What A World Without Prisons Could Look Like

Prison abolition and prison reform are often presented as opposite positions. They're better understood as describing different time horizons and different theories of change.

Reformers believe the prison can be fixed — made less brutal, more rehabilitative, more just. Abolitionists believe the prison is, by nature, a mechanism of harm that cannot be fundamentally fixed and should be replaced. Both positions contain genuine insight and genuine blind spots.

The reform position is right that conditions in prisons can be meaningfully improved and that those improvements reduce harm while the prison system exists. It's wrong if it believes that enough reform produces a fundamentally different institution — a century of prison reform has not produced a system that works.

The abolition position is right that the current prison is not salvageable, that it functions as a mechanism of racial and economic control rather than public safety, and that the resources consumed by incarceration could be redirected to actually reducing the conditions that produce crime. It can be wrong when it underestimates the genuine need for some form of incapacitation for genuinely dangerous people, or when it presents alternatives as fully developed when they're still nascent.

The honest position is probably: abolition as a long-term horizon, reform as a near-term practice, building alternatives rapidly enough that reform becomes, eventually, redundant.

Before imagining alternatives, it's worth being precise about what the current system actually contains, because political discourse makes this wildly confused.

The American prison population (approximately 2 million people):

About 45% are incarcerated for violent offenses. This is the population that generates the most political anxiety about abolition — and legitimately so. Though it's worth noting that "violent offense" includes a vast range, from homicide to an assault that left no lasting injury, and that people convicted of violent offenses are also humans with psychological histories, trauma backgrounds, and the capacity for change.

About 15% are incarcerated for drug offenses in state prisons (higher in federal system). This population has almost no business being in prison under any credible evidence-based framework.

The remaining 40%+ are incarcerated for property crimes, immigration offenses, public order offenses, and technical violations of probation or parole. A substantial portion of the prison population is there for not following the rules of their release — failing a drug test, missing a check-in — rather than for committing new crimes.

The politically convenient image of the incarcerated person as a dangerous violent predator who must be locked away for public safety describes a minority of the actual population. Most people in prison are there for offenses that could be managed in community settings with appropriate support.

The Nordic approach to justice has become almost mythological in American policy discussions — sometimes dismissed as impossible idealism, sometimes cited without understanding what actually makes it work.

What makes it work:

A different theory of crime: Nordic countries approach crime primarily as a public health and social problem rather than a moral failure requiring punishment. Crime is understood to arise from conditions — poverty, trauma, mental illness, social exclusion — that can be addressed. This produces a system oriented toward addressing those conditions rather than punishing their expression.

Investment in social infrastructure: Nordic countries have strong social safety nets — universal healthcare, childcare, education, housing support — that address the conditions that produce crime before it happens. You don't need as many prisons when you've addressed the poverty, housing insecurity, and healthcare deficiency that drive crime.

Professional corrections staff: Norwegian prison guards receive three years of professional training. They're selected for the capacity to build rehabilitative relationships, not for physical dominance. The guard-inmate dynamic is explicitly designed around human dignity on both sides.

Short sentences: Finnish criminologist Tapio Lappi-Seppälä has documented that the Nordic countries simply don't use very long sentences, even for serious offenses. The maximum in Norway is 21 years. This reflects a judgment that incarceration beyond what's needed for rehabilitation and public safety is both cruel and wasteful.

Robust reentry: The Nordic countries invest heavily in reentry preparation — vocational training, mental health treatment, housing assistance, family reconnection, graduated reintegration. The person leaving prison in Norway has been actively prepared for reentry in a way that American prisoners almost never are.

The result: Finland's incarceration rate is 56 per 100,000. Denmark's is 73. Norway's is 63. The United States' is 639.

These countries are not more dangerous than the United States. Their crime rates are lower.

The abolitionist imagination is sometimes treated as a purely theoretical exercise — imagining a future that doesn't exist. But there are actually existing programs and approaches that handle harm in community settings without prison.

CAHOOTS (Eugene, Oregon, est. 1989)

Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets has operated for over 35 years as a mental health crisis response program embedded within Eugene's emergency services. When someone calls 911 for a mental health crisis, substance use issue, or welfare check, CAHOOTS teams — trained crisis counselors and medics, not armed police — respond.

In 2020, CAHOOTS handled approximately 24,000 calls — about 17% of the Eugene Police Department's total call volume — without armed police presence. They call for police backup in fewer than 1% of cases.

The program costs a fraction of police response and produces better outcomes in its appropriate domain. It has been replicated in dozens of cities. It doesn't replace police for all situations — it appropriately handles the situations where trained crisis response is more effective than armed law enforcement.

Violence Interrupters

The Violence Interrupters model, developed by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin and implemented as Cure Violence in Chicago and subsequently in many cities, treats violence as a contagious disease rather than a criminal problem. People who have lived experience with violence — formerly incarcerated, former gang members — are trained as "violence interrupters" who intervene in escalating situations before they become violent, mediate conflicts, and work with high-risk individuals to prevent retaliation cycles.

Independent evaluations of Cure Violence in Chicago found 30-60% reductions in shootings and killings in areas where it operated. A New York City evaluation found 50% reductions in shootings.

This approach doesn't put anyone in prison. It interrupts the cycle before violence occurs — which is far preferable to incarceration after the fact.

Restorative Justice Programs

As covered in depth elsewhere in this manual, restorative justice produces better outcomes on victim satisfaction, recidivism, and cost than standard punitive approaches for a wide range of offenses.

The Hollow Water Community Holistic Circle Healing process, developed by an Indigenous community in Manitoba, handles sexual abuse cases — one of the most challenging offense categories — through community circles and intensive support processes rather than prison. The program, operating since the late 1980s, has produced very low reoffending rates while keeping families and communities intact.

Oakland's Town Hall Project and similar community accountability programs handle neighborhood-level harm — property disputes, interpersonal conflict, threats — without police involvement, using trained community mediators.

Transformative Justice

Transformative justice goes beyond restorative justice by addressing the systemic conditions that produce harm, not just individual incidents. Mimi Kim, who developed Creative Interventions, has documented community-based responses to domestic violence and sexual harm that center survivor safety, accountability, and community transformation rather than incarceration. The results are imperfect — as is the criminal justice system — but they maintain community relationships and address harm without the criminogenic effects of imprisonment.

This article would not be honest if it didn't name the limits of current alternatives.

Genuinely dangerous people: Some people pose ongoing risks to others that cannot be managed safely in community settings with currently available tools. A person who has committed multiple violent offenses and who shows no evidence of changed internal state presents a genuine public safety problem. Some form of secure confinement — which need not be a punitive prison, but which may need to restrict movement — remains necessary for this population.

The critical point is that this population is much smaller than what's currently incarcerated. A serious evidence-based approach would radically narrow the category of "people who require secure confinement" and invest heavily in the conditions that allow that confinement to be humane and time-limited.

Community capacity: Community accountability processes require community infrastructure — trained mediators, support networks, cultural capacity for collective accountability. These don't emerge overnight. A rapid move to community-based systems without first building that infrastructure would leave genuine gaps.

Political conditions: Some communities — particularly communities that have been most harmed by violence — are not currently in a position to advocate for prison abolition because they're dealing with the immediate reality of violence that the criminal justice system, however inadequately, addresses. Effective abolitionist practice requires following the lead of those communities, not imposing frameworks from outside.

Evidence base: Many abolitionist alternatives are promising but relatively small-scale. Scaling them to handle the volume of harm currently processed by the criminal justice system would reveal new challenges and limitations. The evidence base, while growing, is not yet comprehensive.

The intellectual honesty of the abolitionist argument is in its direction, not necessarily its immediate destination.

The direction: toward a world where the community handles harm with tools calibrated to the harm — restorative processes for most interpersonal harm, mental health response for mental health crises, addiction treatment for drug-related harm, economic support for poverty-driven property crime, community accountability for most violence — reserving secure confinement for a small, accurately-identified population for whom no other current approach adequately ensures public safety.

In that direction, prisons shrink. First in population, then in number, then in purpose. The remaining secure facilities look nothing like current American prisons — they look like Norwegian prisons, or better. The resources freed by dismantling the mass incarceration system are redirected to the conditions — housing, healthcare, mental health, economic opportunity — that prevent the harm that prisons currently (try and fail to) address.

This is not a 5-year plan. It's a 50-year trajectory, with near-term steps (decriminalizing drug possession, diverting mental health crises, implementing restorative justice, building community accountability infrastructure) that move in the direction and build the capacity for the next step.

Angela Davis, one of prison abolition's most important theorists, describes it not as "the absence of prisons" but as "the presence of the things we actually need" — healthcare, education, housing, economic opportunity, community. When those things are present, the prison becomes largely unnecessary.

That reframe is clarifying. The question isn't really "what do we do with prisons?" The question is "what do people and communities actually need?" Follow that question honestly and rigorously, build what it points to, and the prison system — as currently constituted — becomes, eventually, indefensible.

We're at the beginning of that work, not the end. But the beginning has already begun.