Name _________________________________________  
Date:____________________ 
 

Vocabulary 
  
Take a look at the list of words. Pick a minimum of 6 words and define them using 
your own words. ​Do not​ ​copy down their definition word by word, if you don’t 
know how to paraphrase ask for help.   

1. Abolish   2. Alternative  3. Rehabilitation 

4. Astonishingly  5. Dwell  6. Flourish 

7. Mediocre  8. Status quo  9. Abject 

10. Endemic  11. Reform  12. Oddity 

 
 

 
 
 

Abolish prison ​by Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry for T​ he Week​, 5/7/15 

Prison is just about the most astonishingly stupid and inhuman way to punish crime. 
It is inexplicable that it is the main crime punishment tool we use. 

Typically, the answer I get when I say this (which is often) is, "What's your 
alternative?" The alternatives are plentiful, easy, and all better. But, first, let me dwell 
a little bit on why prison is so awful. 

Prison is an incredibly stupid way to fight crime because, as is well known, it is the 
enemy of rehabilitation. In prison, criminal gangs flourish. This means prison 
becomes a graduate school for crime, a facility for turning mediocre criminals into 
hardened ones. More generally, who thinks locking people in places where they are 
fed and housed and boxed up and surrounded only by other dysfunctional people is 
going to turn them into productive members of society? The idea would be 
laughable if it wasn't part of the status quo. Prison, by its very design, breeds crime 
and social dysfunction. 

And of course, it is impossible to talk about prison without talking about the prison 
rape epidemic. Can there be anything more abject than a society whose 
police-procedural TV shows include prison rape jokes — and nobody is outraged? 
Everyone knows that it goes on. Everybody knows that it's endemic. Lock up a bunch 
of men in tight quarters, without access to females. Many of the men are violent, 
over-testosterone, and dysfunctional. What will happen? And we joke about it. On 
those grounds alone, the entire system deserves to be scrapped. 

Maybe these problems are just from lack of reform? Maybe we just need to fund 
prisons more, to make the way they work better, to set up more rehabilitation 
programs. Sorry, that won't work. Prison doesn't suck because of a historical 
accident. It sucks because of structural political reasons. In a democracy, an interest 
group gets attention and funding from the government in proportion to its 
numerical size and public sympathy level. The one group that will never be big 
enough, and certainly never popular enough, to get good treatment are prisoners. 
Because of the way the political system works, prisoners will never be able to get the 
political capital to get the reforms that might (might!) in theory make prisons not 
awful. We all live in Omelas​*​. 

Prisons are also contrary to the values of liberty that any 

civilized society ought to aspire to. As the French writer 
Michel Foucault argued in his landmark essay Discipline 
and Punish, prison is a historical oddity that arose as a result 
of the modern state's increasing ability and eagerness to 
control more and more of its citizens' lives. Well-meaning 
modernist reformists believed the way to set the crooked 
timber of man straight was through institutions that would, 
well, discipline and punish — schools, military barracks, prisons. It's no coincidence 
that the celebrated progressive Enlightenment thinker Jeremy Bentham is also the 
author of the Panopticon concept, one of the creepiest ideas in all history. 

*Omelas​ is a happy, utopian society with a problem. 

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Prison has to go. 

The comeback is inevitable: "Then what's your alternative, smart guy?" 

The alternatives are actually countless, and all better. But it all depends on the kind 
of crime we're talking about. 

For petty crime, the obvious answer is community service. It's real punishment, 
without the inhumane and crime-breeding drawbacks of prison. The work of 
community service should be geared toward reparation: For example, if you've been 
caught doing graffiti, you should clean graffiti; if you've been driving drunk, you 
should embalm corpses of people who died in car accidents. And if all fails, there is 
always the lash or the cane — easy, quick, much less destructive. 

For more serious crimes, ankle bracelets. Did you kill someone in a fit of passion or 
drunk rage? Then instead of spending three years in prison, you should spend six 
years working minimum wage in a tedious job, your wages garnished, stuck at home 
with no internet or TV, with only a single night out allowed once in a while. That is 
real punishment — but punishment that does not have unacceptable moral costs. 

As for the very serious crimes — well, I used to think the awfulness of prison was 
reason to support the death penalty. Now, I tend to think that prison might be 
acceptable for a very small percentage of crimes. If we have five percent the number 
of prisoners we currently have, I would be very happy. 

In any case, the point should be clear: We can abolish prison — and we must. 
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  

● Summarize the article 

● Should we abolish prisons?  
● What are some reasons that the author provides for abolishing them? 
● What is the author’s point of view as it pertains to prison? 
● What are the alternatives that he gives?  
● What is your opinion, do you think these alternatives can be effective?  

Your response must be a minimum of 250 words.  

Use some or all of the template below to support your thinking.*

Title: ______________________________
The general argument made by author X in her/his work, _______________, is that
_______________. More specifically, X argues that _______________. She/he writes, “
_______________.” In this passage, X is suggesting that _______________. In conclusion, X’s
belief is that _______________.
In my view, X is wrong/right, because _______________. More specifically, I believe that
_______________. For example, ___________. Although X might object that __________, I
maintain that _______________. Therefore, I conclude that _______________.

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