On Saturday, I received an e-mail from a former prisoner who apparently reads this blog. He had a lot of lovely things to say about it and I am grateful for the kind words. He also wanted to let me know that because I had never been incarcerated I was naive about prison abolition. I asked for permission to quote a couple of sentences from his e-mail to me and he agreed:

“I have read some of the essays that you write about prison abolition. I was locked up for 11 years and there are some monsters in prison. They definitely should not be roaming the streets…There really are some bad people there. The majority are not bad people but there are some monsters on the inside. We are always going to need prisons.”

If any of you have worked inside prisons or with former prisoners on the outside, I am sure that you will not be surprised by the sentiments expressed by this gentleman. My friend Jessi Lee Jackson who is an abolitionist writes about her experience with this issue brilliantly in an article co-authored with Erica Meiners titled “Feeling Like a Failure: Teaching/Learning Abolition Through the Good the Bad and the Innocent” which appeared in Radical Teacher last year.

It is the 8th week of English class in our adult high school completion program, and we have just read a short excerpt from Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? As a class, we review vocabulary words, and then, piece by piece, work to understand Davis’s argument for prison abolition. All of the students have firsthand experience of the system, and they agree that the prison system is clearly racist in its impact. But when we get to the point of discussing abolition — of shutting down prisons — the class quiets. The disagreements start. “I agree with abolishing the death penalty, but…” “But some people need to get locked up.” “I agree we need to change the system, but getting rid of prisons entirely,,,” “It’s too much…” “I don’t think we need to go that far…”

I find myself in the awkward position of being the only person without direct experience of being locked up, and the only vocal abolitionist. By the end of our conversation, I perceive that students have made up their minds and are united in their analysis: the prison system is messed up, but abolition is “going too far.” I wonder to myself what went wrong in our conversation. Why was I not able to present abolition in a way that challenged people to go further or question their assumptions about the necessity of prisons?

So many of us have been exactly where Jessi was in discussing prison abolition be it with family & friends or in a classroom setting. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what I mean when I talk about prison abolition so I won’t go back over that old ground again. I do however want to share an excerpt of what I wrote to the gentleman who reached out to me on Saturday. These passages most directly address themselves to the issue of how we should deal with people who do bad things.

Thank you for sharing your story with me. In particular, I want to thank you for your honesty in letting me know that you felt that you “did a bad thing” that landed you in prison. Rather than focusing on the “bad act” that you committed, I want you to know that what I appreciated most was that you acknowledged the hurt that you had caused to so many. So I have a question for you? Do you consider yourself to be a bad person? Or do you believe that you did a bad thing? I am asking because so often when people reach out to me or talk to me about “bad people” I want to understand their definition of the term. You see just because I want to see an end to prisons does not mean that I do not know that crimes are committed and that violence is prevalent in our culture. I just do not believe that prisons are an adequate response to both of these issues.

Let’s say that I agree with your premise that some “bad people need to be in prison.” I am curious about whether you think that 50% of the people you served time with are “bad people” or is the number closer to 30%? Is it 10% or maybe 5%? I really am interested in your thoughts on the matter. If as I suspect, you tell me that the number is closer to 10 or 20%, then I would ask you to consider how inefficient and immoral it is for us to be locking up the other 70 or 80%. What might your thoughts be about that?

Let’s say that we found another way besides prison to address the various problems that the majority (70-80%) have, how would you propose that we handle the remaining 10 to 20 percent of people who you contend “need to be locked up?” The minority should not dictate how we handle the majority.

You wrote eloquently and movingly about your incarceration experience. You wrote about the brutality, loneliness, and inhumanity of the experience. You told me that it “didn’t make [you] better.” If this is true, then what will happen to positively impact the so-called “bad people” who remain behind bars? Are we just expected to lock them up and throw away the key?

An aging prison population is already putting major strains on states because of the costs associated with their healthcare. As you also know, most prisoners are released eventually. So the majority of the so-called “bad people” that you speak of will eventually be let out of prison one day in the future. Based on your own assessment, prison will not have made them “better.”

If you agree with the points that I have made, then it is incumbent for you to consider abolition as one of the options for addressing the problem of mass incarceration. As my friends Erica and Jessi have written, “[w]orking toward abolition means transforming our communities and creating structures that reduce the demand and need for prisons.” We can begin there. It is important sometimes to push ourselves to imagine ‘a world without prisons.’ What would we do? How would we solve problems without disappearing people?

My response was much longer than what is quoted and have already received another e-mail in response to mine. Suffice it to say that I was right in estimating that he believes that 10 to 15% of prisoners that he served time with should stay locked up. I look forward to continuing the exchange. I don’t have definitive answers to all of the questions that are asked about prison abolition, I only know that it is important that abolition be on the table as one of the options for how to dismantle the prison industrial complex. One’s orientation to the problem of incarceration is different if approached from an abolition lens. The landscape of possibilities is more expansive and it pushes beyond bandaid reforms to a focus on uprooting oppression and transforming society. So I welcome the dialogue about what to do with the so-called ‘bad people’ as long the person that I am engaging is willing to consider that the “bad people” are not the end all and be all in discussions about prisons. In fact, for me, they should not even be the starting point. How about we begin with the majority (90%) of people who are currently locked up and shouldn’t be?