There was a citations needed episode where they made the argument that the US prison system is something like a planned economy. Like, if someone refuses to understand how awful it is that the US has 2.2 million + people in prison, many of them not even convicted, will they ever get it? Maybe you’re more patient than I am. If someone is defending our prisons, they’re profoundly ignorant and I can only believe that this is by choice.

I’ve read that since Covid, some prisoners are in their cells 23 hours a day. Others haven’t been outside since March 2020. There is no possible way to defend this system, and anyone that tries will just piss me off.

The predominant ideology today is liberal conservatism and the problem with liberal-conservatives is that they base their ideology on a just world fallacy. They see the capitalist order as fundamentally fair and occurrences of unfairness is either explained away as rare abberations to be dealt with by fine-tuning existing systems or they embark on a feat of circular logic where the results must be fair because the system is fair.

Furthermore a core component of liberal-conservative ideology is the fetichation of personal responsibility. Things that happen to people are explained as happening primarily because of the individual choices made by these people. This leaves very little room for conceptualising structural issues.

To the liberal-conservative the very existence of brutal mass incarceration thus becomes proof that those incarcerated are dangerous hardened criminals who must have done something to deserve the treatment they get.

To convince the average liberal-conservative about prison abolition you need to dissuade them of beliefs central to their ideological understanding of morality.

You could try and appeal to an utilitarian sentiment in them, after all keeping people in prison is very expensive and causes a lot of problems down the line. Prison abolition would be a benefit to the economy. But I wouldn’t count on it working. Although liberal-conservatives prize themselves for their rationality, they are as caught up in irrational subconscious emotions as anyone. They are against prison abolition because it feels wrong.

The best we can do is to state the systemic explanations for phenomena again and again. Not only about crime and punishment. Wean them into seeing things in a more holistic way, beyond personal responsibility. Also give ample examples of the current order leading to unfair and unwanted results to challenge their core beliefs.