The Prison System and Alternatives to Incarceration: The Good, the Bad, and the Effective

While society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

When I was nine, I lived in a small racially integrated pocket of a segregated Midwestern town—an exception to redlining. My integrated school was unfairly labeled “problematic,” not because of what we did but because of who we were.

One morning, permission slips promised a circus field trip. I woke up thrilled. But when we got off the bus, we faced the locked gates of a maximum-security juvenile detention center. Without warning, we were subjected to a “Scared Straight” program. Guards led us past rows of caged children—all Black—encouraging us to stare. One boy, just eight, was singled out. We were told his mother no longer loved him and that if we misbehaved, our mothers would abandon us, too.

As a white child, I felt deeply disturbed; the Black children in my class faced even greater humiliation and terror. We were shown a barren yard, once a playground, now overgrown and abandoned. A dilapidated “school” was pointed out as a treat—it offered rare respite from solitary cells.

I lacked the vocabulary then to name the racism and violence I witnessed, but I knew this: This was not justice. That day was supposed to teach us our place in a world stitched through with white supremacy and fear. Instead, it left me with a question that would chase me into my career representing people in prison and shaping prison policy: If this place wasn’t about justice, what was it about?

It was the beginning of my life’s work: trying to understand the true purpose and work of prison.

What Prison Does Not Do

Prisons are everywhere in the United States—so ubiquitous they fade into the background. In my teaching, I collect everyday items that show how normalized incarceration has become: teddy bears in prison stripes, “welcome home” cards for returning loved ones, LEGO prisoners with racialized tattoos, even ads for ball-and-chain ice cream cakes. These aren’t obscure items; they’re from mainstream stores. When prison becomes party decor, it’s clear that imprisonment in America is more than a punishment—it’s a worldview.

Despite its social entrenchment, the modern prison system—using confinement as the primary form of punishment—is only 200 years old. Before that, justice looked different: restitution, exile, corporal punishment, healing circles, and more. But in two centuries, prison has embedded itself as if it were a natural law.

Today, the United States imprisons more people per capita than any nation on Earth. In 2024, more than 1.9 million people were locked up in more than 5,000 institutions: state and federal prisons, jails, juvenile and immigration facilities, military prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and more—at an annual cost of at least $182 billion. Even with a drop from the 2008 peak of 2.3 million people incarcerated, the scale remains staggering.

People targeted for imprisonment are overwhelmingly Black, Indigenous, Latino, and low-income people of all races. In McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987), the Supreme Court acknowledged pervasive racial bias throughout the criminal legal system but still upheld the death penalty when applied with bias. Justice William Brennan, dissenting, warned of the Court’s “fear of too much justice” were it to protect against disparate impact. Whatever the work prison does, it is bipartisan, deeply cultural, and shaped by structural racism.

In addition to being a new institution, it also is chronically declared broken. Reform has shadowed prison from the start. Prisons arose in Europe as “humane” replacements for corporal punishment. From that moment forward, as prison reform founder John Howard observed in the 18th century, “the history of prisons is the history of reform.” Every generation has tried to fix the ineffectiveness and violence of the institution.

Despite its perceived brokenness, bias, and relative newness, prison is a core institution, which begs the question: What work does prison do? Does it deliver on its commonly attributed promises of incapacitation, deterrence, retribution, and rehabilitation?

Incapacitation: The Illusion of Safety

Selective incapacitation assumes that we can prevent future harms by identifying and confining dangerous individuals, a proposition that rests on two flawed assumptions: that we can accurately predict future violence and that removing certain individuals will reduce overall harm.

Predicting human behavior is deeply unreliable. Even highly accurate risk assessment tools generate high rates of false positives when attempting to identify small, high-risk populations. As a result, we imprison far more people who pose no serious threat than those who do. In fact, many people in prison are never even assessed as dangerous. They include pre-trial detainees and people convicted of nonviolent offenses or imprisoned for poverty-related issues, addiction, or mental illness. This isn’t just inefficient—it’s a human rights disaster.

Worse, incapacitation does not stop violence; it shifts it. Prisons are themselves violent institutions. Imprisoned people are routinely subjected to physical and sexual assault, degradation, and prolonged isolation. These abuses are so normalized that they are fodder for jokes. Even the children’s cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants aired a “Don’t drop the soap” joke; the punchline works because of the normalization of prison rape, and it further normalizes the violence of prison for a new generation.

If our goal is safety, prisons are failing. People are not sentenced to be tortured. Accepting this reality undermines the rule of law by endorsing a shadow system of extralegal punishment carried out by the state through neglect or collusion.

Prison separates people from society—but it does not produce safety.

Deterrence: The Fomenting of Distrust

Deterrence theory claims people avoid crime when punishment is swift, certain, and severe. But in the United States—the most incarcerating nation in history—violence remains endemic. If imprisonment deterred violence, ours would be the safest country on Earth. It is not.

Our legal system too often sends a different message: Punishment is selective and corrupt. For example, in the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, he called for mandatory death sentences for all who kill police—then he granted clemency to political allies, pardoning January 6th insurrectionists who attacked police. These actions define the justice system. When outcomes are perceived to be shaped by wealth and power, not behavior, the law loses moral force. For over-policed and under-protected communities, it deepens distrust, not deterrence.

Even more basic, deterrence assumes people expect to be caught. But the majority of harms—including violent crime—go unreported due to community mistrust. The chance of arrest is so remote that the threat of imprisonment does not factor in.

For deterrence to work, the system must be fair, predictable, and fast. Ours is none of these. In low-income communities both most surveilled and most vulnerable to violence, the justice system doesn’t deter harm, it foments distrust in the rule of law.

Retribution: The Myth of Just Deserts

Punishment for its own sake as a justification for prisons appeals to a basic moral instinct: Those who cause harm should face consequences. For this rationale to be ethical, punishment must be proportionate.

However, sentences often bear little connection to the harm done. Two people committing the same act may receive wildly different punishments based on race, income, geography, or politics, fracturing any sense of fairness.

And prison itself isn’t just a place to serve time—it inflicts its own violence. The loss of liberty is compounded by neglect, illness, and early death. Families are torn apart. Violence, including that perpetrated by staff, is pervasive. Isolation wrecks mental health. People labor for cents on the dollar. After release, they face lifelong stigma, surveillance, and economic exclusion. Punishment extends far beyond the sentence.

As activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes, punishment in the United States is often about “organized abandonment”—a system built not to deliver justice but to disappear those the state has already written off. This disappearing is literal. As illustration, in 2025, more than 200 migrants were disappeared from the United States under the Alien Enemies Act, not deported but transferred to a Salvadoran supermax prison. Families lost contact; officials offered no answers or remedial action, even when ordered to do so by the Supreme Court. This kind of disappearance is the natural extension of a system built to exile and erase.

If retribution is meant to restore moral balance, our prison system fails. What it delivers is not justice; it’s incongruent vengeance.

Rehabilitation: Alternatives to Incarceration

If our criminal legal system truly aimed at reducing harm, we know what works: We would invest in people, not prisons. Community-rooted alternatives to incarceration—such as mental health and addiction treatment, housing support, job programs, and restorative justice—have consistently interrupted cycles of violence and reduced recidivism. These models offer what prisons cannot: healing, accountability, and true rehabilitation. And they work best when peer-led and designed to support—not punish—behavioral change and survival.

Diversion programs, referring to any process that allows individuals to avoid formal prosecution or incarceration by redirecting them into treatment, supervision, or community-based services, exist at many stages of the legal process, from pre-arrest to post-charge, and may include mental health courts, restorative justice circles, community service in lieu of prosecution, or mandated treatment. Drug courts, one of the most institutionalized models, offer treatment in lieu of incarceration, but they often rely on surveillance, sanctions, and carceral logic. While these programs have gained popularity for reducing initial jail or prison admissions, their outcomes are mixed. Studies show drug courts may reduce incarceration for the initiating offense, but they do not significantly reduce the total time participants spend behind bars. Participants who struggle to comply—often due to lack of support—can face longer sentences than if they had never enrolled. As such, these programs can reproduce the very harms they intend to disrupt.

In contrast, peer-led diversion, reentry, and rehabilitation programs—born out of the HIV/AIDS crisis—have proven far more effective. Initially resisted by prison officials, peer educators have become essential, offering health education, harm reduction, hospice care, violence interruption, reentry planning, victim reconciliation, and restorative justice. Research shows peer mentorship improves institutional safety and participant well-being and can reduce recidivism by 20 percent. Programs near jails and courts that are run by and for formerly incarcerated people show the strongest outcomes in housing, health care, and employment access.

These results aren’t accidental. Credibility rooted in lived experience builds the trust necessary for change. Peer mentors offer what the legal system rarely does: hope, dignity, and possibility.

Yet, these programs remain underfunded, undervalued, and emotionally burdensome for those doing the work. States often extract peer labor to stabilize broken systems—without compensation or support.

If we are serious about justice, we must stop building cages and start building systems of care: peer-led, trauma-informed, and culturally grounded. The people most impacted by prison hold the wisdom we need. It’s time we invested in them.

The Work Prisons Do

When my daughter was three, I took her to Legoland. At DUPLO Playtown, a model of a “typical” American town included a bank, a home, a fire station—and a jail. Children crowded inside, laughing behind the plastic bars as parents took photos. Just as my daughter ran toward it, I stopped her. “In our family,” I said, “we don’t play jail.”

We know we can reduce both incarceration and crime. Since 2008, the U.S. prison population dropped from 2.3 to 1.9 million. Between 2007 and 2017, 34 states reduced imprisonment and crime simultaneously. FBI data shows that violent and property crime rates have declined overall, even as some types of crime fluctuate. The takeaway: Decarceration does not require sacrificing safety. But we are not taking a bulldozer to the Legoland.

Despite the failures of imprisonment, the institution persists and even expands. To understand why, we must stop asking whether prisons are broken and instead ask: What work do they do very well?

Disappearance, Terror, and Eugenics as Discipline: Prison as Social Control

As Gilmore has argued, prisons are “partial solutions to political problems.” Following the Civil War, the rise of convict leasing and Jim Crow helped preserve a slave-based economy. Plantations were converted to prisons. Similarly, following World War II, when the economy shifted from manufacturing to services, men of color and low-income men of all races were no longer economically useful. Instead, they were warehoused in prisons as disposable labor.

Legoland jail crystalizes a harsh truth: Prisons are woven into U.S. culture—not because they reduce harm, but because they are part of the social order. When viewed in the context of effectuating social control, all the brokenness of prisons becomes an asset.

Imprisonment need not be evenly applied—as a tool of social control, it targets classes deemed surplus or threatening to the status quo. It makes sense that people of color, immigrants, disabled individuals, and the economically disenfranchised are disproportionately confined, not merely punished but disappeared during their most economically and politically active years.

This system’s power lies in its methods: punishment that is swift, arbitrary, and often devoid of due process. People are detained without notice, charges, or representation—subjected to deportation, solitary confinement, and forced sterilization. The goal is not justice but fear: teaching communities that safety is fragile and freedom conditional.

This isn’t new. During COINTELPRO, a counterintelligence program conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1956 to 1971, Black, Indigenous, and civil rights leaders were surveilled, discredited, imprisoned, and killed. The message remains: Challenge authority and risk disappearance. Today’s prison system, inclusive of immigration detention, continues this legacy through state-sanctioned erasure and the secondary fragmentation and destabilization of families and communities.

Prison persists not for its success in creating safety but for how effectively it manages and marginalizes.

A Path Forward: Replacing State Violence with Community Safety

The future is not a place we are going to; it is something we are creating. We have a responsibility to create a better world, to leave a more hopeful legacy for future generations.
—Jane Dorotik, exoneree, writing while serving 20 years in prison

We cannot tinker with this system. We don’t need better prisons—we need a reckoning.

We already know what works: Housing, health care, education, and employment reduce harm far more effectively than incarceration. We know how to interrupt violence and reduce recidivism. What’s missing is the political will.

That will must be built through community-based approaches that prioritize safety, accountability, and healing. And we must follow the leadership of those most impacted: survivors of harm and people currently imprisoned, who are often one and the same.

This is hard, unfinished work. In the face of seemingly intractable problems, there is a tendency to throw our hands up in frustration or despair. And yet, seemingly intractable problems are solved.

We do not yet have a cure for cancer, and we do not stop reaching to find it. We must act—individually and collectively—to build a world grounded in care, not cages. We owe it to ourselves and to the next generation to stop playing jail.