What is prison? Are prisons needed? What are their purposes? Some people say “Prison reform”, some people say “Prison abolition.” Although some think abolition is the best possible result for the current prison system, prison reform is more important than prison abolition because the prison system is one of the most important and inevitable factors to have a stable society.
“There are 2.2 million people in the nation’s prisons and jails — a 500% increase over the last 40 years. Changes in law and policy, not changes in crime rates, explain most of this increase.”. With the tendency of increasing crime rates, the issue here is a large number of people overcrowding inside the prisons of the United States. It burdens the country financially and emotionally, it has also presented as unequal and inhumane in some ways. Because of this reason, a controversial topic has pushed it to a noticeable level due to different perspectives about prisons in the United States. “American prisons house more than 1.5 million individuals, an increase of more than 390% since 1978. This growth persisted even in the face of an overarching decline in crime rates since the 1990s and the longest terms of incarceration since we began to collect accurate data.” From the 1980s-1982s, the crime rate has increased by 25%. There were many studies that showed that in the 1980s the crime rate started to spike up, and it has continued to spike up for approximately 10 years. The graphs below show the rates for various violent crimes and property crimes during recent decades. “Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation (2008)”.
Since about 1990, the trend has been downward. The act called “The War on Drugs” started in the 1980s. The researchers commonly believe this act is the major cause that prompted crime to spike up. The drug problem has been the mainstream of charging people with drug offenses according to their local laws, “The number of people incarcerated for drug offenses in the U.S. skyrocketed from 40,900 in 1980 to 452,964 in 2017.”, the amount of drug charges has decreased slightly since the open policy of marijuana in some states. In the discussion of comparing the ideas between “Prison reform” and “Prison abolition”, we need to first understand the concept of crime, “Crime is a socially harmful act or omission that breaches the values protected by a state.”, crime can be understood as “deviance”, it is a recognized violation of cultural norms. Violations occur in multiple directions away from the norm, which branches out into the different types of crime. Famous sociologist Emile Durkheim claims that deviance was “normal”; he argued that deviance is a rational and necessary piece of any society because it contributes to the social order. His argument fundamentally presented us that deviance defines our social collective moral standard because there can be no good without evil and no justice without crime. Deviance will also contribute to unifying any society because people draw a boundary between right and wrong; people typically react to serious deviance with shared outrage, so deviance helps society to push social change because meanwhile deviant people push a society’s moral boundaries, some people tend to see it as a negative example for their behavior control. Sociologist Robert K. Merton argued, “Society may be set up in a way that encourages too much deviance.” One of the most iconic factors that relate to deviance is his theory of “Rebellion”,(Source: Merton (1968).) he thinks that rebellion defines new goals and means for the society. this his theory is close to what Emile Durkheim argued: “Deviance promotes social changes.”, or perhaps more specific, “Behavior only becomes deviant or criminal if defined and interfered as such by specific people in a specific situation.”. Sociologist Frank Tannenbaum and Howard S. Becker’s “Labeling” theory believes that people are designed to behave the way they are ascribed to. Ascribing means people are given an identity for social development. For example, a teenager who is defined as deviant might begin to act deviant, he is committed to making his label real to fit everyone’s expectation. Sociologist Edwin Sutherland proposed his theory “Through interaction with others, individuals learn the values, attitudes, techniques, and motives for criminal behavior.” According to his claim, Durkheim believes that deviant behavior is learned, he also believes that reaps rewards while the lack of it reaps punishment, which means if associates are prone to violation of norms for rewards with an environment that lacks proper punishment, then one is also more likely to take part.
Here is another reason why prison should exist — “Stigma”. A powerful negative label that greatly changes a person’s self-concept and social identity, sometimes when society is incapable of pushing and defining people’s standardized behavior and moral standard, stigma works as a “master status”. This is a social position that is the primary identifying characteristic of an individual; it has an enormous impact on people, it can effectively perform restriction on people’s behavior, especially nowadays with the Hip-Hop culture where “gangster rap” increasingly promotes drug abuse and violent behavior over time. A society like this needs a symbol of retribution, which an act of moral vengeance by which society makes the offender suffer as much as the suffering caused by the crime, for example, “Prison”.
Even the current prison system in the United State has many flaws. The lack of control in security, cheap labor, and fragile constitution for human rights, it is still unreplaceable factor for the society. Therefore the prison system can not be stripped away. There are some imperfections indeed, it needs better structure and ways of operation, as well as a better practice on the treatments of inmates
However, many sociologists consistently agreed that punishment is demanded by society and has proven that prison is an inevitable factor, a symbol of punishment, and a safety guideline for social moral standards throughout their researches. Although some think abolition is the best result in the current prison system, prison reform is more important than prison abolition because the prison system is one of the most important and inevitable factors to have a stable society.
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