The Dangerous Few

A colleague directed me to an article I had missed from 2022 called The Dangerous Few, Taking Seriously Prison Abolition and its Skeptics, by Thomas Ward Frampton. It’s a clear and useful essay that I’ll review in a minute. Before that, however, I’ll note that whether the goal is massively cutting incarceration or the goal is abolition, there is a very long road to travel before those goals diverge. The U.S. is so far out of whack that our least punitive state, Massachusetts, still incarcerates far more people than the next OECD country on the list (Poland). Millions of cases a year that cycle through U.S. jails and prisons just don’t happen in other countries, because they have better health and housing infrastructure, stronger values around human dignity, more restrained criminal laws, and a less punitive culture – all of those changes are ones we can make without transforming into some magical future society. We need to spend a lot of time, effort, and money to bring the U.S. into line with its peers and that is the focus of my work. 

With that said, back to the article. Frampton first discusses the drawbacks of some of the most common responses by abolitionists to skeptics. In particular, the claim that ‘the dangerous few,’ meaning a small but persistent number of people committing very serious crimes, will simply not exist in a transformed society, because all of the social harms that produce extreme violence etc will have been eliminated. However, the idea that murder and rape will disappear in a far healthier society is not credible; even if most crime disappears, it’s not credible to suggest that literally all serious crime will disappear. And therefore…. prisons still have to exist, says the abolition skeptic. 

The implicit assumption made by the skeptic here is that if there are very serious crimes, surely all must agree that prison is the right solution for those few remaining serious crimes that aren’t possible to eliminate. But no, the abolitionist doesn’t accept that assumption! And it’s not because they believe in rehabilitation for everyone, or out of some deep commitment to mercy. Rather, there are two key insights that Frampton lays out that undermine prisons as the obvious solution for these very hard cases.

First, Frampton writes. "Prison does not eliminate the ability of 'the dangerous few' to harm others, and it never has; it simply redirects that violence to more isolated places and less worthy... recipients. Prisons are 'geographical solution[s] to socio-economic problems.'" Frampton quotes data finding that roughly 200,000 sexual assaults occur in prisons each year, as compared to the estimated ~245,000 sexual assaults outside of prisons each year. Most of the prison cases involved staff assaulting prisoners, meaning those crimes resulted from the existence of the prison. And even in Finland, which has one tenth the incarceration rate of the U.S. and the requirements to serve as a prison guard are higher, there is serious violence in prison. The only plausible response to this is that it’s better for people in prisons to be subjected to that violence than people on the outside, which is certainly not a compelling moral stance!

Next, Frampton reminds us that the ‘dangerous few’ are mostly free now anyways. Most people who commit murder and the vast majority of people who commit rape don’t go to prison for their crimes - they go uncharged, unprosecuted, or unconvicted. Whatever world people are imagining where murderers and rapists don’t go to prison is the world we are living in right now.  

Bottom line, I agree that what to do about really serious cases is a hard problem. My goal has been to show that it’s not obvious that prison must exist in order to address those hard cases. But, like I said above, we are a long way from having to solve for how to eliminate incarceration for the most serious cases. I’m focused on cutting down the obviously heavily bloated population we have right now, and along the way supporting people to create healthier communities where fewer people will grow up with the kinds of trauma that leads to violence.