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When reform falls short: eradicating the prison plague

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Notes

  1. Criminal Justice Facts | The Sentencing Project. (n.d.). Retrieved April 26, 2016, from http://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts.

  2. https://www.aclu.org/drug-war-new-jim-crow.

  3. Drucker writes “Still, drug arrests are responsible for nearly half of all new commitments to New York state prisons. In addition, beginning in the 1990s—event after new arrests for drugs began to decline—the adoption of longer sentences for drug offenders based on predicate offenses served to lengthen the time individuals spent incarcerated, keeping the system filled” (2011: p. 55).

  4. Seelye (2015).

  5. https://www.nlg.org/sites/default/files/Resolution%20Supporting%20the%20Abolition%20of%20Prisons_2015%20NLG%20Convention%20(2).pdf.

  6. A significant portion of the criminal legal system is designed in response to extreme cases, which prison abolitionists typically refer to as “the dangerous few” (McLeod 2015: 1168). The abolition paradigm is often dismissed in its entirety and systemic punishment justified because of fears that are oriented around a small portion of the prison population, however, final resolution should not “interfere with serious engagement with abolitionist analysis (p. 1168). See INSTEAD OF PRISONS: A HANDBOOK FOR ABOLITIONISTS (Mark Morris 1976) for more information on who and how many are the dangerous few.

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  1. John Jay College, CUNY, New York, NY, USA

    Naomi Haber

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  1. Naomi Haber
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Correspondence to Naomi Haber.

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Haber, N. When reform falls short: eradicating the prison plague. Dialect Anthropol 40, 411–418 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-016-9435-4

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