The prison abolitionist movement has been gaining steam across the country with the rise of radical left candidates such as New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier, who will soon be a member of Congress. Many have asked what will replace prisons in the post-carceral society. Seattle University law professor Dean Spade has the answer: care and accountability circles. If you are having that My Cousin Vinny moment of “you were serious about Dat?,” the answer is, yes, they are indeed very serious about that.
The abolitionist movement is the outgrowth of activists and professors who have argued for years that prisons are racist, oppressive, or simply useless.
One of the earliest abolitionists is avowed Communist and activist Angela Davis, who is ecstatic that her call for ending prisons has gone from a fringe movement to being taken seriously by academia and the media: “I feel like I’m living in a future I could never imagine … a future where people are (openly) talking about abolition.”
She has noted that the push to abolish prison stems from a growing acceptance of radical politics. She told Radcliffe Magazine, “As a matter of fact, rather than considering abolition a failure or as a nonviable strategy because of the emergence of a global prison industrial complex with its clear connections to racial capitalism, I would argue that this development was precisely the material basis for moving away from a politics of reform to a radical politics of abolition.”
Davis is correct that there has been a seismic change, particularly in higher education where departments have effectively purged conservatives, libertarians, and Republicans from the faculty ranks. Faculties now run from the left to the far left, and once-fringe theories are now more mainstream.
The latest voice is found in a recently posted clip by a Manhattan investigator of Seattle University law professor Dean Spade.
In the video, Professor Spade joined Professor Sarah Lamble of the Birkbeck University of London to discuss the end of the “carceral system” and Lamble’s book “Unsafe: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash.” In the video, Spade makes the remarkable claim that “care and accountability circles work better” than prison for those who have committed rape or other sex crimes.
In fairness, there are some credible points raised by abolition advocates that have long been discussed in this area, including how incarceration does not “address root causes of harm.” However, it does remove those who are victimizing others from these communities. While there is a need to discuss ways to reduce crime in society, that does not mean that prisons do not serve this critical public safety purpose. While prison may not reform a rapist, it will punish the rapist and isolate him from society. While that removal is precisely what abolitionists object to in cutting off avenues for support and rehabilitation, it also protects victims from dangerous criminal actors.
Moreover, whatever the social and economic conditions may be in a given community, most people do not respond to those conditions by raping or harming others.
Professor Spade insists that “care and accountability circles work better than punishing people who have engaged in sexual harm to make them stop.” Yet, there is a significant leap of logic in insisting that the “incarceral context… has set up a story about safety, culturally, that’s terrible for all of us. And it’s also set up the same structures internally, that are about getting safe by getting away from people we perceive as bad.”
I have spent my career as a criminal defense attorney, but the removal of rapists is not “some story” fed to the public “about getting safe by getting away from people we perceive as bad.” It is not a mere “perception” that rapists and abusers are “bad.” These are dangerous individuals who get a thrill or fulfill a need in sexually assaulting others. In the course of those crimes, they cause lasting injury to victims, destroying their sense of security and self for years.
Turning back to the transgender movement, Spade insisted that such a reformation of society will require a “militant struggle” that brings together a broader coalition to “fight[] back.”
Many in academia have embraced Spade for these views. New York University Law School invited him to give the Annual Rose Sheinberg Lecture where he spoke about the talk “No Prisons, No Borders, No Cops, No State?” Spade, who is transgender, bills his work as seeking “to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice.”
Spade is not alone in “abolitionist” writings, which both the media and academia have highlighted with little comparative interest in opposing views or criticism.
CUNY Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who teaches Earth and Environmental Sciences and Psychology, was given a profile in The New York Times Magazine about her work to abolish prisons entitled “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind.” Gilmore calls for massive increases in government-funded jobs, education, housing, and health care to produce “a productive and violence-free life.”
The New York Times exalts how she has succeeded in reframing the debate on “policing, jailing, caging and controlling of populations” and “has shaped the thinking of many geographers, as well as generations of graduate students and activists.”
The New York Times has long pushed abolition theories. In 1955, it was a column titled “Should Prisons Be Abolished?” that described a prison as the manifestation of an “anachronistic relic of medieval concepts of crime and punishment.”
In the NYU lecture, Professor Spade hits on many of the same radical concepts as Davis, lashing out at the state, capitalism, and the establishment. Spade heralds how we are at this “incendiary moment” that she never thought would come in seeking to abolish prisons despite the work of the “colonial government.” As a result of “big insurrectionary uprisings,” Spade says we can now end the “long history of repression” in the United States.
As part of this effort at the “delegitimization of the state,” Professor Spade emphasizes that the state exists to “extract the most from the people and the planet” and “redistribute wealth upwards.”
The abolitionist movement is central to this radical agenda and, as shown at schools like NYU and in papers like the New York Times, it is all the rage.
For some, replacing prisons with “Care and Accountability Circles” can seem reminiscent of the final scene in A Clockwork Orange when the minister apologizes to actor Malcolm McDowell while spoon-feeding him breakfast. He assures that he will be given an ample job and speaks hopefully of how “public opinion has a way of changing.”
That is precisely what abolitionists believe is happening in this “incendiary moment.” For years, students have been given a steady diet of such indoctrinating codswallop with little exposure to opposing views on their faculties. With so little diversity of viewpoints, it’s like going through college with your eyes wired open like McDowell.
I encourage you to watch the full video of this lecture to gain insight into the current state of higher education.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
The fact is that prisons can self-improve under the collective agency of the incarcerated population establishing norms of behavior. San Quentin, a maximum security lockup which was a jungle 60 years ago has transformed itself into an institution of self-correction for 70-80% of its prisoners. This was accomplished through leadership among the long-timers with help from smart, pragmatic outside expert criminologists.
How was that possible? It took some mental health savvy to recognize and segregate the sub-population of psychopathic prisoners — who by definition have miswired brains, and thus cannot be rehabilitated. Those non-empathetic monsters have to be put in a prison within a prison so that they don’t despoil the culture of those on a path to self-renewal. That attentiveness to dominant culture is the breakthrough concept.
These radical do-gooders wouldn’t know how to even replicate success, as they are fixated on race. That makes them blind to everything else — including the psychopathic spectrum. These idiot abolitionists don’t know the first thing about what works and what doesn’t. Their shallow theories of criminal culpability are destined to fail the very people they aspire to help, while subjecting society-at-large to psychopathic terror.
The circle will continue. One teacher gave someone with like minded ideas a degree that lead to a teacher position. That teacher being inspired by his power then found two more students with similar ideas and graduated them so they could teach. The numbers of like minded professors continued to expand resulting in what we have today. Individuals that have differing opinions are pushed out of the education system.
Can this be reversed?
IMO it will take a long time. One professor will have to buck his colleagues or misrepresent themselves like Gov. Spanberger. As more and more parents realize the failure of higher education resulting in indoctrination and lower income to cost, they will find alternate choices. Community college, trade schools and direct apprenticeship programs. I believe there is less of the radical indoctrination in these supposedly lower choices, due to the students trying to get the basics prior to moving on. The individuals that are working want to improve their skillset, not partake in politics but to move upward. Or those just looking to learn.
More insight into the far leftist mindset, Now They Think Babies Can Be Racist
https://modernity.news/2026/09/10/now-they-think-babies-can-be-racist/
Note: This would be the same group of people who believe that a fetus, in the womb, knows if it is “trans” or not.
Yes! Release the prisoners! We must house, feed, and educate them. But where? Why not start the release in late spring at the end of the academic year and move the prisoners into empty university dormitories! Food service exists, pay the faculty to teach, and allow the prisoners to roam the campus.
Can we all just agree that there are times when we should be free to apply the term “lower education” instead of “higher education” (even though, technically, we are referring to the same tertiary post-secondary level)?”
My church has the same sort of groups. We call them “care groups” and we hold each other accountable in our Christian walk.
I belong to one, but hardly ever attend. So much for my care and accountability, right?
This concept only works if the criminal wants to change, otherwise, pffft.
Anyone see George this morning? Me thinks he exhausted himself yesterday. It was a long one for him and the nurses can’t find him.
Abolitionism, incarceration, recidivism, rehabilitation, habilitation, restorative justice, accountability circles. We throw all these terms around, but every one of them is downstream from formation.
Formation is happening everywhere, all the time. Family, schools, neighborhoods, culture, and yes, prisons. The real question is what those environments are forming people to become.
We should absolutely work on that root problem. But while we do, people who have demonstrated that they are a threat to others still need to be separated from law-abiding society. Those are two different problems, and we need to be capable of dealing with both.
I was thinking: capacity.
What is the conservative solution?
I dont know that there is a solution. I do know that releasing sex offenders back into society without recognizable punishment will result in persons in society taking the law into their own hands.
What then will be done to the father who murders his daughters assailant?
This is what these people want to bring to all of America, i.e. failed Blue cities, Lefty Seattle-Area Corporate Giants Begin Revolt Against Progressive City Hall
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/lefty-seattle-area-corporate-giants-begin-revolt-against-progressive-city-hall
What does that have to do with the subject at hand? You’ve never had an original thought in your life and you think links makes you smart?
Pointing out the association of illiberal leftist thinking and policies leads to sane and normal liberal Democrats to revolt against those failed illiberal leftist policies.
Why?
Fear of crime.
It is not hard to figure out. Well, perhaps it may be for someone like you.
No prisons per se, but gulags and re-education centers are A-OK
Exactly.
Just like abolish the police. But storm troopers and death squads are OK.
Kinda tells you something about their totalitarian agenda, doesn’t it.
Kinda tells you? What exactly? Or not what exactly?
Jeez do we have to spell everything out for you? It ‘kinda’ tells you the lefty’s totalitarian agenda includes storm-troopers and death squads necessarily, in order to seize socialist control from those who own anything or desire freedom to enslave humanity for their own greed. Sheesh.
How about these marxist idiots who are advocating turning criminals loose on society be the very first people to volunteer to house them in their own homes with their families?? If it works, if criminals truly become reformed & civilized people under these conditions, we can give a try on a wider basis. But the marxists need to volunteer to welcome rapists & murderers into their own homes FIRST!
As you say it about “volunteering”, so if one doesn’t volunteer then they don’t need or have to house a so-called criminal. Now what if that criminal is a Trump supporter in jail for, say, illegal voting, would you house him/her?
Only a brain-dead “yout” would agree that “care and accountability” circles are better than prisons to protect normal society against criminals.
“care and accountability circles”
Here’s an idea: Hold those “circles” in Martha’s Vineyard. See how long it takes the resident “humanitarians” to bus them elsewhere.
Is this idea from the same brain trust that gave us the welfare state as a means of raising everyone up out of poverty?
Or is it the group that believed that open borders were benefit for Americans?
Or, perhaps, the same group that thought that lowering standards in education would promote those from the bottom into a good life?
Oh, wait…I think they are all from the same twisted tribe that thought defunding police and releasing hardened, pathological criminals into our streets – for the good of the offender (never mind the victims).
Sure your next idea will be as successful AND as costly or more to the rest of the sane citizens of this nation.
That welfare state you disparage kept your family from dissolving after your husband (now that’s am scary thought) left you and kept your spawn from living a criminal existence. And now you’re a super successful entrepreneur (actually you were forced out) at 75, but where would you be if you didn’t have illegals in your business paying them pennies an hour?
Didn’t yo mama ever warn you about taking them loco drugs so early in the morning… a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Now don’t go driving while under the influence of that junk.
whimsicalmama,
HAHAHAAHAHAH! Good one!!
This reminded me of Richard Pryor some years ago when he went to a California prison to do a show. He talked about how he saw all of those beautiful, Black brothers, and then said, “thank God they’re in prison.” Anyone who has ever dealt with criminals knows that there are some– by no means all– who are just plain bad, whatever the cause, and they need to be kept away from civilized society. My wish would be that Professor Spade and his circle would have some of these individuals move in with them.
honestlawyermostly,
You are correct.
Case in point, Engineer with close ties to Fox News hosts stabbed to death in random attack in Texas park
https://nypost.com/2026/09/12/us-news/engineer-with-close-ties-to-fox-news-hosts-killed-in-random-attack-in-texas-report/
Upstate– to add a little humor to this topic, I once had to represent a man indicted on federal guns and drugs charges. (Here, in federal court at that time, civil lawyers like me had to accept criminal appointments as a condition of keeping our license). In my first meeting with my new client, he explained– I wrote down the exact words– “I am what you would call a career criminal. But, I ain’t very good at it cause I’ve been got nine convictions.” (I learned he did have nine felony convictions). During a preliminary hearing where the drugs and guns were in the courtroom, before a break, the judge asked who was going to watch the evidence. My client raised his handcuffs hands and volunteered. I actually grew to like him.
honestlawyermostly,
HA! Thank you for the insight and the morning laugh!
You sound very much like Matlock was patterned after you.
He’s married old woman. Attend to your poodle.
WTF does that have to do with abolishing prisons?
Why is the focus of your argument, and others, that those eventually released should live with supporters of prison reform? How is that an argument? For a lawyer, you’re rather stupid to use that facetious argument. What about the criminals, Trump supporters in jail for petty crimes and serious ones, say, like Tina Peters in CO. Would you help them? Don’t bother answering. You’re an idiot.