even an unindicted suspects) everyday life. The goals of
decarceration can fall into the logic of carcerality as easily as the goals of reform . So
how much really separates reformers from abolitionists? A reformer might call for
the restoration of prison education and voting rights, for the creation of schools that
teach rather than prepare students for prison, for decriminalization and treatment of
drug abuse, for poverty-reduction and racial justice, while still thinking that certain
kinds of violence should lead to coercive detention, that restorative justice has
dangerous implications when applied to cases of sexual assault or organized
violence.

Util
The impossibility to attain knowledge of every outcome or
abuse leaves utilitarianism as the only option for most rational
decision-making
Goodin 95 Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of the Social
Sciences at the Australian National University (Robert E., Cambridge University
Press, Utilitarianism As a Public Philosophy pg 63)
My larger argument turns on the proposition that th ere is something special about the situation of
public officials that makes utilitarianism more plausible for them (or, more precisely, makes

them adopt a form of utilitarianism that we would find more acceptable) than private individuals. Before proceeding

their
situations that makes it both more necessary and more desirable for them to adopt
a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider, first the argument from necessity. Public
officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very
with that larger argument, I must therefore say what it is that is so special about public officials and

special sort at that. All choices-public and private alike- are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course. But

private individuals will usually have more complete information on


the peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the ramifications that
alternative possible choices might have for them. Public officials, in contrast, at
relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their choices will have on
individuals, one by one. What they typically do know are generalities: averages and
aggregates. They know what will happen most often to most people as a result of
their various possible choices. But that is all. That is enough to allow public policy
makers to use the utilitarian calculus if they want to use it at all to choose general rules of
in the nature of things,

conduct. Knowing aggregates and averages, they can proceed to calculate the utility payoffs from adopting each

they cannot be sure what the payoff will be to any given


individual or on any particular occasion. Their knowledge of generalities, aggregates
and averages is just not sufficiently fine-grained for that.
alternative possible general rule. But

We must choose the lesser evil. Utilitarianism limits further


atrocities against civilization.
Issac 02 Professor of political science at Indiana-Bloomington, Director of the
Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD from Yale (Jeffery C., Dissent
Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, Ends, Means, and Politics, p. Proquest)
WHAT WOULD IT mean for the American left right now to take seriously the centrality of means in politics? First, it

There is a
tendency in some quarters of the left to assimilate the death and destruction of
September 11 to more ordinary (and still deplorable) injustices of the world system--the
would mean taking seriously the specific means employed by the September 11 attackers--terrorism.

starvation of children in Africa, or the repression of peasants in Mexico, or the continued occupation of the West

this assimilation is only possible by ignoring the specific


modalities of September 11. It is true that in Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere, too
many innocent people suffer, and that is wrong. It may even be true that the experience of
suffering is equally terrible in each case. But neither the Mexican nor the Israeli government
has ever hijacked civilian airliners and deliberately flown them into crowded office
buildings in the middle of cities where innocent civilians work and live, with the
intention of killing thousands of people. Al-Qaeda did precisely this. That does not
make the other injustices unimportant. It simply makes them different . It makes the
Bank and Gaza by Israel. But

September 11 hijackings distinctive, in their defining and malevolent purpose--to kill people and to create terror and

This was not an ordinary injustice. It was an extraordinary injustice. The


premise of terrorism is the sheer superfluousness of human life . This premise is inconsistent
havoc.

Because
it threatens everyone, and threatens values central to any decent conception of a
good society, it must be fought. And it must be fought in a way commensurate with its malevolence.
Ordinary injustice can be remedied. Terrorism can only be stopped . Second, it would mean
with civilized living anywhere. It threatens people of every race and class, every ethnicity and religion.

frankly acknowledging something well understood, often too eagerly embraced, by the twentieth century Marxist

it is often politically necessary to employ morally troubling means in the


name of morally valid ends. A just or even a better society can only be realized in and through political
left--that

practice; in our complex and bloody world, it will sometimes be necessary to respond to barbarous tyrants or
criminals, with whom moral suasion won't work.

In such situations our choice is not between the


wrong that confronts us and our ideal vision of a world beyond wrong. It is between
the wrong that confronts us and the means--perhaps the dangerous means--we
have to employ in order to oppose it. In such situations there is a danger that
"realism" can become a rationale for the Machiavellian worship of power. But
equally great is the danger of a righteousness that translates, in effect, into a
refusal to act in the face of wrong. What is one to do? Proceed with caution. Avoid casting oneself as
the incarnation of pure goodness locked in a Manichean struggle with evil. Be wary of violence. Look for alternative
means when they are available, and support the development of such means when they are not. And never
sacrifice democratic freedoms and open debate. Above all, ask the hard questions about the situation at hand, the
means available, and the likely effectiveness of different strategies.

Race
The neg politicizes Identity by submitting the past as a
reminder of the failure of history. Simultaneously they
politicize their own identity in relationship to those histories.
They perpetuate the foundation of an identity based in injury,
which creates disciplinary regimes that neutralize difference
and reinscribe domination, turns all the method and the case.
Brown, 1995 (Wendy, Professor of Political Science and Rhetoric at UC-Berkeley, States of Injury: Power
and Freedom in Late Modernity, published by Princeton UP, p. 65-66)

Contemporary politicized identity is also potentially reiterative of


regulatory, disciplinary society in its configuration of a disciplinary
subject. It is both produced by and potentially accelerates the production
of that aspect of disciplinary society which "ceaselessly characterizes,
classifies, and specializes," which works through "surveillance, continuous
registration, perpetual assessment, and classification," through a social
machinery "that is both immense and minute. "19 An example from the world of local

politics makes clear politicized identity's imbrication in disciplinary power, as well as the way in which, as Foucault
reminds us, disciplinary power "infiltrates" rather than replaces liberal juridical modalities. 20 Recently, the city
council of my town reviewed an ordinance, devised and promulgated by a broad coalition of identity-based political
groups, which aimed to ban discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of
"sexual orientation, transsexuality, age, height, weight, personal appearance, physical characteristics, race, color,
creed, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, marital status, sex, or gender. "21 Here is a perfect instance of
the universal juridical ideal of liberalism and the normalizing principle of disciplinary regimes conjoined and taken
up within the discourse of politicized identity. This ordinance-variously called the "purple hair ordinance" or the
"ugly ordinance" by state and national news media-aims to count every difference as no difference, as part of the
seamless whole, but also to count every potentially subversive rejection of culturally enforced norms as
themselves normal, as normalizable, and as normativizable through law. Indeed,

through

the

definitional, procedural, and remedies sections of this ordinance (e.g., "sexual


orientation shall mean known or assumed homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality") persons are
reduced to observable social attributes and practices defined empirically,
positivistically, as if their existence were intrinsic and factual, rather than
effects of discursive and institutional power; and these positivist
definitions of persons as their attributes and practices are written into
law, ensuring that persons describable according to them will now
become regulated through them. Bentham couldn't have done it better. Indeed, here is a perfect
instance of how the language of recognition becomes the language of unfreedom, how articulation in
language, in the context of liberal and disciplinary discourse, becomes a
vehicle of subordination through individualization, normalization, and
regulation, even as it strives to produce visibility and acceptance. Here, also, is
a perfect instance of the way in which "differences" that are the effects of social power
are neutralized through their articulation as attributes and their
circulation through liberal administrative discourse: what do we make of a document
that renders as juridical equivalents the denial of employment to an African American, an obese woman, and a
white middleclass youth festooned with tattoos, a pierced tongue, and fuchsia hair?

Gender
Gender is not the root cause of environmental degradation
such claims are simplistic and wrong
Fox 98 Center for Environmental Studies
Fellow @ Cent. Env Studies, The Deep-Ecology-Ecofem debate, in Environmental Philosophy ed.
Zimmerman, p 232-3
To begin with, deep ecologists completely agree with ecofeminists that men have been far more
implicated in the history of ecological destruction than women. However, deep ecologists also agree
with similar charges derived from other social perspectives: for example, that capitalists, whites,
and Westerners have been far more implicated in the history of ecological destruction than precapitalist peoples, blacks, and non-Westerners .21 If ecofeminists also agree with these points, then the question
arises as to why they do not also criticize deep ecology for being neutral with respect to issues
concerning such significant social variables as socioeconomic class, race, and Westernization. There
appears to be two reasons for this. First, to do so would detract from the priority that econfeminists
wish to give to their own concern with androcentrism. Second, and more significantly, these charges
could also be applied with equal force to the ecofeminist focus on androcentrism itself.14 How does
one defend the ecofeminist charge against deep ecology (i.e., that androcentrism is "the real root"
of ecological destruction) in the face of these charges?" For deep ecologists, it is simplistic on both
empirical and logical grounds to think that one particular perspective on human society identifies
the real root of ecological destruction. Empirically, such thinking is simplistic (and thus
descriptively poor) because it fails to give due consideration to the multitude of interacting factors
at work in any given situation. (While on a practical level it can be perfectly reasonable to devote most of one's energy to one
particular 'cause-if only for straightforward reasons to do with time and energy-that, of course, is no excuse for simplistic social theorizing.)

Such thinking falls, in other words, to adopt an ecological perspective with respect to the workings
of human society itself. Logically, such thinking is simplistic (and thus facile) because it implies that
the solution to our ecological problems is close at hand-all we have to do is remove "the real root"
of the problem-when it is actually perfectly possible to conceive of a society that is nonandrocentric,
socioeconomically egalitarian, nonracist, and nonimperialistic with respect to other human
societies, but whose members nevertheless remain aggressively anthropocentric in collectively
agreeing to exploit their environment for their collective benefit in ways that nonanthropocentrists
would find thoroughly objectionable. Indeed, the "green" critique of socialism proceeds from precisely this recognition that a
socially egalitarian society does not necessarily imply an ecologically benign society.

Patriarchy is inevitablebiology proves


Fukuyama 1998 [Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist/economist and author. Hes a senior fellow at
the Center on Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law at Stanford. He has a Ph.D. in political science from
Harvard.] Women and the Evolution of World Politics. Foreign Affairs 77.5 (1998). Web.
http://www.evoyage.com/Evolutionary%20Feminism/ForAffairWomen&Evolution.htm

A number of authors have extended the noble savage idea to argue that violence and patriarchy were
late inventions, rooted in either the Western Judeo-Christian tradition or the capitalism to which the former gave
birth. Friedrich Engels anticipated the work of later feminists by positing the existence of a primordial matriarchy,
which was replaced by a violent and repressive patriarchy only with the transition to agricultural societies. The

problem with this theory is, as Lawrence Keeley points out in his book War Before Civilization, that the most
comprehensive recent studies of violence in hunter-gatherer societies suggest that for them was
actually more frequent, and rates of murder higher, than for modern ones. Surveys of ethnographic data
show that only 10-13 percent of primitive societies never or rarely engaged in war or raiding; the others engaged in
conflict either continuously or at less than yearly intervals. Closer examination of the peaceful cases shows that
they were frequently refugee populations driven into remote locations by prior warfare or groups protected by a
more advanced society. Of the Yanomam tribesmen studied by Napoleon Chagnon in Venezuela, some 30 percent
of the men died by violence; the !Kung San of the Kalahari desert, once characterized as the "harmless people,"

have a higher murder rate than New York or Detroit. The Sad archaeological evidence from sites like Jebel Sahaba in
Egypt, Talheim in Germany, or Roaix in France indicates that systematic mass killings of men, women, and
children occurred in Neolithic times. The Holocaust, Cambodia, and Bosnia have each been described as a
unique, and often as a uniquely modern, form of horror. Exceptional and tragic they are indeed, but with precedents
stretching back tens if not hundreds of thousands of years .

It is clear that this violence was largely


perpetrated by men. While small minorities of human societies have been matrilineal, evidence of a
primordial matriarchy in which women dominated men, or were even relatively equal to men, has been hard
to find. There was no age of innocence. The line from chimp to modern man is continuous. It
would seem, then, that there is something to the contention of many feminists that phenomena like
aggression, violence, war, and intense competition for dominance in a status hierarchy are more closely
associated with men than women. Theories of international relations like realism that see international
politics as a remorseless struggle for power are in fact what feminist call a gendered perspective, describing the
behavior of states controlled by men rather than states per se. A world run by women would follow different rules, it
would appear, and it is toward that sort of world that all postindustrial or Western societies are moving. As women
gain power in these countries, the latter should become less aggressive, adventurous, competitive and violent. The

problem with the feminist view is that it sees these attitudes toward violence, power, status as wholly
the products of a patriarchal culture, whereas in fact it appears they are rooted in biology. This
makes these attitudes harder to change in men and consequently in societies. Despite the rise of
women, men will continue to play a major, if not dominant, part in the governance of postindustrial
countries, not to mention less-developed ones. The realms of war and international politics in particular
will remain controlled by men for longer than many feminists would like. Most important, the task of
resocializing men to be more like women - that is, less violent - will run into limits. What is bred in
the bone cannot be altered easily by changes in culture and ideology.

Inherent equality of all beings requires utilitarianism


David Cummiskey, Associate Professor of Philosophy @ Bates College & a Ph.D. from UM, 1996,
Kantian Consequentialism, Pg. 145-146
In the next section, I will defend this interpretation of the duty of beneficence. For the sake of argument, however,
let us first simply assume that beneficence does not require significant self-sacrifice and see what follows. Although
Kant is unclear on this point, we will assume that significant self-sacrifices are supererogatory. Thus, if I must harm
one in order to save many, the individual whom I will harm by my action is not morally required to affirm the action.

I am faced with a
dilemma: If I act, I harm a person in a way that a rational being need not
consent to; if I fail to act, then I do not do my duty to those in need and thereby fail to
On the other hand, I have a duty to do all that I can for those in need. As a consequence

promote an objective end. Faced with such a choice, which horn of the dilemma is more consistent with the
formula of the end-in-itself?

We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this


type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract social
entity. It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for
some elusive overall social good. Instead, the question is whether some
persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert
Nozick, for example, argues that to use a person in this way does not sufficiently
respect and take account of the fact that he [or she] is a separate person,
that his is the only life he [or she] has. But why is this not equally true of
all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing
solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently
respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with
only one life , who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a
conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A
morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the
principle that rational nature exists as an end in itself. Rational nature as such is
the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have
an equal value then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves
maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as

possible . In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian


needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most
Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a
non-value based rationale. But we have seen that Kants normative theory is based on an
unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice
rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is
based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from

If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do


not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of
rational beings. Persons may have dignity, that is, an unconditional and
incomparable worth that transcends any market value, but persons also
have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give
way for the sake of others. The concept of the end-in-itself does not
support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in
order to benefit others. If on focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal
consideration suggests that one may have to sacrifice some to save many .
maximally promoting these two tiers of value?

T No Consent
A. Interpretation: Surveillance means the target cannot
consent.
FISA 78 (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Legal Document Outlining
Electronic Surveillance Within The United States For Foreign Intelligence Purposes,
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. 50 us e 1801,
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-92/pdf/STATUTE-92-Pg1783.pdf)//ghs-VA
(f) "Electronic surveillance" means (1) the acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other
surveillance device of the contents of any wire or radio communication sent by or intended to be received by
a particular, known United States person who is in the United States, if the contents are acquired by intentionally
targeting that United States person, under circumstances in which a person ' has a reasonable expectation of
privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes; (2) the acquisition by an electronic,
mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any wire communication to or from a person in the

without the consent of any party thereto , if such acquisition occurs


in the United States ; (3) the intentional acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance
device of the contents of any radio communication, under circumstances in which a person has a
reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes, and if
United States,

both the sender and all intended recipients are located within the United States; or (4) the installation or use of an
electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device in the United States for monitoring to acquire information, other
than from a wire or radio communication, under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of
privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes.

B. Violation: The target has consented to the surveillance.


C. Reasons to prefer
1. Limits Would justify an infinite number of affs that curtail
contracts between the government and organizations which
makes neg prep impossible kills clash.
2. Topic Education they move the debate away from privacy
versus utility which kills predictability and core topic learning.
3. Extra-topicality Justifies any number of untopical actions,
which kills neg prep and causes a rush to generics.
Competing interpretations, reasonability makes judge
intervention inevitable.

Crime Disad

1NC Shell
Crime is decreasing nationwide
FBI 2013, Federal Bureau of Invesigation Unifrorm Crime Report, 2013, Violent
Crime, https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-theu.s.-2013/violent-crime/violent-crime-topic-page/violentcrimemain_final
In 2013, an estimated 1,163,146 violent crimes occurred nationwide, a decrease of 4.4
percent from the 2012 estimate. When considering 5- and 10-year trends, the 2013
estimated violent crime total was 12.3 percent below the 2009 level and 14.5
percent below the 2004 level. (See Tables 1 and 1A.) There were an estimated 367.9 violent crimes per

100,000 inhabitants in 2013, a rate that declined 5.1 percent when compared with the 2012 estimated rate. (See
Tables 1 and 1A.) Aggravated assaults accounted for 62.3 percent of violent crimes reported to law enforcement in
2013. Robbery offenses accounted for 29.7 percent of violent crime offenses; rape (legacy definition) accounted for
6.9 percent; and murder accounted for 1.2 percent. (Based on Table 1.) Information collected regarding types of
weapons used in violent crime showed that firearms were used in 69.0 percent of the nations murders, 40.0
percent of robberies, and 21.6 percent of aggravated assaults. (Weapons data are not collected for rape.) (See
Expanded Homicide Data Table 7, Robbery Table 3, and the Aggravated Assault Table.)

Abolishing Prisons wont stop crime, itll actually increase it


Nick Hervert July 27, 2008, Nick Herbert is Conservative MP for Arundel and

South Downs, The abolitionists' criminal conspiracy,


http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jul/27/prisonsandprobation.youthj
ustice
Last week saw an International Conference on Penal Abolition. With such a heady
ambition, what can be next? A global conference to abolish crime ? The ambition of
an eccentric minority to abolish prison isn't just dotty. It's a distraction from a real
and pressing agenda, which is to reform prisons which simply aren't working. A
century ago, prisons had hard labour and treadmills. Today, they have colour TVs in
cells. Jails may have changed, but the enduring truth that they are necessary has
not. We will always have a small minority of offenders who, by their behaviour, pose
so great a threat to the lives and property of the law-abiding majority that they
must be kept apart from us. Ignoring this reality and arguing for the total abolition
of prison is a hopelessly utopian goal that does the credibility of penal reformers no
service. The case for penal abolition rests on a series of tenuous assertions. Let's
set aside the obvious, if uncomfortable, fact that part of the purpose of prison is to
punish. It's said that short-term prison sentences don't work, because recidivism
rates are shockingly high and there is little time for any restorative programmes to
work. But since the evidence is that longer sentences have lower recidivism rates,
and provide the opportunity to rehabilitate offenders, this might be an argument to
lengthen sentences, not abolish them altogether. After all, another purpose of prison
is to incapacitate offenders

The fear caused by crime results in the further subjugation of


ethnic minorities and would worsen civil rights

Mark Moore and Robert Trojaniwikz 1988, A publication of the National Institute of
Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, and the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and
Management, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University,
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/111459.pdf
When crimes occur-when a ghetto teenager is shot to death in a gang war, when an
elderly woman is mugged for her social security check, when a nurse is raped in a
hospital parking lot, when one driver is punched by another in a dispute over a
parking place, when a black family's new home is vandalized- society's attention is
naturally focused on the victims and their material losses. Their wounds, bruises,

lost property, and inconvenience can be seen, touched, and counted. These are the
concrete signs of criminal victimization. Behind the immediate, concrete losses of
crime victims, however, is a different, more abstract crime problem-that of fear. For
victims, fear is often the largest and most enduring legacy of their victimization. The
raped nurse will feel vulnerable long after her cuts and bruises heal. The harassed
black family suffers far more from the fear of neighborhood hostility than the
inconvenience of repairing their property. For the rest of us---the not-recently, or
not-yet victimized fear becomes a contagious agent spreading the injuriousness of
criminal victimization. The gang member's death makes parents despair of their
children's future. The mugging of the elderly woman teaches elderly residents to
fear the streets and the teenagers who roam them. The fight over the parking place
confirms the general fear of strangers. The harassment of the black family makes
other minorities reluctant to claim their rights. In these ways, fear extends the
damage of criminal victimization.

An increase of crime will drive an already impoverished


community further into poverty; changes lives forever
Law Library 2004, American Law and Legal Information, Economic and Social
Effects of Crime - Growing Interest In The Costs Of Crime, Determining Costs, The
High Cost Of Crime, Community Efforts To Avoid Crime Costs,
http://law.jrank.org/pages/12125/Economic-Social-Effects-Crime.html
Crime is a major part of every society. Its costs and effects touch just about
everyone to some degree. The types of costs and effects are widely varied. In
addition, some costs are short-term while others last a lifetime. Of course the
ultimate cost is loss of life. Other costs to victims can include medical costs,
property losses, and loss of income. Losses to both victims and nonvictims can also
come in the form of increased security expenses including stronger locks, extra
lighting, parking in more expensive secure lots, security alarms for homes and cars,
and maintaining guard dogs. Considerable money is spent to avoid being victimized.
Other types of expenses can include a victim or person fearful of crime moving to a
new neighborhood, funeral expenses, legal fees, and loss of school days. Some
costs of crime are less tangible (not easily or precisely identified). These kinds of
costs can include pain and suffering, and a lower quality of life. There are also the
traumatic impacts on friends and the disruption of family. Behavior can be forever
changed and shaped by crime, whether it be weighing the risks of going to certain
places or even the fear of making new friends.

Poverty is equivalent to an ongoing nuclear war and makes all


forms of violence inevitable.
James Gilligan 1996 , Faculty Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School,
Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes (Book)
You cannot work for one day with the violent people who fill our prisons and mental
hospitals for the criminally insane without being forcibly and constantly reminded of
the extreme poverty and discrimination that characterize their lives. Hearing about
their lives, and about their families and friends, you are forced to recognize the
truth in Gandhis observation that the deadliest form of violence is poverty.
Not a day goes by without realizing that trying to understand them and their
virulent behavior in purely individual terms is impossible and wrong-headed. Any
theory of violence, especially a psychological theory, that evolves from the

experience of men in maximum security prisons and hospitals for the criminally
insane must begin with the recognition that these institutions are only microcosms.
They are not where the major violence of our society takes place, and the
perpetrators who fill them are far from being the main causes of most violent
deaths. Any approach to a theory of violence needs to begin with a look at the
structural violence of this country. Focusing merely on those relatively few men who
commit what we define as murder could distract us from examining and learning
from those structural causes of violent death that are far more significant from a
numerical or public health, or human, standpoint By structural violence I mean
the increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom
rungs of society, as contrasted with the relatively lower death rates experienced by
those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstratably
large portion of them) are a function of class structure; and that structure is
itself a product of societys collective human choices, concerning how to distribute
the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting
structural with behavioral violence, by which I mean the non-natural deaths and
injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against
individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare,
capital punishment, and so on. Structural violence differs from behavioral violence
in at least three major respects The lethal effects of structural violence
operate continuously rather than sporadically, whereas murders, suicides,
executions, wars, and other forms of behavioral violence occur one at a time.
Structural violence operates more or less independently of individual acs;
independent of individuals and groups (politicians, political parties, voters) whose
decisions may nevertheless have lethal consequences for others. Structural violence
is normally invisible, because it may appear to have had other (natural or violent)
causes. Neither the existence, the scope and extent, nor the lethal power of
structural violence can be discerned until we shift our focus from a clinical or
psychological perspective, which looks at one individual at a time, to the
epidemiological perspective of public health and preventative medicine. Examples
are all around us. [Continues Page 195] The 14 to 18 million deaths a year
caused by structural violence compare with about 100,000 deaths per year
from armed conflict. Comparing this frequency of deaths from structural violence
to the frequency of those caused by major military and political violence, such as
World War II (an estimated 49 million military and civilian deaths, including those
caused by genocide---or about eight million per year, 1939-1945), the Indonesian
massacre of 1965-66 (perhaps 575,000 deaths), the Vietnam war (possibly two
million, 1954-1973), and even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the U.S.
and the U.S.S.R. (232 million), it was clear that even war cannot begin to
compare with structural violence, which continues year after year. In other
words, every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative
poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 deaths, and every
single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the
world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is,
in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating,
thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetuated on the week and poor every year of
every decade, throughout the world. Structural violence is also the main cause of

behavioral violence on a socially and epidemiologically significant scale (from


homicide and suicide to war and genocide). The question as to which of the two
forms of violencestructural or behavioralis more important, dangerous, or lethal
is moot, for they are inextricably related to each other, as cause to effect.

Uniqueness
Crime is decreasing nationwide
FBI 2013, Federal Bureau of Invesigation Unifrorm Crime Report, 2013, Violent
Crime, https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-theu.s.-2013/violent-crime/violent-crime-topic-page/violentcrimemain_final
In 2013, an estimated 1,163,146 violent crimes occurred nationwide, a decrease of 4.4
percent from the 2012 estimate. When considering 5- and 10-year trends, the 2013
estimated violent crime total was 12.3 percent below the 2009 level and 14.5
percent below the 2004 level. (See Tables 1 and 1A.) There were an estimated 367.9 violent crimes per

100,000 inhabitants in 2013, a rate that declined 5.1 percent when compared with the 2012 estimated rate. (See
Tables 1 and 1A.) Aggravated assaults accounted for 62.3 percent of violent crimes reported to law enforcement in
2013. Robbery offenses accounted for 29.7 percent of violent crime offenses; rape (legacy definition) accounted for
6.9 percent; and murder accounted for 1.2 percent. (Based on Table 1.) Information collected regarding types of
weapons used in violent crime showed that firearms were used in 69.0 percent of the nations murders, 40.0
percent of robberies, and 21.6 percent of aggravated assaults. (Weapons data are not collected for rape.) (See
Expanded Homicide Data Table 7, Robbery Table 3, and the Aggravated Assault Table.)

Overall crime rate decreasing in every major area


BJS 2013, Bureau of Justice Statistics, IN 2013 VIOLENT AND PROPERTY CRIME
RATES DECLINED AFTER TWO YEARS OF INCREASES,
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/press/cv13pr.cfm
WASHINGTON The overall violent crime rate declined slightly from 26.1 to 23.2 victimizations per 1,000 U.S.
residents from 2012 to 2013, the Justice Departments Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. The
violent crime rate had declined for nearly two decades before increasing in 2011 and 2012. The 2013
decrease in violent crime was largely the result of a slight decline in simple assault, which is violence that does not involve a

weapon or serious injury. The rate of violence committed by strangers also declined in 2013.
However, there was no statistically significant change in the rate (7.3 per 1,000 in 2013) of serious violence, defined as rape or
sexual assault, robbery or aggravated assault. In addition, there were no significant changes from 2012 to 2013 in the rates of
firearm violence (1.3 per 1,000), violence resulting in injury to the victim (6.1), domestic violence (4.2) or intimate partner violence
(2.8). Intimate partner violence is violence committed by a current or former spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend, and domestic violence
includes crimes by intimate partners and family members. In 2013, 1.2 percent of all U.S. residents age 12 or older (3 million
persons) experienced at least one violent victimization, down from 1.4 percent in 2012. About 0.4 percent (1.1 million persons)

The overall property crime rate, which includes burglary,


theft and motor vehicle theft, also decreased after two consecutive years of increases. From 2012 to 2013, the rate declined
from 155.8 to 131.4 victimizations per 1,000 U.S. households. The rate of theft declined from 120.9 to 100.5
experienced at least one serious violent victimization.

victimizations per 1,000 households, driving the decline in the overall rate. In 2013, 9 percent of all households (11.5 million
households) experienced one or more property victimizations. An estimated 46 percent of violent crime and 61 percent of serious
violent crime was reported to police in 2013. A greater percentage of robbery (68 percent) and aggravated assault (64 percent) was
reported than simple assault (38 percent) and rape or sexual assault (35 percent) victimizations. From 2012 to 2013, the percentage
of property crime reported to police increased from 34 to 36 percent. Reported thefts increased from 26 to 29 percent, accounting
for the majority of the increase in the overall percentage of property crime reported to police. About 75 percent of motor vehicle
thefts and 57 percent of burglaries were reported to police in 2013. Other findings from the report includeIn 2013, 10 percent of

Violent victimization in urban areas


declined from 32.4 per 1,000 in 2012 to 25.9 per 1,000 in 2013. The violent crime rate declined for males but
did not change significantly for females from 2012 to 2013. From 2012 to 2013, the violent crime rate declined
for blacks while remaining flat for whites and Hispanics. The NCVS is the largest data collection on criminal victimization
independent of crimes reported by law enforcement agencies to the FBIs Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) the
nations other key measure of the extent and nature of crime in the United States.
violent crime victims received assistance from a victim service agency.

During 2013, about 90,630 households and 160,040 persons age 12 or older were interviewed for the NCVS. Since the NCVS
interviews victims of crime, homicide is not included in these nonfatal victimization estimates.

Crime DA Links
Statistics prove- prisons are key to keeping crime rates low
David Green, 06, director of think-tank Civitas, a community of researchers and
supporters committed to discovering how best to strengthen democracy, uphold
limited government, maintain personal freedom, achieve opportunity for all, and
encourage free enterprise, 6/20/15, Prison really does work,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-391584/Prison-really-does-work.html
**edited for gendered language**
A sense of deepening crisis hangs over our prison system. While public concern
mounts over short sentences for serious offenders, parts of our political elite and
judiciary express anxiety about the size of the inmate population and the
supposedly excessive use of custody. The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers,
claims that our jails are now full to capacity, barely able to cope with current
demands. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, warns that too many criminals are
being sent to prison in the first place. And a large phalanx of lobby groups, such as
the Prison Reform Trust, argues that the jail system only encourages crime by
dehumanising its inmates. It is, to use one of the campaigners' favourite slogans,
'an expensive way of making bad people worse'. But as the problem of
overcrowding becomes more intense, neither the Government nor the judicial
establishment seems willing to contemplate the obvious solution: build more
prisons. This is partly because of the perceived costs, partly because of the Leftwing ideology which holds that prisons in themselves are a bad idea. According to
such thinking, a large prison population should be regarded as a badge of shame in
a civilised society. Wasted But such an outlook is utterly misguided . For the
truth is that prisons are not only the most effective method of protecting the public
from criminal behaviour, they are also, in the long-term, cheaper than the
alternatives. The entire cost of running our prisons is just 2.2billion, barely a
fraction of the cost of the welfare state. To put it in perspective, that is smaller than
the sum wasted every year on benefit fraud. And given that the cost of crime across
the country is estimated at 60billion a year, a prison system for 2.2billion is
surely a bargain. It is absurd to argue that 21st-century Britain, one of the most
affluent countries in the world, with public expenditure now over 520billion per
year, cannot afford to build any more prisons and therefore has to treat convicted
criminals more leniently. Anti-prison campaigners are, of course, fond of claiming
that jail does not work, pointing to the high levels of re-offending among exconvicts. But this is to ignore the crucial point that when a criminal is locked up, it is
physically impossible for him [them] to commit any offences. He[They] may return
to his [their] life of crime once he is [they are] released, but at least when he is
[they are] inside, the public is safe from him [them]. There are sobering statistics
to show just how many crimes he might have committed had he not been locked up.
According to a Home Office survey in 2000, the average inmate committed 140
crimes in the 12 months before his admission into custody. On that basis, if we
locked up 10,000 more offenders a year, we could prevent 1.4 million offences,
saving the public purse a fortune as well as reducing aggravation for law-abiding
citizens. The indisputable fact is that, according to police records and the
authoritative British Crime Survey, crime levels have fallen when more offenders

have been sent to prison. Yet the conjunction of a rising jail population and
declining crime causes the anti-prison brigade to descend into tortuously illogical
thinking and intellectual absurdities as they refuse to face up to the facts. So John
Denham, the normally well-balanced Labour MP who chairs the Home Affairs Select
Committee, absurdly stated at the weekend that he could not see why we were
jailing so many people at a time of falling crime. Is he really so blinded by dogma
that he cannot see that crime is on the way down precisely because more criminals
are being kept off the streets? The lesson of recent history is that prison
works. We should be celebrating that reality by building more jails, not
wringing our hands about overcrowding . It was the Tory politician Michael
Howard who first challenged the progressive consensus. Until he became Home
Secretary in 1993, the conventional wisdom was that rising crime was inevitable
and that the duty of the Government was to keep as many offenders as possible out
of jail. Mrs Thatcher was known as the Iron Lady, but there was nothing tough
about her administration's penal policy. Successive Home Secretaries such as
Douglas Hurd and Kenneth Clarke swallowed the anti-prison line which
predominated at the Home Office, allowing the widespread use of parole, cautions,
executive early release and community sentences and massively extending
criminals' rights through measures such as the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.
As a result, the crime rate soared.

Arrestees do smuggle contraband into prisons; even minor


offendors

SCOTUS October 2011, Supreme Court of the United States, Highest Court in
America, FLORENCE v. BOARD OF CHOSEN FREEHOLDERS OF COUNTY OF
BURLINGTON ET AL, http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-945.pdf
Experience shows that people arrested for minor offenses have tried to smuggle
prohibited items into jail, sometimes by using their rectal cavities or genitals for the
concealment. They may have some of the same incentives as a serious criminal to
hide contraband. A detainee might risk carrying cash, cigarettes, or a penknife to
survive in jail. Others may make a quick decision to hide unlawful substances to
avoid getting in more trouble at the time of their arrest. This record has concrete
examples. Officers at the Atlantic County Correctional Facility, for example,
discovered that a man arrested for driving under the influence had 2 dime bags of
weed, 1 pack of rolling papers, 20 matches, and 5 sleeping pills taped under his
scrotum. Brief for Atlantic County et al. as Amici Curiae 36 (internal quotation marks
omitted). A person booked on a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct in
Washington State managed to hide a lighter, tobacco, tattoo needles, and other
prohibited items in his rectal cavity. See United States Brief 25, n. 15. San Francisco
officials have discovered contraband hidden in body cavities of people arrested for
trespassing, public nuisance, and shoplifting. San Francisco Brief 3. There have been
similar incidents at jails throughout the country. See United States Brief 25, n. 15.

Banning all strip searches would be implausible and would


increase crime
SCOTUS October 2011, Supreme Court of the United States, Highest Court in
America, FLORENCE v. BOARD OF CHOSEN FREEHOLDERS OF COUNTY OF
BURLINGTON ET AL, http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-945.pdf

It also may be difficult, as a practical matter, to classify inmates by their current and
prior offenses before the intake search. Jails can be even more dangerous than
prisons because officials there know so little about the people they admit at the
outset. See New Jersey Wardens Brief 1114. An arrestee may be carrying a false ID
or lie about his identity. The officers who conduct an initial search often do not have
access to criminal history records. See, e.g., App. 235a; New Jersey Wardens Brief
13. And those records can be inaccurate or incomplete. See Department of Justice v.
Reporters Comm. for Freedom of Press, 489 U. S. 749, 752 (1989). Petitioners rap
sheet is an example. It did not reflect his previous arrest for possession of a deadly
weapon. Tr. of Oral Arg. 1819. In the absence of reliable information it would be
illogical to require officers to assume the arrestees in front of them do not pose a
risk of smuggling something into the facility. The laborious administration of prisons
would become less effective, and likely less fair and evenhanded, were the practical
problems inevitable from the rules suggested by petitioner to be imposed as a
constitutional mandate. Even if they had accurate information about a detainees
current and prior arrests, officers, under petitioners proposed regime, would
encounter serious implementation difficulties. They would be required, in a few
minutes, to determine whether any of the underlying offenses were serious enough
to authorize the more invasive search protocol. Other possible classifications based
on characteristics of individual detainees also might prove to be unworkable or even
give rise to charges of discriminatory application. Most officers would not be well
equipped to make any of these legal determinations during the pressures of the
intake process. Bull, 595 F. 3d, at 985987 (Kozinski, C. J., concurring); see also
Welsh v. Wisconsin, 466 U. S. 740, 761762 (1984) (White, J., dissenting) ([T]he
Courts approach will necessitate a case-by-case evaluation of the seriousness of
particular crimes, a difficult task for which officers and courts are poorly equipped).
To avoid liability, officers might be inclined not to conduct a thorough search in any
close case, thus creating unnecessary risk for the entire jail population. Cf. Atwater,
532 U. S., at 351, and n. 22.

AT: Recidivism
Prisons reduce recidivism rates and teach prisoners important
skills to be introduced back into society
Zoe Williams, 10, a Guardian columnist, 12/15/10, Yes, prisons work. No, I am

not a Michael Howard clone,


http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/dec/15/prison-michael-howardrehab-punishment
Of course prison works . If you're going to have a judicial system, then it needs
armoury more than verbal censure. Imprisonment, like democracy, is the worst
possible idea until you consider all the others . The number of crimes goes down
when the prison population is high because inmates have their criminal activity
curtailed through the pesky fact that they are in prison. There are problems with
the way crime is measured: Clarke said, rather indolently, to the justice committee
that "you can argue it either way, and you can't prove it either way". I would argue
that it doesn't matter whether a high prison population reduces crime. It's like
having a herd of rampaging elephants: you can tie them all to trees, and they will
cause less damage, but you cannot deduce from this that the answer to your
elephant problem is to plant more trees. The only sensible measure of prison's
efficacy is in recidivism. Again, the figures are vexed. A study in 2003 showed
offenders on community sentences were slightly less likely to reoffend than those in
custody (43% to 55%). When Clarke made his first speech as justice secretary in
May, he said that Labour's policies had increased reoffending. This was sleight-ofhand reoffending had gone up between 2008 and 2010, but the drop was so
substantial in the eight years beforehand that Jack Straw was right when he said
last June that it had gone down overall by 20% among offenders and 24% among
young offenders. Rates of reoffending always make politicians gape at the idea
that anybody would devise a system in which more than half the offenders saw their
sentences merely as a hiatus in a life of crime. I wonder why nobody is more
amazed at the number of prisoners who come out and don't reoffend. These are
people who had already reached an accommodation with the moral implications of
criminality; who were OK with the stigma of being on the wrong side of the law; who
certainly didn't come out of prison any richer than they went in, or with more to
lose. And yet 45% come out and eschew crime anyway. How is it possible that the
prison system, devised on the hoof, in a spirit of desperation and vengeance, could
have such a socially beneficial impact on nearly half the people who pass through
it? Where prison does work, it is for these reasons: that it addresses and solves a
prisoner's addiction problems, where they exist; that it endows the prisoner with
skills, both cognitive and practical; and that it is near enough to a prisoner's family
that there's a chance of returning to a stable life at the end of the sentence. So any
justice secretary with any enthusiasm for reform would be looking to replicate these
benefits in a non-custodial context. Schemes have been conceived to do this, and
have been found not to work the rightwing think tank Civitas brandishes the
figures somewhat triumphantly. But all this shows is that non-custodial sentencing
doesn't have the teeth to enforce its own requirements. The rates of recidivism
roughly correlate to the proportion of offenders who drop out before completing a
course. As with so much education, courses on anger management, enhanced
thinking skills and rehab only work if you show up. The diametric opposition that
Howard insists upon where the tough-minded insist upon prison, and the woolly-

headed beg for community service in fluorescent tabards is totally specious. The
prison service realised three decades ago that the punitive element could never be
the main point of incarceration, only a side issue. Ken Clarke's aim to change
offenders' lives through education and rehab marks no great departure in
criminological philosophy, merely an attempt to graft the successes of the prison
service on to a cheaper, non-custodial process. And Michael Howard's ideal of
prisons as dank hellholes that really teach bad people a lesson these are a figment
of his imagination.

Impacts
The fear caused by crime results in the further subjugation of
ethnic minorities and would worsen civil rights
Mark Moore and Robert Trojaniwikz 1988, A publication of the National Institute of
Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, and the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and
Management, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University,
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/111459.pdf
When crimes occur-when a ghetto teenager is shot to death in a gang war, when an
elderly woman is mugged for her social security check, when a nurse is raped in a
hospital parking lot, when one driver is punched by another in a dispute over a
parking place, when a black family's new home is vandalized- society's attention is
naturally focused on the victims and their material losses. Their wounds, bruises,
lost property, and inconvenience can be seen, touched, and counted. These are the
concrete signs of criminal victimization. Behind the immediate, concrete losses of
crime victims, however, is a different, more abstract crime problem-that of fear. For
victims, fear is often the largest and most enduring legacy of their victimization. The
raped nurse will feel vulnerable long after her cuts and bruises heal. The harassed
black family suffers far more from the fear of neighborhood hostility than the
inconvenience of repairing their property. For the rest of us---the not-recently, or
not-yet victimized fear becomes a contagious agent spreading the injuriousness of
criminal victimization. The gang member's death makes parents despair of their
children's future. The mugging of the elderly woman teaches elderly residents to
fear the streets and the teenagers who roam them. The fight over the parking place
confirms the general fear of strangers. The harassment of the black family makes
other minorities reluctant to claim their rights. In these ways, fear extends the
damage of criminal victimization.

Fear of crime will actually increase crime control, this turns the
case
Mark Moore and Robert Trojaniwikz 1988, A publication of the National Institute of
Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, and the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and
Management, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University,
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/111459.pdf
Of course, fear is not totally unproductive. It prompts caution among citizens and
thereby reduces criminal opportunities. Too, it motivates citizens to shoulder some
of the burdens of crime control by buying locks and dogs, thereby adding to general
deterrence. And fear kindles enthusiasm for publicly supported crime control
measures. Thus, reasonable fears, channeled in constructive directions, prepare
society to deal with crime. It is only when fear is unreasonable, or generates
counterproductive responses, that it becomes a social problem. This paper explores
fear as a problem to be addressed by the police. It examines current levels and
recent trends in the fear of crime; analyzes how fear is linked to criminal
victimization; considers the extent to which fear is a distinct problem that invites
separate control strategies; and assesses the positive and negative social
consequences of fear. It then turns to what is known about the efficacy of police
strategies for managing fear, i.e., for reducing fear when it is irrational and
destructive, and for channeling fear along constructive paths when it is reasonable
and helpful in controlling crime.

Where crime increases, fear increases


Mark Moore and Robert Trojaniwikz 1988, A publication of the National Institute of
Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, and the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and
Management, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University,
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/111459.pdf
In the past, fear was viewed as primarily caused by criminal victimization. Hence,
the principal strategy for controlling crime was reducing criminal victimization. More
recently, we have learned that while fear of crime is associated with criminal
victimization, the relationship is less close than originally assumed.14 The
association between victimization and fear is seen most closely in the aggregate
patterns across time and space. Those who live in areas with high crime rates are
more afraid and take more preventive action than people living in areas where the
risk of victimization is lower.15 The trends in levels of fear seem to mirror (perhaps
with a lag) trends in levels of crime. Yet, the groups that are most fearful are not
necessarily those with the highest victimization rates; indeed, the order is exactly
reversed. Elderly women, who are most afraid, are the least frequently victimized.
Young men, who are least afraid, are most often victimized?~ Even more
surprisingly, past victimization has only a small impact on levels of fear; people who
have heard about others' victimizations are almost as fearful as those who have
actually been victimized.'' And when citizens are asked about the things that
frighten them, there is little talk about "real crimes" such as robbery, rape, and
murder. More often there is talk about other signs of physical decay and social
disorganization such as "junk and trash in vacant lots, boarded-up buildings,
stripped and abandoned cars, bands of teenagers congregating on street comers,
street prostitution, panhandling, public drinking, verbal harassment of women, open
gambling and drug use, and other incivilities."

This leads to the crumbling of communities across the nation,


taking away from their abilities to curb crime
Mark Moore and Robert Trojaniwikz 1988, A publication of the National Institute of
Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, and the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and
Management, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University,
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/111459.pdf
Second, fear motivates people to invest time and money in defensive measures to
reduce their vulnerability. They stay indoors more than they would wish, avoid
certain places, buy extra locks, and ask for special protection to make bank
deposits. Since this time, effort, and money could presumably be spent on other
things that make people happier, such expenditures must also be counted as
personal costs which, in turn, become social costs as they are aggregated. These
are far from trivial issues. The fact that two-fiths of the population is afraid and that
the Nation continues to nominate crime as one of its greatest concerns means that
society is living less securely and happily than is desirable. And if 45 percent of the
population restricts its daily behavior to minimize vulnerability, and the Nation
spends more than$20 billion on private security protection , then private
expenditures on reducing fear constitute a significant component of the national
economy." All this is in addition to the $40 billion that society spends publicly on
crime control efforts. In short, fear of crime claims a noticeable share of the Nation's
welfare and resources. Fear has a further effect. Individual responses to fear
aggregate in a way that erodes the overall quality of community life and ,

paradoxically, the overall capacity of society to deal with crime." This occurs when
the defensive reactions of individuals essentially compromise community life , or
when they exacerbate the disparities between rich and poor by relying too much on
private rather than public security.

Reform CP

1NC
Text: The United States Federal Government should enact the
Public Safety Enhancement Act.
The PSEA will reduce prison sizes, and decrease recidivism;
shields link to crime disadvantage
Andrew Cohen July 18th, 2013, fellow at Brennan Center of Justice, legal analyst

for 60 minutes, For Federal Prison Reform, the Time Has Come,
https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/federal-prison-reform-time-has-come,
Every once in a while in law and politics and government you see the coalescence
of opinion around an idea whose time has come. When that happens and it is
rare, especially when it comes to criminal justice its important to mark the
occasion and act upon it because one never knows when the moment is going to
come again.
In just the past week in Washington weve seen from various forces and in various
forms a confluence of support for criminal justice reform that has been a long time
in coming. The case has never been better for legislative reform in federal
mandatory minimum sentencing requirements and for beginning to empty our
overflowing federal prisons of inmates who should no longer be incarcerated.
Last week, on Capitol Hill, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican lawmaker from Utah,
introduced H.R. 2656, the Public Safety Enhancement Act of 2013, which if enacted
surely will help with the second problem. The measure seeks to implement creative
ways for federal law enforcement officials to determine which inmates can be most
safely and efficiently released from prison. The idea is to reduce the risk of
recidivism while at the same time providing incentive for prisoners to earn time
credits leading to early release.

The bill has support from both Republicans and Democrats;


reducing prison sentences important issue among law
enforcement
Andrew Cohen July 18th, 2013, fellow at Brennan Center of Justice, legal analyst

for 60 minutes, For Federal Prison Reform, the Time Has Come,
https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/federal-prison-reform-time-has-come,
The flip side of the coin when it comes to the nations teeming prisons are federal
sentencing rules that have taken discretion away from judges resulting in longer
sentences and onerous burdens upon taxpayers. Here, too, there has been recent
action. On Tuesday, a group of current and former federal judges, prosecutors, law
enforcement officers and others sent an open letter to Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and
Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) making a compelling case against mandatory minimum
sentencing laws and in favor of another piece of pending federal legislation, the
Justice Safety Valve Act of 2013. The authors wrote: We believe that this
outstanding achievement is the result of many factors and policies, including
smarter policing strategies and a greater reliance on severe punishment for violent
offenders. At the same time, we agree with Attorney General Eric Holders recent
statement that, Too many people go to too many prisons for far too long for no

good law enforcement reason. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws are chiefly
responsible for this wasteful use of prison space because they fail to distinguish
between violent, serious criminals and low-level, nonviolent offenders.

CP popular
Reforms are popular support from both sides of the aisle.
Sally Kohn 15, Journalist for CNN, 2-23-2015, Will one man keep Americans
locked up in prison?, http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/23/opinion/kohn-prison-reformgrassley/
Groups as disparate as the Center for American Progress and ACLU on the left and
the Koch Brothers on the right; Republican Sen. Rand Paul and Democratic Sen.
Cory Booker; and over two-thirds of the American people all support major
overhauls to America's criminal justice system . As do, presumably, the 2.2 million
Americans ensnared in our nation's costly and counterproductive current prison
system. So what's stopping reform? One man: Chuck Grassley.
The PSEA will downsize prison costs and also has widespread support from
Republicans
Andrew Cohen July 18th, 2013, fellow at Brennan Center of Justice, legal analyst
for 60 minutes, For Federal Prison Reform, the Time Has Come,
https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/federal-prison-reform-time-has-come,
This bill is an important recognition by members of Congress that many states
have successfully improved public safety and reduced correctional populations
through evidence-based programming, says Lauren-Brooke Eisen, counsel in the
Brennan Centers Justice Program. Implementing a risk and needs assessment tool
to target appropriate programming for inmates should result in better outcomes for
justice involved individuals as well as the community at large. Additionally,
incentivizing behavior with positive outcomes is a key component of this bill and is
backed up by research indicating that positive reinforcements can change
behavior. Importantly, especially for conservatives seeking to reduce the costs of
the nations inmate industrial complex, the Public Safety Enhancement Act is
designed to help address the underlying cost structure of the federal prison
system. You dont need to be an expert in criminal justice to understand the
dynamics here. If we can better identify those federal prisoners who can be safely
released, and if we can help them better prepare for a successful return to society,
we can both cut taxpayer costs and increase the tax base in a particular community.
This legislation wont solve all of the problems of mass incarceration. But it is not a
bad start, especially if lawmakers ensure that federal prison officials are willing and
able to comply with the new rules.

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