Halfway To Prison Abolition
With talk of abolishing prisons in vogue (and the specific meaning apparently up for debate), it might be useful to at least imagine what some steps towards abolition might look like.
I speak from the perspective of a public defender. When I first started I was bewildered by how many societal problems were dealt with through the criminal justice system. Focusing on misdemeanors for now, about 90% of cases were driving with a suspended license, DUI, shoplifting, or domestic violence assault.
Criminalizing driving because of a suspended license is the stupidest fucking thing ever in the field of traffic enforcement. The prosecutors still filed the charges but they always offered a deal where if you agree it turned into a $250 ticket. The typical scenario was guy gets pulled over, guy gets ticket, guy forgets about ticket, unpaid traffic fines suspend your license, guy gets pulled over again, driving with a suspended license is a crime. Ta-da! There were thousands of people churning through the system because they were too poor or too forgetful to pay traffic tickets, and some of them were even arrested for missing court on these charges! I always thought the solution was really easy: instead of using fines as a deterrent, just use points. Any traffic infraction that you are guilty of costs nothing, but it does take away points from your driver's license. If you accumulate enough points fast enough, then you lose the privilege of driving, and then maybe you can start arresting people. This also means you can resort to a traffic-only enforcement officers who don't have and don't need arrest powers.
Similarly with DUIs. This is more of a pie in the sky issue but it's just baffling to combine sprawling development with a robust drinking culture. DUIs were by far the most intersectional charge in the system; virtually every demographic will eventually get one because it wasn't really an issue unique to anyone. Almost everyone drinks, almost every drives, so it's only a matter of time. If you live in a dense city, getting a DUI is just fucking dumb because you have so many options to get home, most of them far more convenient than trying to wrestle for parking. With self-driving cars, this issue might just disappear on its own.
With shoplifting, I think the solution here is simple as well. By far, the vast majority of shoplifting charges were motivated by habitual drug users. They'd steal, almost always flagrantly, and either pawn it off or try a fraudulent return to get cash to buy heroin. Solution? Give people free heroin. Switzerland already does this. You still have the problems associated with the drug itself, but the associated property crime that support the habit virtually collapses.
Domestic violence? Who knows.
I can write a ton more on other parts of the criminal justice system but these issues would make a huge dent on the country's prison population without abolishing it completely.
Regarding the free heroin proposal (which I think is mostly genuine, not *modest*), I've wondered about that in regard to San Francisco. The city has provided addicts with housing, medical care, food, spending money, safe places to shoot up, narcan, etc. But they still need more money to buy drugs on their own, so theft and shoplifting continues. And even gets worse, as more people are attracted to the location for it's relative legal tolerance. If the city could also just give them the drugs too, maybe that would be a relative win/win - some people would disappear into city services who houses and cares for them while providing them the drugs they prefer, but with much less impact on strangers.
But then there are the videos of zombie like folks standing (or bent over) on the sidewalk, oblivious to what's going on around them. Is facilitating that (but in a safe non-public space where it didn't impact other citizens) being caring, or would it turn into a cruel parody of caring, helping people gradually kill themselves with as little inconvenience to others as possible?
From time to time, a recovering addict writes about their life, and I've yet to read one success who advocated for a soft policy on drugs and the law. They typically describe being enabled for years to continue by "harm reduction programs", until some event caused them to change (like going to jail for more than a short period, or sometimes having a child - which obviously don't have that effect for everybody). Some do report that recovery programs which give them a lot of space at the beginning, while they pull their minds together, before requiring them to go more deeply into counseling, as being helpful - so they are not advocating meanness for the sake of meanness or mistreatment. Just stopping the shielding from due consequences out of "kindness".
I'd like to hear their perspective on free heroin, fentanyl, tranc, meth etc as another datapoint.