Could we make prisons obsolete if capitalism is dismantled?

 

SPOTM Analysis of the Claim
“Prisons are the consequences of systemic racism and global capitalism.”

This is the substance of James Talarico’s 2022 remark that prisons “allow us to ignore the consequences of systemic racism and global capitalism,” and that shifting spending from prisons and policing to education, health care, and jobs could make prisons “obsolete.”

SPOTM rejects the claim.

1. What Prisons Are For

In SPOTM, law exists to place retaliatory force under objective control. Prisons are not a mysterious byproduct of markets or of “whiteness.” They are the institutional response to people who initiate force, fraud, or other rights-violations.

A just prison system answers one question:
Has this person been proven to have violated the rights of others, and what proportionate restraint does justice require?

If that question is replaced with “what social system produced the inmate?”, individual responsibility disappears and the victim is pushed offstage.

2. Capitalism Did Not Create the Need for Prisons

Capitalism, properly understood, is private ownership of the means of production, voluntary exchange, and the pursuit of material self-interest under freedom. It does not require cages. It requires secure property and contracts.

Crime exists in every economic system. The systems that abolished markets did not abolish prisons. They expanded them, often for political offenses, while also producing more poverty. Blaming “global capitalism” for the existence of prisons confuses:

• the fact that some people choose to rob, assault, rape, or murder
  with
• the economic system in which most people create value without doing those things.

Prosperity tends to reduce some kinds of crime. That is an argument for production and property, not against them.

3. Racism Does Not Explain the Institution

Racism is real as a moral vice and, in American history, as a legal injustice. It does not follow that the prison is mainly a device for managing “systemic racism.”

SPOTM’s test is individual and causal:

• A person of any race who initiates force is a proper object of objective law.
• A person of any race who does not is not.
• Unequal group outcomes, by themselves, do not prove that the institution’s purpose is racial domination.

Using “systemic racism” as the master cause treats persons as avatars of groups and treats crime as a weather system rather than as chosen action. That is collectivism plus evasion of agency.

4. The “Make Prisons Obsolete” Move

The program implied by the remark is familiar: cut policing and incarceration, spend the money on social services, and expect the need for prisons to fade.

SPOTM’s objection is not to education, jobs, or medicine. It is to the substitution of welfare for justice.

• Some crime is linked to poverty, family collapse, or addiction. Addressing those can help at the margin.
• Some crime is chosen predation. Schools and clinics do not abolish the need to restrain predators.
• Declaring prison itself “violence,” in the same breath as poverty and pollution, erases the difference between initiating force and restraining those who initiated it.

A society that treats confinement of proven rights-violators as morally equivalent to the original crime has lost the concept of justice.

5. What the Rhetoric Does Philosophically

The claim belongs to a misintegrative pattern SPOTM has flagged before:

• A few large “systems” (capitalism, racism) are treated as the One that explains the Many.
• Particular acts — this assault, this robbery, this murder — are dissolved into the system.
• The remedy becomes reconstruction of society rather than judgment of the actor.

That is not a higher compassion. It is a lower resolution picture of moral reality.

SPOTM Alternative

• Keep prisons for people who have been proven to violate rights.
• Make the law objective: clear offenses, due process, proportionate sentences.
• Attack poverty by production, capital accumulation, and freedom — not by treating property and markets as the crime.
• Attack racism by judging individuals and forbidding race-based legal privilege, not by treating incarceration itself as a racial artifact.
• Use education and work as goods in their own right, not as a magic substitute for justice.

Bottom line:
Prisons exist because some people choose to violate others. Capitalism is not the crime, and racism is not the sufficient cause of the institution. A politics that “explains” cages by markets and race is explaining away the offender.

In addition:

Here is a deeper expansion.

1. The Claim Has a Specific Intellectual Pedigree

The remark does not stand alone. It tracks prison-abolition theory associated with writers such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore, whom Talarico quoted: prisons as a “catchall solution to social problems.” In that school, incarceration is less a response to chosen crime than a way capitalist and racial orders manage surplus people, poverty, and unrest.

SPOTM’s objection is to the causal story. A catchall explanation that swallows robbery, rape, murder, fraud, and political dissent into one “system” is too coarse to be true. Different acts have different causes. Treating them as symptoms of capitalism or racism is a refusal to look at the act.

2. Crime Is Not an Output of Markets

If prisons were mainly a capitalist waste-disposal system, one would expect:

• less incarceration where markets are weaker
• more peace where private property is suppressed

That is not the historical pattern. Command economies and revolutionary regimes kept prisons, camps, and secret police, often on a larger scale and with fewer rights for the accused. Markets can coexist with unjust laws, and they have. That does not make the market the source of the need for restraint.

SPOTM’s account is simpler: wherever there are persons and property, some people will initiate force. The question is whether the response is objective law or political vendetta.

3. Racism and Disparities Are Not the Same Thing

Racial disparities in arrest and imprisonment are real in U.S. data. SPOTM does not deny the numbers. It denies the automatic inference:

disparity → the institution exists in order to enforce racial domination

Possible contributors to disparities include:

• differences in rates of violent offending
• family structure and local culture
• policing patterns
• charging and sentencing policy
• past and present racial injustice in particular laws or practices

A serious view sorts these. An ideological view picks “systemic racism” as the One and treats every disparity as proof. That is M2-style misintegration: a pre-chosen unity imposed on the facts.

Where a law or procedure is actually race-based or racially targeted, SPOTM condemns it. Where the law forbids the same crime for everyone and some groups commit that crime at different rates, the prison is not thereby “the consequence of racism.”

4. Why “Spend on Jobs and Schools Instead” Does Not Abolish the Need for Cages

Work and education are goods. They can reduce some crime by raising the value of a lawful future. They do not answer:

• What do you do with the person who has already chosen serious violence?
• What do you do with the person who will continue if left free?
• What do you owe the victim?

Those are questions of justice, not of social-service budgeting. A society can have excellent schools and still need prisons. A society can have poor schools and still need prisons. Conflating the two treats the victim’s right to security as a residual after the budget for programs is set.

5. “Prison Is Violence” Collapses a Moral Distinction

Calling poverty, pollution, and prison all “violence” is a rhetorical leveling. SPOTM keeps the distinction:

• Initiatory force: the criminal act
• Retaliatory force under law: restraint after proof

If those are the same thing, then the jailer and the mugger occupy the same moral category. That is not compassion. It is the destruction of the concept of justice. A cage can be used unjustly. That is an argument for due process and proportionate sentencing, not for the claim that confinement as such is evil.

6. What a SPOTM Criminal-Justice Stance Would Look Like

• Define crimes as rights-violations, not as “social problems.”
• Require proof, public rules, and penalties known in advance.
• Imprison people for what they did, not for what group they belong to.
• Refuse both racialized enforcement and racialized excuse-making.
• Treat rehabilitation as optional improvement of the offender, never as a replacement for the victim’s claim to protection.
• Attack poverty through production and capital, not by treating property as the original offense.

Short Restatement

Capitalism is a system of production and trade. Racism is a collectivist vice and, at times, a legal crime. Prisons, when just, are a response to chosen violations of rights. Tying the existence of prisons to “systemic racism and global capitalism” relocates guilt from the offender to the economic and racial order. That may sound like depth. In SPOTM it is a failure to look at the particular person who initiated force, and at the particular victim who was entitled to protection.