The radical proposal to shut down prisons by the Left, such as the US Democrat radicals, is not primarily a technical argument about sentencing guidelines or rehabilitation programs. At its core it is a rejection of the idea that a free society requires a functioning system of coercion against those who prey on others. When activists and theorists speak of prison abolition, they are not merely calling for fewer people behind bars or better conditions. They are advancing the claim that the very institution of incarceration is illegitimate, a relic of oppression that must be dismantled and replaced by softer instruments: restorative justice circles, expanded social work, community investment, and therapeutic intervention. The difficulty is that these alternatives have hard limits, and pretending otherwise does not make the limits disappear.
Criminal justice exists because some people repeatedly and deliberately harm others. A small fraction of offenders accounts for a large share of serious violence and predation. For these individuals, the primary function of prison is not moral improvement or social reintegration. It is incapacitation. While they are locked up they cannot rob, assault, or kill people outside. Deterrence and rehabilitation matter, but they are secondary to the simple fact that a person in a cell is not on the street. Any serious discussion of "ending" prisons must confront this reality rather than dissolve it into language about systemic harm and collective care.
Restorative justice has a legitimate place. When an offense is limited, the offender accepts responsibility, and the victim is willing to participate, mediated processes can produce accountability and some measure of repair that a purely punitive sentence does not. Certain low-level property crimes, youthful impulsivity, and first-time non-violent offenses can respond to this approach. The problem arises when the method is treated as a general substitute for the criminal justice system. Predatory offenders, repeat violent criminals, and those who feel no remorse, do not become safe because a facilitator has arranged a dialogue. Social work and mental-health interventions likewise help some people at the margins. Stable housing, treatment for addiction, and early support for at-risk youth can reduce the pipeline into crime for a portion of the population. They do not neutralise the subset of offenders whose behaviour is driven by impulse control deficits, psychopathy, or calculated exploitation.
The historical record is not kind to the idea that soft measures alone can replace confinement. Jurisdictions that sharply reduced enforcement and incarceration without corresponding gains in social order have often seen measurable increases in disorder and violence. The pattern is familiar: rhetoric about root causes is followed by visible deterioration in public safety, after which the same advocates insist the real failure was insufficient funding for the alternatives. This cycle treats empirical feedback as ideological inconvenience rather than information.
None of this requires defending every excess of the existing system. Overly long sentences for non-violent drug offenses, inadequate mental-health care inside prisons, and failures of re-entry support, are real problems that deserve reform. Smarter differentiation between offenders, diverting the low-risk while incapacitating the high-rate and dangerous, is both possible and desirable. But reform is not abolition. The radical demand to shut down prisons collapses that distinction. It treats the coercive core of criminal justice as the disease rather than as the imperfect instrument that protects the rest of society from those who will not be constrained by norms, therapy, or community pressure.
A society that cannot bring itself to remove dangerous people from circulation will eventually discover the cost in the lives of its most vulnerable members. Social programs and restorative processes are tools. They are not a replacement for the hard edge of law. When the language of abolition presents them as such, it is not advancing compassion. It is advancing a denial of the problem that prisons exist to solve.
https://www.cato.org/blog/contradictions-socialist-prison-abolitionism