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:
“People have passed through a very dark tunnel at the end of which there was a light of freedom. Unexpectedly they passed through the prison gates and found themselves in a square. They are now free and they don’t know where to go.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“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)
“You watched and you saw what happened and in the accumulation of episodes you saw the pattern: Daddy ruled the roost, called the shots, made the money, made the decisions, so you signed up on his side, and fifteen years later when the women’s movement came along with its incendiary manifestos telling you to avoid marriage and motherhood, it was as if somebody put a match to a pile of dry kindling.”
—Anne Taylor Fleming (20th century)