Following the George Floyd uprising in recent years, there has been a global debate in the spotlight

about police and prison abolishment. In this Essay, with the help of these theories about Justice, we
will try to analyze the arguments of the debate, using data to back up the analysis wherever
possible. Since many countries have abolished capital punishment, we will try to compare its
abolition with the arguments to abolish the prison system. We will try to remember that this essay is
not to advocate for or against any system in place, but only to explore the different arguments from
a different perspective.

We will explore the arguments which led to the abolition of capital punishment, and then see if we
can find them analogous. We will hope that till the end of this essay, we won’t find the idea of prison
abolishment “so out” there, or at least see some rationale in the arguments intellectually.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT:

As of now, 55 countries retain capital punishment, 109 countries have completely abolished it de
jure for all crimes, seven have abolished it for ordinary crimes (while maintaining it for special
circumstances such as war crimes), and 24 are abolitionists in practice. Although most nations have
abolished capital punishment, over 60% of the world's population live in countries where the death
penalty is retained, such as China, India, the United States, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Nigeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Japan, and Taiwan.

Capital punishment is controversial in several countries and states, and positions can vary within a
single political ideology or cultural region. Amnesty International declares that the death penalty
breaches human rights, stating "the right to life and the right to live free from torture or cruel,
inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." These rights are protected under the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948. In the European Union (EU),
Article 2 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union prohibits the use of capital
punishment. The Council of Europe, which has 46 member states, has sought to abolish the use of
the death penalty by its members absolutely, through Protocol 13 of the European Convention on
Human Rights. However, this only affects those member states which have signed and ratified it, and
they do not include Armenia and Azerbaijan. The United Nations General Assembly has adopted,
throughout the years from 2007 to 2020, eight non-binding resolutions calling for a global
moratorium on executions, with a view to eventual abolition. (Wikipedia)

For the sake of this essay, we will take the example of Britain. Britain's final hanging wasn't until
1964, which makes it a good example to analyze the contemporary philosophical arguments related
to the matter. Britain has been executing people for thousands of years, but the number of capital
crimes gradually fell until the late 18th Century when it suddenly shot up. They added many more
capital crimes, like stealing fruit from the Prime Minister’s Garden. In 1801, a 13-year-old homeless
boy named Andrew Brunning was publicly hanged for stealing a spoon. A 19 old male (Evans) was
hanged for using the phrase “let them have it” to his 16-year-old accomplice, asking him to
surrender while he open-fired on police. (Since at the time, the law in Britain, Another person
(Bently) was hanged for the murder of his wife, which was later found to committed by a serial killer
working in the police after two unsuccessful inquiries, several decades later. Later, a woman (Ellis)
was hanged for a crime she did commit (killing her husband with whom she shared an abusive
relationship), but the public sentiment found it disturbing. We've had a teenager hanged who didn't
pull the trigger. We've had an innocent man hanged who didn't do anything. And we've had a
woman hanged who was definitely guilty, but it made a lot of people very uncomfortable. And there
were many more such events not mentioned here. The famous author Charles Dickens wrote, “Not
only Ruth Eliss was hanged today, but hundreds of children were a little corrupted”. People used the
slogan “Evans, Bently, Ellis!” in a protest outside the prison in July 1955, which sparked debate on
the British Justice system.

Knowing the history and the context, we will now look at the arguments made for and against capital
punishment.

We can classify all the arguments to be from either of the two schools of thought, the retributive
and consequentialist theory of Justice. The concept of Capital punishment had criticisms from
philosophy from both schools of thought. The Retributive school of thought is known to be tough on
criminals, which says, roughly, that criminals deserve to be punished for they did a wrong thing
(Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals). But philosophers from the same school argued with
the same logic, asking if people deserve to die. And even though we commonly feel that at least
some people deserve to die, that is just how we feel about the matter because of the morality we
have. But we can’t justify an argument based on this feeling, for it is not the business of the justice
system to decide what’s morally right, it is supposed to serve the State by guiding it towards the
well-being of its subject. Another question raised in support of this argument was “who and how
was it decided who deserved to die”

The only way capital punishment could be defended against this argument was that it would help to
deter crime, from a consequentialist point of view. Below is the data on several homicides in Britain,
and we can compare the data for pre-abolition and post-abolition periods. (Before and after 1969)
If we observe the data, we do find a slight uprise in the number of homicides after 1970. But, this
data can, and was in public and parliament debates in Britain, be interpreted in many ways. First of
all, homicides may tend to increase with time simply because of the increasing population. More
number of people living in the same place and sharing the same resource can cause more murders.

And there were several other reasons to see the rises in the number of homicides, Dr. Harold
Shipman, a serial killer who murdered approximately 250 people over a period of decades. He was
convicted in 2000, and this graph includes 173 of his murders and they're included in 2003 despite
the fact that he didn't kill anybody that year. So, the Shipman case is just one example of how
sometimes crime statistics can have limited uses. Really those murders should have been spread out
over previous years. And there's another example if we jump back to 2001. There's another spike
because 58 Chinese migrants suffocated to death in the back of a lorry in Dover. The lorry driver got
done for manslaughter in the UK. Some Chinese gang members got done for it in the Netherlands
where the lorry had started the journey, but should one count that as a crime being committed here,
or in the Netherlands, or in China, or all three?

This showed that we don’t have any strong evidence to claim that abolishment of capital
punishment caused people to commit more crimes than before.

So, to sum up, the big philosophical and practical problems that led to the death penalty being
abolished in Britain were that: -

1) It occasionally punished innocent people.

2)It encouraged corruption.

3)It was disproportionate.

4)The actual application of it seemed arbitrary.

5)People worried that it wasn't good for society generally.

And at the very least, it wasn't clear that it actually worked to deter crime at all, never mind enough
to outweigh all the other problems.

PRISON ABOLISHMENT

Once we understand the arguments which led to the abolishment of capital punishment, we can see
the analogous application to the debate of prison abolishment. But this essay doesn’t explore any
arguments on the matter, it just intends to make us prone to be open to entertain the idea. The idea
of doing away with the prison system raises a bigger challenge of finding an alternative system which
does not happen to cause other problems. But not paying any attention to the arguments also has a
price, of us passively accepting the brutality happening today under the name of law. In USA, slave
labour is legal under the prison system. The power of State over prisoners is not something that
could be left unchecked out of ignorance. An example of unfair power of State would be the rape of
women in Iraq before execution, due to the belief that virgin women go to heaven, and it has been
recognized by United Nations (UN). Not only is this against human rights, but leaving the system
which is supposed to punish the crimes unchecked has itself caused the presence of “crimes without
punishments”. And this persuades us to contemplate reforms in our Justice system.