The Prison Abolition Movement
The prison abolition movement attempts to eliminate prisons and the prison system. Prison abolitionists see the prisons as an ineffective way to decrease crime and reform criminals. They also believe the modern criminal justice system to be racist, sexist, and classist. One of the many arguments made for prison abolition is that the majority of people accused of crime cannot afford to pay a lawyer. The Anarchist Black Cross was a key group involved in the prison abolition movement that still persists today. A variety of proposed alternatives to prisons arose from the prison abolition movement.
Read more about this topic: Alternatives To Imprisonment
Famous quotes containing the words prison, abolition and/or movement:
“This great purple butterfly,
In the prison of my hands,
Has a learning in his eye
Not a poor fool understands.
Once he lived a schoolmaster
With a stark, denying look....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“Women, because of their colonial relationship to men, have to fight for their own independence. This fight for our own independence will lead to the growth and development of the revolutionary movement in this country. Only the independent woman can be truly effective in the larger revolutionary struggle.”
—Women’s Liberation Workshop, Students for a Democratic Society, Radical political/social activist organization. “Liberation of Women,” in New Left Notes (July 10, 1967)