What Would Effective Prison Reform Look Like? CISS Affiliates Weigh In

Calls for change grew louder in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd. Millions of philanthropic dollars began flowing to criminal justice reform. Arguments for reducing or eliminating the prison system, and replacing it with a rehabilitative system and reparative justice, which were once viewed as radical solutions to police violence and mass incarceration, became part of mainstream discussions. 

While there is a consensus that the system is broken, agreement on a solution remains elusive. Arts&sciences asked three faculty members, from three academic fields, how they would address the crisis. 

Spencer Piston, an associate professor of political science, studies the politics of oppression—in particular, the ways that race, class, politics, the welfare state, and the criminal justice system create inequities. 

Ianna Hawkins Owen, an assistant professor of English and African American Studies, teaches ​​”Write Back Soon: Blackness and the Prison” and is working on a video game of the same name. 

Jessica Simes, an assistant professor of sociology, has studied mass incarceration and solitary confinement. Her book, Punishing Places: The Geography of Mass Imprisonment in America, was published in 2021. 

Here’s what they said.

Spencer Piston, associate professor of political science 

The first thing to do is redefine the problem. “Mass incarceration” is real—many, many people are in cages—but the problem is bigger still. When political momentum built to reduce mass incarceration, a range of powerful actors, especially those with a financial stake in the carceral state, adapted in two ways, among others: (1) advocating for an increase in immigration detention; (2) advocating for an increase in “e-carceration,” in which people are let out of their cages but confined in other ways, like in their homes, via ankle monitors.  

The problem, therefore, is not merely mass incarceration but what some have termed “mass supervision.” This includes those on probation, on parole, in immigration detention, in Guantanamo Bay—and, I would argue, many in the welfare state. Child Protective Services is used by the government to separate children from their parents—especially indigenous children. The massive increase of police in schools over the past few decades, and the rise of the surveillance state (cellphone trackers, facial recognition, etc.) also count, in my view, as mass supervision.  

What we need to do is to reduce the scope of the supervisory state: police, courts, jails, prisons, probation, cops in schools, immigration detention, and so much more. It is nothing less than a struggle for freedom.  

 Ianna Hawkins Owen, assistant professor of English and African American Studies

In “Through the Flash,” a short story about personal transformation by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, everyone is trapped in a repeating day. In one scene, the protagonist Ama describes an elder waking in the same way day after day: her tissue box is always on the floor and she always needs one upon waking. Ama laments, “Such a big difference it would make if it was just on her nightstand, if she could just have that one thing be easy and simple.” She climbs through the window to pick up the tissues; it is not enough to break the loop, though it is a kindness.

 To answer the question directly, the carceral system is broken by design and it needs to be abolished. If that word is too unsettling, here’s another we all use: “revision.” In either case, it is difficult work. We use the word interchangeably with “edit,” though it is anything but.

When editing, you tinker with phrasing, you spot check, fix errors, you think you are pretty close to being finished—like reform. In contrast, revision is a practice that requires surrender. You rebuild your work from the ground up. If you’re lucky, very little is the same when you’re done and, yet, you are so much closer to making a meaningful intervention.

If we value Black life, if we value trans life, if we value human life above our imagined borders, then it is incumbent upon us to imagine something that begins from the premise of cherishing one another. Merely editing atop a framework that, by design, routinely targets, undermines, and brutalizes these communities is to be bound to those original failures: racial hierarchy, compulsory gender, and nationalism. I’ll tell you what I tell myself. No first draft is that precious. Begin again.

If you’ve ever written a few pages then you know the feedback process is difficult—even viscerally so—as you realize you could’ve done so much better. But it’s also a gift to know there is so much more you can do to make things right. To know you are not out of time.

The movement to abolish prisons is about more than policy changes. It is about redistributing resources and rebuilding our world on a foundation of mutual recognition and dignity. Though it may be evidence of opening hearts, editing will not break the loop of structural harm. Only true revision will.

Jessica Simes, assistant professor of sociology 

The singular most impactful policy change local and state governments could make is to dramatically and permanently reduce the prison population while simultaneously investing in our welfare and healthcare systems. Contact with the criminal justice system has led to avoidable health harms for the most marginalized members of our society. My research shows that policies like the Affordable Care Act significantly reduced criminal justice contact. But this is just a start. We must envision and create a future of justice based in healing and wellbeing rather than surveillance and punishment. And we need to ensure this reimagining centers the communities and individuals with direct experience with the justice system.

During the pandemic, the spread of COVID in prisons and jails called into question the ethical status of carceral institutions. Jail and prison incarceration exposed people to great risk and may have contributed to greater community transmission. However, those ethical questions predate the pandemic and will remain once the pandemic is over.

In my book Punishing Places: The Geography of Mass Imprisonment, I argue that while punishment is premised on the individual, in actuality it has been enacted on whole communities. Generations of people have suffered under a decades-long era of mass incarceration, with the greatest harms felt by Black communities. While we must work to fix a broken system, mass incarceration necessarily requires that we look back at this historic injustice, and look for models that can repair and restore the harms experienced by communities.