This is an open letter to some of my progressive friends who keep talking about “jailing” the banksters. It may be unpopular.

Dear Friends,

For the past three years, I have ignored your comments about the need to put some of the bankers and Wall Street financiers in jail/prison for their role in destroying our economy. I felt that you needed to blow off some steam and that you were entitled to be hyperbolic in doing so. I too am incredibly angry over their actions. I too want some form of accountability.

Well we are now three years removed from the 2008 economic meltdown and the Occupy Wall Street movement is nascent. This is an exciting time and I feel so grateful that the national conversation has shifted to addressing economic justice. However in the midst of this mass mobilization of the dispossessed, I still hear you talking about jailing the robber barons of Wall Street. In fact, you are on the streets holding up signs to this effect:

The air is ripe with anxiety, anger, and demands for “justice.” Crusading documentarians declare that they hope their films will lead to the prosecution of bankers. When I turn on my television, I hear you suggesting that nonviolent protestors are being arrested while not a single banker has been.

I am with you on the fact that nonviolent protestors should be allowed to freely demonstrate. However, we part ways when you compare their treatment to that of criminal bankers. My reason: I don’t think that we will get “justice” because one banker finds him or herself locked up in a cell. I guess that our definitions of “justice” differ.

I hear you insisting that if bankers were jailed, we would have more fairness in our economy. I don’t believe you when you make this case. I don’t think that you really believe this to be true either. It is capitalism that breeds inequality and we have to dismantle it to bring more fairness.

I want to share a few words about prison with you. Prison is a terrible place. I know that you already know this and you may not care. You may think that criminal bankers deserve to spend time in hell for their actions. Yet somehow because I know that most progressives are particularly concerned with humaneness, I cannot accept that the knowledge that prisons are torture chambers will leave you unmoved. Prisons do not deter or rehabilitate; they make people worse.

We agree on so many other issues. But on this one, the jailing of bankers, we part company. I do not want to further extend the reach of the prison industrial complex. The solution to injustice is not to heap more injustice on top of it. There is a quote by Buckminster Fuller making the rounds on Facebook over the last few days and it is relevant to our discussion today:

In other words, what I want is a new model for addressing all forms of harm. The current legal system is oppressive, inhumane, corrupt and irreparably broken. I think that forcing criminal bankers to make restitution for their harms by paying back money that they stole would provide more accountability for their actions than prison ever will. I believe that a “sentence” of spending three years figuring out how to develop truly affordable housing for the poor would provide accountability. There are dozens of other creative ways that we could insist that bankers contribute to the commons without incarcerating them. I don’t want anyone locked in cages and this includes odious banksters.

I want to bring up another point of contention with you. True economic justice also involves dismantling the prison industrial complex. Many prisoners are exploited for cheap labor. Our unemployment rate is held artificially low by locking people up and taking them out of the labor market. Finally as the National Prison Industry Divestment Campaign makes clear, Wall Street profits through its investment in the prison industrial complex too.

I want to stand in solidarity with you, my progressive friends, who are calling out corporate greed and advocating for economic justice. I desperately want to do this but I am asking that all of us reject the viscerally reflexive calls for more incarceration. We already have a national policy of mass incarceration. Let’s not play into this by criminalizing more people. Instead how about we imagine and build a world without prisons where we can still get accountability for harm done? Let’s expand on the positive vision of a country free of the plague of mass incarceration. What we need in these times is a mass movement that also calls for decarceration. Progressives need to be in the forefront of this movement which should be linked to our calls for economic and social justice. See you at the next rally, I’ll be the one carrying the sign marked: “Don’t Jail the Bankers, Occupy Prisons Instead.”

Peace to you all.

Signed Your Friend, Prison Culture.