The Fatal Contradiction at the Heart of Socialist Prison Abolition

Ilya Somin

“Democratic socialists” are a growing movement on the political left. And many of them are also prison abolitionists. But there is a deep contradiction between their socialism and their abolitionism. As the history of actual socialist states shows, serious attempts to implement socialism lead to vastly greater incarceration (and other punishment), not less. There are several ways to try to escape this contradiction. But none work. The way to reduce incarceration is to reduce the range of activities we make illegal, not increase it.

What is Socialism?

“Socialism” here means government control of all or most of the economy, not simply an increase in welfare spending or a marginal increase in certain discrete types of regulation. That’s what actual leading socialists say they want. For example, the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), America’s most prominent socialist organization, states that it seeks to establish a system in which “[f]ood, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods.” That requires a complete government takeover of these massive parts of the economy. 

The DSA and other socialists also seek to massively extend government control even over those parts of the economy that they might not socialize outright. For example, they advocate extensive rent control, a massive increase in employment regulation, and so on. Elsewhere, I have described how, in combination, these demands would amount to socialization of the vast bulk of the economy. It is not simply a matter of making the US more like Denmark or Sweden.

Socialist prison abolition isn’t just a strawman either. For example, the DSA has an “Abolition Working Group,” which, among other things, advocates “Freedom for all incarcerated people.” Prominent socialist candidates for political office also have a history of advocating prison abolition.

An Inherent Contradiction

There is a blatant but generally ignored contradiction between socialism and prison abolitionism. Socialism requires making a wide range of economic transactions illegal, and those laws have to be enforced by some system of punishment. If, like the DSA, you want to ensure that “[f]ood, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses,” but instead make them “common goods,” you will have to make it illegal to provide those goods and services for profit and punish people who violate the relevant laws.

Historically, attempts to do this created vast black markets, especially since government control of these and other industries routinely resulted in shortages and low quality, caused by knowledge problems and poor incentives. I was born in the Soviet Union. Almost all my adult relatives and their friends and acquaintances were involved in illegal black market transactions of various kinds. Often, it was the only way to get even minimally decent-quality goods and services, including food, medicine, and transportation. For example, my mother’s two cousins operated a black-market auto repair business, which prospered because the official state-owned auto repair shops were predictably terrible and unreliable. 

Socialist governments sought to suppress these activities through massive coercion. If they did not, the extent of black market activity would have been even greater, and socialism would have been even further undermined. 

Similar logic applies to sweeping economic regulations that fall short of complete socialization. If, like many socialists, you want to impose severe rent control or very high minimum wages, you will have to punish people who dare rent out housing at higher rates or hire workers at lower wages. And such black market activities are predictable, because high minimum wages price numerous lower-skilled workers out of the market (thereby increasing unemployment) and rent control predictably creates housing shortages.

Socialism requires making many things illegal, and enforcing it requires punishment. That’s why actual socialist states have imprisoned (and often killed) large numbers of people as a natural byproduct of their economic policies. Consider, for instance, the fate of the “Kulaks” and their counterparts in China, Cuba, and elsewhere.

No Way Out of the Dilemma

There are several theoretically possible ways to escape this contradiction. But none of them actually work.

Many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialists argued that a socialist society wouldn’t need much of a carceral apparatus, if any, because socialism would lead to a transformation in human nature. “New Socialist Man” would obey the law without the need for coercion, because he would no longer be violent, selfish, and greedy, as people are under capitalism.

In actuality, “socialist man” was just as violent and greedy as the capitalist version, often even more so. Ask almost anyone who has ever actually lived in a socialist state. Today, most socialists no longer promise a fundamental transformation of human nature. And for good reason!

A second possible solution is to rely on non-prison punishments, such as fines and community service. But what happens when people refuse to pay the fines or do the service? Then, you have to enforce the penalty with the threat of prison or some other more severe punishment. Ultimately, there can be no effective enforcement system that isn’t backed by violent coercion. As liberal Yale Law School Prof. Stephen Carter puts it, people should “never support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce.”

That still leaves open the possibility of using non-prison punishments that are as severe as or more severe than imprisonment. Pre-modern societies had few or no prisons but made extensive use of corporal punishment and the death penalty. We could potentially bring back flogging and the rack and greatly increase the use of the death penalty. Socialist dictators like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot have, in fact, made extensive use of mass executions. Obviously, however, modern socialists who want to abolish prisons are unlikely to support replacing them with even more cruel forms of punishment. 

Finally, there is the option of having prisons but calling them something else. The USSR, China, and other socialist states had a long history of establishing mass incarceration facilities that, at least in theory, were distinct from ordinary prisons, Gulags, “reeducation camps,” and so on. Currently, the Chinese has state has forcibly detained over 1 million members of the Uyghur minority. But these facilities are called “vocational education and training centers.” So that makes it OK! Obviously, conditions in such facilities are just as bad as those in conventional prisons, and often much worse. 

How to Actually Reduce Incarceration

Prison abolitionists aren’t entirely wrong about the need to cut back on incarceration. They’re just wrong about how to do it. And, at least so long as we don’t have a fundamental transformation in human nature, they are wrong about how far it can go.

Prison abolitionists are right to point out that imprisonment is a severe infringement on liberty, and that conditions in prison are often terrible. Ironically, that’s true precisely because of the kinds of economic incentives socialists otherwise tend to ignore.

For-profit businesses have strong incentives to keep quality up and prices down because, otherwise, consumers can reject their products in favor of competitors. A business that loses out to competitors will have reduced profits and often has to close. By contrast, prison inmates have little or no choice over where to serve their sentences, and administrators and guards are unlikely to lose profits or suffer pay cuts if inmates aren’t satisfied with their “services.”

Moreover, prisons contain a lot of violent and dangerous people. And guards and administrators often have only weak incentives to keep them from preying on fellow inmates. Thus, we often get awful prison conditions and widespread inmate-on-inmate abuses, including such things as ubiquitous sexual assault.

In theory, voters can monitor prison conditions and vote out politicians who allow abuses to persist. But, in practice, most voters are “rationally ignorant” about public policy and have little sympathy for prisoners, in any event.

For those reasons, it is important to reduce the extent of imprisonment. And the way to do that is to reduce the number of activities that are illegal, not increase them! One of the few issues the DSA platform gets right is its call to abolish ICE. I agree and have long advocated the same idea myself. But, unless we just want to replace ICE with another agency likely to engage in similar abuses, the plan can only work if we either legalize much of the currently illegal immigration, or at least cut back on mass deportation.

Socialist prison abolitionists recognize this truth when it comes to immigration enforcement. But it also applies to their own proposals to make a vast range of “capitalist” economic activity illegal. In both cases, we end up with large black markets that require massive coercion to suppress.

Ultimately, imprisonment should be reserved for activities so serious that perpetrators deserve to be incarcerated under harsh conditions, if that is the only way to achieve retribution and deterrence. Such crimes as murder, rape, assault, theft, and so on qualify. Illegal migration does not. And the same goes for virtually all the “capitalist acts between consenting adults” (as Robert Nozick famously called them) that socialists want to ban. This problem is an additional reason to get rid of the War on Drugs, which accounts for much of our current mass incarceration. About 43% of federal prison inmates and 20% of total inmates (including state and local) are incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses. If we want to cut back on imprisonment, abolishing—or at least severely cutting back on—immigration restrictions and the War on Drugs would be a great way to start. 

We cannot completely abolish imprisonment and other severe punishments. At least not so long as there are at least somewhat common human activities that we want to suppress. But we can greatly reduce its use.

In fairness, the statist economic policies advocated by right-wing nationalists have many of the same flaws, and I have written about that at length. But the flaws of the nationalists don’t justify those of the socialists, and vice versa. Indeed, socialists would do well to keep in mind that the coercive apparatus they establish to enforce their economic policies could, at some point, fall into the hands of their ideological adversaries. 

The issues addressed here do not definitively resolve the issue of the appropriate role of government in the economy. But it is essential to keep in mind the tradeoff between making more activities illegal and cutting back on the carceral state. That’s especially true when making an activity illegal predictably incentivizes the creation of a large black market. You can’t have socialism without a massive apparatus of state coercion. And that, at the very least, strengthens the case against it.

Source: https://www.cato.org/blog/contradictions-socialist-prison-abolitionism