An elegant solution

Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2023/03/14/whole_pie_2023/

Are you concerned about crime? Have you seen the news lately?  Do you watch murder shows?  Is crime at an all time low or is it creeping back up again?  Have you noticed an uptick in police activity?  Have you observed that in spite of over $100 billion spent annually on police budgets, over $80 billion on prisons and more than $50 billion on courts-- police, courts and prisons all tell us it's not enough?  And what about the crime that does not get reported, let alone investigated, solved and punished?

When the perceived threat of crime goes up we give more money to police. When the crime rate goes down we give more money to police.  For those concerned about crime, can we agree that what we are doing-- giving more and more money to police-- is not working?   Let me propose a solution that I think you will in short order come to agree, given the proper societal commitment, is elegant in its simplicity:

Let's decriminalize everything.

That's right-- everything!  The semantic fix alone should not convince you.  True enough, if everything were decriminalized overnight, tomorrow nothing would be a crime, and therefore, crime would be semantically disappeared.  The decriminalization of victimless crimes— drug use, black markets, consensual sex— should be uncontroversial.  Theft, murder,  sexual assault, kidnapping, shoplifting, arson, public disorderliness, pollution,  embezzlement, insurance and tax fraud-- we would not expect these behaviors to magically cease.  But if everything were decriminalized, none of these would be crimes: the ledger under crime would be blank.

To go beyond the absurd elegance of the semantic trick takes some imagination and this is where the real beauty of the solution lies.  For starters, if there is no crime, there is nothing to prohibit, enforce or punish, so we do not need police, prisons or criminal courts.   This frees up over $200 billion for other priorities, the neglect of which (due to our compulsive spending on policing) we will soon see has been a contributing factor to the conditions that make what we today consider criminal behaviors flourish.  What is needed are new ways to prevent those behaviors and new ways to restore justice to those against whom those behaviors are committed. 

Money is the root of all evil, as crime shows remind us every day.  However with a commitment to  strive to meet the basic needs of everyone,  we could drastically reduce financial pressures that underpin so many criminal motivations.  As a simple example, if healthcare were universal in this country it would relieve $195 billion in medical debt in the US.*  We are eager to spend public funds to build prisons and pad the budgets of hyper-militarized police departments-- what if instead, for an additional $30 billion education dollars a year we funded universal school breakfasts and lunches for every student?  Studies show us that in communities where free meals are provided students, family grocery budgets are eased by as much as $40 on average a month which in turn has been shown to lower prices on other goods in neighborhood grocery stores.  With more investment in public transportation, housing, child care,  public secondary and vocational education, the expenses that breed inequality will less and less cause the kind of grief and want that lead to theft, fraud, drug abuse, armed robbery, violence and mayhem.

These are the easy cases.  What about the cycles of violence that beget violence-- child and spousal abuse, rape, murder?  In a world without police and punishment, what do we do about violence, both with respect to its perpetrators and to their victims?  There is no single answer.  But what we currently do-- collect every suspected perpetrator that our criminal justice system gets hold of (that it doesn't kill with its violent methods of collection†) in anti-social enclaves where they are only hardened to more violence-- is no answer. Our system of incarceration often punishes the victims as well, as families are torn apart, making life-- in more cases than our punitive state is capable of recognizing-- more difficult, not less; wounds deepen rather than heal, and cycles perpetuate.  In reality the situations in which violence arises are too complex for the one-size-fits-all (at its absolute best) non-solution of criminal justice.  Decriminalization favors different models of justice in response.  While revenge would itself not be illegal in a decriminalized world, a better model-- one that invites community involvement in maintaining and mediating the peace-- is restorative justice in which acts that cause harm are responded to with acts that bring healing.

It's true, the solution to crime -- complete decriminalization of our society -- requires a society that is quite different from the one we live in and getting there will take some steps that we have been conditioned to think are impossible.  But before you abandon the idea as hopeless, consider for a moment the forces in society that do not want crime to disappear anytime soon.  Other than employees, stockholders and other direct beneficiaries of the Prison Industrial Complex, those who least want you to consider alternatives to policing, punishment and imprisonment are those who benefit the most from the inequalities of the capitalist system.  They who control the messages about what's possible and what is not are happy within their citadels with their armed security details to let crime run rampant among us, because it keeps us trapped trying to scrounge for safety and security outside the gates of their communities while they rest fat and happy within.  

We need the peace and safety that every human deserves, the deprivation of which is behind so much of the crime that fills our prisons and breaks the stillness of our nights with the wails of sirens.  We need the peace that they purposely withhold from us.  They need to twitch in their sleep.

 * * *

The spin on the argument is my own, but for further reading and a strong and solid case for police abolition, I highly recommend Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie's excellent, mind and life changing book on the subject, No More Police.

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* It would also simplify the exit from abusive relationships of those who under our current system remain partly to keep the health insurance provided by a violent spouse's employment.

† Five percent of homicides per year are committed by police.