What Would a World Without Prisons Be Like?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 January 2020

⏱️ 22 minutes

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Summary

Mass incarceration is now widely regarded as a prejudiced and deeply harmful set of policies. Bipartisan support exists for some degree of criminal-justice reform, and, in some circles, the idea of prison abolition is also gaining traction. Kai Wright, the host of the WNYC podcast “The United States of Anxiety,” spoke about the movement with Paul Butler, a law professor and former federal prosecutor who saw firsthand the damage that prosecution causes; and sujatha baliga, a MacArthur Foundation fellow who leads the Restorative Justice Project at the nonprofit Impact Justice and a survivor of sexual violence. “Prison abolition doesn’t mean that everybody who’s locked up gets to come home tomorrow,” Butler explains. Instead, activists envision a gradual process of “decarceration,” and the creation of alternative forms of justice and harm reduction. “Abolition, to my mind, isn’t just about ending the prisons,” baliga adds. “It’s about ending binary processes which pit us as ‘us, them,’ ‘right, wrong’; somebody has to be lying, somebody’s telling the truth. That is not the way that we get to healing.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:13.2	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:17.0	Last week, we spent the full hour of our program on the topic of mass incarceration.
0:22.1	I was joined for that by Kai Wright, who's the host of WNYC's election podcast,
0:27.1	The United States of Anxiety.
0:29.1	And we talked about how imprisonment soared during the war on drugs
0:33.0	in the emerging consensus that mass incarceration, whatever the intention,
0:39.6	had caused incalculable harm,
0:42.2	especially in black and Latino communities.
0:47.5	At the end of that episode, we touched on the future of prison reform, in particular the movement known as prison abolition, what it is, and maybe just as importantly, what it isn't.
0:53.8	I think the place to begin is that for a lot of people listening, I imagine, just the words
0:59.2	prison abolition are probably a bit of a head scratch.
1:02.2	What does that mean?
1:03.2	What are you talking about?
1:05.2	Kai Wright joins us again this week in conversation with two prominent advocates of prison
1:10.0	abolition. Paul Butler, a law professor
1:12.6	who was a federal prosecutor in Washington, and Sujatha Baliga, an attorney who leads the
1:18.2	restorative justice project. She was recently awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant for her work.
1:24.9	Sujata, can I start with you and ask you to just sort of explain to you what that means?
1:30.0	So to my mind, I come to prison abolition personally from a series of perspectives, and one is from a practical place.
1:38.8	So mass incarceration and mass criminalization more broadly has not met even its own stated
1:46.4	goals of keeping us safer, of deterring crime and harm, of rehabilitating folks who we
	...

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