C4SS Feed 44 presents Nathan Goodman‘s “Prisons: The Case for Abolition” from the Students for a Stateless Society‘s Volume 1, Issue 3 of THE NEW LEVELLER read and edited by Nick Ford. People often ask what we would do about rapists and murderers without prisons. But as Dean Spade puts it, “The prison is the serial killer; the prison is…

For libertarian prison abolitionists, Randy Barnett’s The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law is an indispensable book. Not only does Barnett offer a persuasive series of arguments for a stateless legal order, he further argues against the legitimacy of punishment altogether. However, even as crucial as Barnett’s work is for libertarian prison…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David Grobgeld‘s “The Cynicism and Futility of Imprisonment” read Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford. The prison system is built on a fundamental paradox of principles. On the one hand, its defenders make pragmatic, consequentialist arguments like “we need to send a clear message to criminals.” But all evidence points to…

Do we want cops and politicians to go to prison? Is that a demand that individualist anarchists, radical libertarians, and other enemies of the state should get behind? Intuitively, it seems like we should. We’re instinctively outraged that cops can outright murder people and almost never get locked up for it. We’re understandably incensed that politicians…

A new report from the Open Society Justice Initiative documents the overuse of pretrial detention around the globe. The report estimates that around 3.3 million people are currently incarcerated awaiting trial. These people have yet to be convicted of any crime, yet they are locked in cages and subjected to brutal human rights abuses. Martin Schoenteich…

For this week’s Weekly Abolitionist post, I’d like to emphasize the importance of holding a specifically abolitionist stance on prisons. Getting rid of prisons is not just one more reform to tack on after we’ve accomplished everything else. It’s the primary goal, and all other reforms should be judged with that in mind. The key…

Recently in the Los Angeles Times, Carolina A. Miranda published a list of “8 eye-opening prison books.” Out of the books listed, I’ve only read Angela Davis’s excellent treatise on the prison-industrial complex, Are Prisons Obsolete.  I’ll be adding the rest to my reading list, however. This got me thinking about what I would recommend…

Prisons are the antithesis of all we stand for as anarchists. While we seek a society built around peace and bodily autonomy, prisons are violent institutions that trap inmates at gunpoint and make them vulnerable to rape and murder. Where we seek justice through restitution, reconciliation, and self-defense, prisons are based on punitive vengeance. While…

Since Nathan Goodman has asked me to fill in for him this week on The Weekly Abolitionist, I’d like to focus on something important to radical political struggles that isn’t talked about much: fiction. As prison abolitionists, we can talk at length about the ways that prisons as such encourage abuse, add to recidivism, interlock…

On July 7th, Molly Knefel published a great piece on jury nullification in The Nation. Knefel opens by discussing the trial of Cecily McMillan, an Occupy Wall Street protester who was convicted of “assaulting” a police officer who had assaulted her, and sentenced to a prison term that most of the jurors who convicted her…

Dylan Matthews recently published an article at Vox titled Prisons are terrible, and there’s finally a way to get rid of them. Matthews’ article starts out strong, beginning with an explanation of the horrific costs of prisons. He describes the appalling rates of physical and sexual assault, the data on systemic racism, and the costs…

This Wednesday, June 25th at the Salt Lake City Library, I will discuss Ending the Prison State in Utah with Kirsten Tynan, director of the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA). I’m quite excited about this. I’ve admired FIJA’s work for a long time. Their work educating people across the political spectrum about jury rights and jury nullification helps…

This week marks the 2014 National Week of Action Against Incarcerating Youth. Across the country, actions will be held to protest everything from the criminalization of queer and disabled youth to the isolation of youth in solitary confinement. Ultimately, what activists are protesting is systematic child abuse by the state. Kids are being locked in…

Jeffrey Tucker of Liberty.me takes on the tricky topic of prisons and the market solution with Cory Massimino.

Robert Johannes, a 73 year old man, is currently incarcerated in Michigan. His attorney, Daniel E. Manville, contends that inadequate access to dental care has left Johannes missing teeth for extended periods of time and unable to eat. As Michigan Live reported, “The lawsuit claims that Johannes has had several teeth removed, including three bicuspids and…

Palestinian prisoners incarcerated in Israeli jails are not allowed conjugal visits. They have no physical contact with loved ones, and all visits have a glass barrier between visitors and inmates. But prisoners and their wives are finding a route around this social control by smuggling sperm out of prison and using in vitro fertilization to…

The following article contains graphic description of a sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised. Occasionally I see a headline that makes me want to cheer. “Corporations Divest Nearly $60 Million From Private Prison Industry” was such a headline. As Katie Rose Quandt reported in Mother Jones: Scopia Capital Management, DSM North America, and Amica Mutual…

Last week I had the great pleasure of attending the Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE) annual conference. I saw many excellent presentations, including Ed Stringham’s talk on anarchism, Abigail Hall presenting a paper on how foreign wars bring repression home, David Skarbek discussing prison gangs as self-governing institutions that facilitate market exchange, Brian Meehan…

Whenever someone asks me about the problems of the prison state and why I would like to abolish the entire prison system, I just say, “read Nathan Goodman’s blog ya muppets!” I’m delighted to be writing this guest blog post for my pal Nathan, who does a wonderful job highlighting the problems and moral atrocities…

A recent article by Deborah Small at Salon raises some genuinely valuable points about the likely pitfalls of prison reform and the broad scope of the problem of criminalization. Yet the headline, and the later paragraphs, package these important and interesting points into yet another one of the “progressives should fear and despise libertarians” pieces…