The DSA Envisions a ‘World Without Prisons,’ but Not One Without Camps

The list of things the Democratic Socialists of America want to abolish is long: federal immigration enforcement agencies and the borders they police, the Pentagon, the Senate, the Electoral College, the two-party system, and the Constitution’s separation of powers among them. But it’s the existence of America’s prisons, and the justice system that consigns convicts to incarceration, that seems to irritate the DSA’s vanguard most.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for “prison abolition” designed to “abolish our carceral system.” The Democratic nominee in New York’s 13th district, Darializa Avila Chevalier, couldn’t agree more. “I am an abolitionist and oppose reform that entrenches the expansion of the carceral state,” she wrote. CNN described Zohran Mamdani as “evasive” when the New York City mayor was asked whether he sought the end of incarceration as we know it. “There are prisons,” he replied with remarkable obtuseness when asked if there “should be” prisons. Mamdani skeptics were probably not persuaded that he had abandoned his longtime confusion over the “purpose” of prisons.

Of course, defunding the police is part and parcel of this campaign. “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,” the Democratic Party’s likely nominee for Wisconsin governor, Francesca Hong, once insisted. Such reforms are a sine qua non if we are to realize her “perfect world,” which “would be a world without prisons.”

The press rather gently describes these views as “ambitious” or even “aspirational,” but the DSA’s most notable agitators are not dealing in metaphors. It would be foolish, however, to expect DSA candidates to “explain the nuances of prison abolition in a hostile media environment,” the Maoist influencer Hasan Piker brooded. “We need far more political education, power [and] credibility before we get there.”

Some of the DSA’s candidates appear to struggle with the concept of criminality itself. For her part, Chevalier agonized over the impossible moral conundrum presented by murder, and whether punishing the murderer renders us complicit in some cosmic injustice. And yet, for all the DSA’s hostility toward the conventional methods for punishing criminals, most of them can still summon passion for prosecuting crime as they define it.

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