I oppose prisons, period.
So what do you propose instead? Executions? Selling into servitude to repay the harm of their crimes? The lash? The stock? Crimes do require some form of punishment and prisons offer the chance for rehabilitation, even if that is too seldom offered by society these days and too seldom accepted when it is offered.
No s**t? 
I don't buy your premise that prisons offer the chance for rehabilitation, given their sorry track record throughout American history. I would rather see the U.S. implement principles of restorative justice rather than continue down the path of imprisonment for imprisonment's sake. How would that work in question? Well, as per the above link, a prison abolitionist like myself would apply restorative justice largely in the following manner:
I do think that eliminating the causes of crime is of the utmost importance, which ultimately means abolishing capitalist social relations (and in the meantime, minimizing them insofar as possible) in favor of a post-market, post-capitalist economy. Crime is not and never has been something that can be simply boiled down to individual actors: it is a social phenomenon resulting from the uneven distribution of the capitalist surplus and arises naturally from capitalist class society. Only when we have abolished all classes and each of us have full and free access to the surplus of our labor on the basis of need shall we eliminate crime.
How can crime be eliminated? I suppose one could argue that, in a society without laws (which is one of the ultimate objectives of Marxist politics no?), 'crime' will not exist (because it will be impossible to break any laws). However, people will still murder, they will still rape, they will still attempt to deny people access to the 'surplus of their labour'. Man's proclivity to hurt other men, in my view, is something fixed; after all, people will still succomb to anger, greed, envy, lust and all of the more base emotions that exist inside all of us; this is shown by the fact that the wealthy, despite, in theory, having all that they could possibly want, still commit crimes like the aforementioned murder, rape and theft. I suppose one could say that our propensity to harm one another is indelibly imprinted upon humanity. I mean, in 'pre-capitalist' societies, did humans not harm one another (and if you like, this can be extended all the way back to when humans were nothing more than primitives sheltering in caves or under deerskins)?
Poll
