On The Good Place and Prison Abolition
Warning: Contains spoilers through the end of season 4 of The Good Place
The Good Place convinced me that prisons should be abolished. I finished the final season of the show the week of the first George Floyd protests, two weeks before a friend recommended Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, and three weeks before an op-ed advocating for police abolition was featured in The New York Times.
I felt silly and a little guilty that a goofy fantasy sitcom led me to prison abolition, rather than the actual conditions of millions of incarcerated people in the US or the scholarship and activism of the black women who’ve led the abolition movement for decades. But I think the guilt is rather pointless; after all, narratives are powerful. When reality seems too sad and immovable, stories force us to confront the things we’d rather avoid and grant us the power to reimagine what’s possible.
Lately, I’ve been fascinated by how people change their minds. I always assumed opinions were formed in moments — in emotional reactions to life events or stories, or upon hearing the arguments too convincing to be denied. But I’ve realized my own opinions evolve slowly over time. The final season of The Good Place felt like a revelation to me, but it felt that way in the context of living through a global pandemic in a city where wealth inequality is as deep as it is visible. It felt that way in the context of conversations with a few close friends with a longstanding commitment to criminal justice reform who have always encouraged me to think critically about my place in the world.
One of those friends put it this way — the moments that change our minds are the straws that break the camel’s back. But in order to have those moments at all, we need a critical mass of straw in the first place, the experiences and exposure that open us up to listening. For me, The Good Place was the straw that broke the camel’s back and transformed the way I think about criminal justice. I don’t know if it did or could do that for anyone else, but I’m writing about The Good Place and prison abolition with the hope that I can be one more straw on the camel’s back.
The Good Place is a sitcom about the justice system in the afterlife. It follows four humans (Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani), one reformed demon (Michael), and one kind-of-but-not-quite robot (Janet) as they explore and ultimately redesign the afterlife. In The Good Place, afterlife is a whimsical version of the classic Christan heaven-or-hell setup. On Earth, humans are assigned positive or negative point values for each of their actions. When they die, the afterlife accounting department tallies up the points and assigns them to either “the Good Place” or “the Bad Place.” In the Bad Place, demons torture humans using such tactics as putting spiders up butts. In the Good Place, residents achieve all their wildest dreams, including such fantasies as go-kart racing monkeys.
Heaven and hell in The Good Place are wacky, but at their core they espouse straightforward tenants; there are good people and bad people — good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell. In the course of its four seasons, The Good Place explores these concepts and questions whether they should be the backbone of the afterlife justice system.
The first major point the show makes is that people don’t make decisions in a vacuum. Humans are shaped by their childhoods, the people who surround them, their material conditions, and their societies. The first two seasons explore this theme in the lives of its main characters. Eleanor is selfish because her parents were selfish and forced her to fend for herself from a young age. Jason is impulsive because that was all he learned from his father and friends. Tahani is vain because her parents conditioned their love on her accomplishments. All of our main characters end up in the Bad Place, but the show forces us to ask — to what extent can we blame them for their actions on Earth? Once we understand the context and root causes behind the “bad” lives they lived, do we still want to condemn them to eternal damnation?
Season three expands this critique from the individual to broader societal forces. In episode ten, the protagonists discover that no one in the past 521 years has qualified for the Good Place at all. The world has become so complicated, with each individual’s actions contributing to so many unintended effects, that even the most well-intentioned people cause more harm than good.
Michael realizes this when he compares the point totals of someone giving their grandmother a flower in 1500 vs 2009. In 1500, the gift netted one individual 145 points. In 2009, the thoughtfulness of the gift was overshadowed by all its unintended effects and inadvertent support of harmful systems. The flowers were grown with harmful pesticides, picked by exploited workers, ordered via a cell phone whose manufacture had its own negative environmental and human rights impacts, and delivered from thousands of miles away. The flower picker actually lost points for his gift.
I suspect this episode of The Good Place resonated deeply with many of its viewers who face thousands of little decisions a day with complex moral implications. If these viewers are anything like me, they felt comforted by the message of the episode — I shouldn’t be classified as a “bad person” for making decisions that cause harm, because there are very few options that don’t cause harm under a system of global capitalism. I was happy to reach this conclusion when it applied to me and the way I judged myself, but upon initially watching, I failed to extend this logic beyond me. What is the actual set of choices available to people who commit crimes? Is it possible that the causes of those crimes are not only personal choices influenced by childhoods and material conditions, but entire systems far beyond the individual?
But even if you believe that at the core, there are good people who make good choices and bad people who make bad choices, The Good Place argues these classifications are nonsensical, because most, if not all people are redeemable under the right conditions.
The characters of The Good Place discover this by accident. For thousands of years, the classic Bad Place torture chamber leaves no room for rehabilitation. The sole purpose of the Bad Place is to punish those who’ve wronged; rehabilitation is not the point.
Michael, however, inadvertently creates the conditions for rehabilitation in the afterlife. His goal is to create a new kind of psychological torture. Residents are told they’re in the Good Place while Michael and his team of demons create scenarios that frustrate the residents and remind them of their deepest flaws. Michael’s fake Good Place neighborhood initially causes Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani much consternation, but it ultimately creates the right conditions for them to become better people.
In the neighborhood, the tortured humans live in close communities that foster friendship, and in turn selflessness. They have the time and resources (in the form of Chidi’s philosophy knowledge) to learn about how to be good people. Michael’s psychological torture reminds them of their flaws and encourages self-reflection. They don’t have to interact with anybody from their life on Earth who left them with baggage and they never lack for any material need, so they’re able to make good decisions without the complications of Earth.
This environment is so ripe for rehabilitation that no matter how many times Michael reboots his neighborhood and restarts the experiment, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason become better people. And they’re not the only ones; in season four, the crew explicitly sets out to prove that the same thing happens to other humans. After one year in a Good Place neighborhood, two of the new human guinea pigs, Simone and John, become objectively better people. The third test subject, Brett, is arrogant, misogynistic, and self-deluded. Despite the difficulties Eleanor and Michael face in rehabilitating him, he ends his stay in the neighborhood with his first ever apology.
If rehabilitation is possible, but the traditional Bad Place was never trying to encourage it, what was the point of all that torture? In The Good Place, the answer lies the demons’ obsession with cruelty. They don’t care what the purpose of their torture is, as long as they get to hurt their residents in increasingly creative ways.
The Good Place doesn’t suggest alternate explanations, but they’re worth exploring. Does the Bad Place exist to keep the “bad people” away from the “good people”, so the residents of the Good Place are able to enjoy it at peace? Does it exist to encourage humans to be good in their lifetimes, the stick of “carrot and stick”?
If we accept that people are shaped by their surroundings and they are redeemable, then the former explanation doesn’t hold. Why separate the “bad people” from the “good people” if the primary distinction between the two groups are forces outside their individual choices? Why not try to rehabilitate the “bad people” in order to reintegrate the two groups?
The latter hypothesis is a common explanation for religion’s existence. Divine rules and the fear of eternal damnation motivate individuals to act in “good” ways. And yet, does this system work? The characters of The Good Place are motivated to be better people when they learn the rules of the afterlife. Eleanor in particular never tried to be good during her life on Earth, but becomes deeply motivated once she understands she could be sent to the Bad Place. And yet, this fear of the Bad Place alone is not enough to push her into making good choices. She ends up looking for loopholes in order to do the minimum necessary to make it into the Good Place. In fact, within The Good Place’s point system, Eleanor can’t gain points for good actions at all if her motivation is to get into the Good Place; those actions are considered selfish. Instead, it’s Eleanor’s friendship with the other main characters that forms the motivation to improve herself.
The Good Place’s final season ends with the main characters redesigning a new afterlife justice system altogether. In the new system, everyone has the opportunity to examine their mistakes and learn about how to be a good person before taking a test that determines whether they’ll be admitted into the Good Place. By the time the system is introduced in the penultimate episode, it feels like a no-brainer, the only possible way to design a truly just afterlife. When the demons and the all-knowing Judge suddenly accept the suggested solution after many episodes of opposing this very change, I don’t mind the narrative improbability. The moral arc of the show has taken precedence over the storyline, and the ending is the fitting conclusion to four seasons of philosophical questioning.
The primary lessons of The Good Place, that people don’t make decisions in a vacuum and that everyone is capable of growth and change in the right conditions, are a few of the anchors of prison abolition.
A New York Times profile of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, one of the leading scholars and activists on prison abolition, defines the movement in the following way:
“Abolition means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of vital systems of support that many communities lack. Instead of asking how, in a future without prisons, we will deal with so-called violent people, abolitionists ask how we resolve inequalities and get people the resources they need long before the hypothetical moment, when, as Gilmore puts it, they ‘mess up.’”
We tend to think of crime in terms of “personal responsibility.” While we acknowledge that offenders may have had difficult childhoods or fewer choices, we think of these as mitigating factors, reasons we should have slightly more compassion. Prison abolition, on the other hand, flips this on the head and sees these individual and societal reasons as root causes. In Are Prisons Obsolete? Angela Davis discusses alternatives to prisons such as better schools, affordable physical and mental healthcare, and accessible drug rehabilitation programs (Davis 107–109). Both intuition and empirical studies show that education, mental health treatment, and drug abuse treatment reduce crime. If we believe that better resources could prevent the majority of crime, what does that reveal about the moral culpability of offenders? To what extent can we hold them responsible for individual “bad” decisions?
Beyond individual decisions, the prison abolition movement, like The Good Place, focuses on rehabilitation.
Today, no one makes the argument that prisons are meant to rehabilitate offenders. This wasn’t always the case though. When prisons first became widespread as a form of punishment in the US and Europe in the eighteenth century, they were introduced as a more humane form of punishment compared to the death penalty or torture. Many of the prison’s early advocates were religious and believed solitary confinement, in its similarities to the monastery, was the best condition for self-reflection and rehabilitation (Davis 48). The prison gained popularity in the eighteenth century due to belief in individual rehabilitation, rather than disregard for it. Davis cites English scholar John Bender’s work, which draws parallels between the rise of the novel and the rise of the prison:
The new penitentiaries, according to Bender, “supplanting both the old prisons and houses of correction, explicitly reached towards… three goals: maintenance of order within largely urban labor force, salvation of the soul, and rationalization of personality.” He argues that this is precisely what was narratively accomplished by the novel. It ordered and classified social life, it represented individuals as conscious of their surroundings and as self-aware and self-fashioning. Bender thus sees a kinship between two major developments of the eighteenth century — the rise of the novel in the cultural sphere and the rise of the penitentiary in the socio-legal sphere. If the novel as a cultural form helped to produce the penitentiary, then prison reformers must have been influenced by the ideas generated by and through the eighteenth-century novel. (Davis, 54)
Despite some of the noble intentions behind the initial rise of the prison, solitary confinement has never actually provided the right conditions for rehabilitation. As early as 1842, Charles Dickens described solitary confinement as torture and opposed to its intentions for reformation after a visit to a penitentiary (Davis 48). Since then, we’ve lost the intention to rehabilitate in prisons altogether. That’s especially apparent in the gradually dwindling resources for prison education programs. In 1994, after many years of decreasing funding, the congressional Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act “eliminated all Pell Grants for prisoners, thus effectively defunding all higher educational programs” (Davis 58).
Any enthusiastic viewer of The Good Place, and most people for that matter, would agree that individuals are capable of growth and change, and that rehabilitation is a worthy goal. If prisons don’t do this, why do they exist? Do they keep us safe from offenders by locking them away? Do they encourage people to commit less crimes out of a fear of punishment? Are we just the demons of The Good Place with a secret love for cruelty?
In order to address the former two possibilities, Ruth Wilson Gilmore asks the question “do prisons work?” She’s less interested in whether we should have empathy for offenders or believe in forgiveness. Her point is that instead of addressing the root causes of crime, prisons recreate the conditions from which crime emerges. The NYT profile of Gilmore explains:
Gilmore told them that in the unusual event that someone in Spain thinks he is going to solve a problem by killing another person, the response is that the person loses seven years of his life to think about what he has done, and to figure out how to live when released. “What this policy tells me,” she said, “is that where life is precious, life is precious.” Which is to say, she went on, in Spain people have decided that life has enough value that they are not going to behave in a punitive and violent and life-annihilating way toward people who hurt people. “And what this demonstrates is that for people trying to solve their everyday problems, behaving in a violent and life-annihilating way is not a solution.”
I’m not the first person to draw parallels between The Good Place and prison abolition. Both The Verge and The New York Times have published reviews explaining The Good Place’s critique of the prison system, but comments on the analyses call them “a stretch” and “a load of ‘bullshirt’”. The Good Place had about four million viewers every season, an IMDB rating of 8.2, and rave reviews from critics and viewers, but prison abolition is far from a mainstream opinion.
Why are we so hesitant to draw parallels between the show and our world? Angela Davis would argue that it’s because we believe prisons are inevitable and because they’re too painful to think about. She writes:
On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted. It is difficult to imagine life without them. At the same time, there is reluctance to face the realities hidden within them, a fear of thinking about what happens inside them…Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including ourselves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives. (Davis 15)
Moreover, we struggle to draw parallels between ourselves and prisoners because it’s easy to think of those who commit crimes as “others.”
In the past few years, Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow and Ava DuVernay’s film 13th have spurred wider conversation of criminal justice reform. In their critiques of the existing system, they paint a picture of the prison population as mostly black, non-violent offenders exploited for their labor in private prisons. This image allows us to sidestep the problem of guilt altogether; we’re more comfortable feeling outrage over racism, slavery, or abuse of the innocent. Gilmore explains, however, that the majority of prisoners in the US are neither black, nor non-violent offenders, nor in private prisons. The NYT profile elaborates:
When people are looking for the relative innocence line,” Gilmore told me, “in order to show how sad it is that the relatively innocent are being subjected to the forces of state-organized violence as though they were criminals, they are missing something that they could see. It isn’t that hard. They could be asking whether people who have been criminalized should be subjected to the forces of organized violence. They could ask if we need organized violence.”
Racism and drug arrests and private prisons are problems within the criminal justice system. Gilmore, however, points to a more fundamental problem, the same one championed by The Good Place — that wrongdoing does not need to be followed by violent punishment, that there are better options that address root causes and focus on rehabilitation.
The profile of Gilmore is titled Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind. When I read it over a year ago, I found it interesting and persuasive, but it didn’t accomplish its goal. Prison abolition seemed to me too radical and unrealistic to be a stance worth adopting. There are many things The Good Place did for me that arguments based in the real world did not, but perhaps the most important was that it removed me from what exists and refocused me on what should be. Change requires a sense of hope and possibility, and in providing those qualities, narratives have an indispensable role in changing our minds.
