Many self-described democratic socialists advocate for dismantling prisons. Yet this position clashes with their broader aim of criminalizing a far wider range of activities.
“Democratic socialists” are a rising force on the political left, and many of them subscribe to prison-abolitionist views as well. Yet there is a stark inconsistency between their brand of socialism and their abolitionism. Building a socialist economy requires outlawing numerous kinds of economic activity, and those prohibitions must be backed by some mechanism of punishment. Historically, when ambitious socialist projects have been pursued, they have tended to produce far more incarceration (and related punishment) rather than less. There are several theoretical routes to resolving this tension, but none prove viable. The dilemma matters not only for full prison abolition but also for any plan to meaningfully reduce imprisonment without eliminating it altogether.
What is Socialism?
Before delving deeper, it is worth clarifying that the term “socialism” here denotes government domination of a substantial portion of the economy, not merely a modest uplift in welfare spending or a handful of targeted regulations. This is not merely my own interpretation. It reflects what leading socialists themselves advocate. For instance, the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the most prominent socialist organization in the United States, asserts that they aim to create a system in which food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation are not run as profit-seeking enterprises but are treated as common goods. Accomplishing that requires a comprehensive takeover of these vast sectors by the state. The DSA and other socialist groups also seek to broaden government influence even in sectors that they may not fully socialize, endorsing extensive rent controls, a major expansion of employment regulations, and related measures. Taken together, these demands would amount to socializing a substantial chunk of the economy. It isn’t simply about making the U.S. resemble Denmark or Sweden—countries with sizable welfare states yet still operating largely under market mechanisms in many respects.
Socialist calls for prison abolition aren’t just rhetorical. For example, the DSA operates an “Abolition Working Group” that, among other aims, campaigns for “Freedom for all incarcerated people.” Prominent socialist candidates for public office also have histories of endorsing prison abolition.
The Contradiction
There is a glaring, though often overlooked, contradiction between socialism and prison abolitionism. Socialism envisions criminalizing a broad spectrum of economic activity, and those laws require enforcement by some form of punishment. If, as with the DSA, you want to guarantee that sectors such as “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit enterprises” and instead treat them as “common goods,” you will necessarily have to outlaw profit from delivering those goods and punish anyone who violates those prohibitions.
In practice, attempts to do this have repeatedly spawned enormous black markets, particularly because government control over essential industries tends to produce shortages and depress the incentives for efficient operation. I grew up in the Soviet Union, and nearly all of my adult relatives and their friends and acquaintances were involved in illicit, black-market exchanges of various kinds. Often, such activity was the only way to obtain even reasonably decent goods and services—food, medicine, transportation, and more. For example, my maternal relatives ran a black-market auto-repair business because state-owned workshops were notoriously unreliable. If they had been caught, they could have ended up imprisoned, as many others did in similar circumstances. Others illicitly produced and sold food, medicines, and clothing on the side.
Socialist governments attempted to suppress these activities through coercive means. When they succeeded in limiting such illicit activity, it was usually via extensive repression, which helped the state maintain control over key sectors of the economy and, to some extent, reduced overall illicit economic activity. The same logic extends to heavy-handed regulations that stop short of full socialization: imposing severe rent control or very high minimum wages, for example, creates incentives for illegal rental markets or for employers to evade wage regulations. Such counterproductive effects—unemployment among less skilled workers and housing shortages—are predictable consequences of stringent controls.
The bottom line is straightforward: socialism entails banning a substantial number of activities and enforcing those bans through punishment. That is why actual socialist states have imprisoned—and sometimes executed—large numbers of people as an unintended outcome of their economic policies. The Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and others routinely jailed or killed individuals who engaged in illegal “capitalist” transactions. Think of the fate of the so-called Kulaks and their peers in other socialist regimes.
No Way Out of the Dilemma
There are a few theoretical routes one might imagine to escape this paradox, but none of them are truly workable for modern Western socialists in a morally acceptable sense.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some socialists argued that a truly socialist society would scarcely need a carceral apparatus, because human character would change under socialism. The so-called “New Socialist Man” would follow the law willingly, without coercion, because greed, selfishness, and violence would be vastly diminished under a different social order.
As history shows, this expectation never came to pass. In reality, the idealized “socialist man” proved to be just as violent and grasping as the capitalist version, if not more so. Those who have lived in socialist countries can attest to this reality.
And the same holds for the “socialist woman.” While women, on average, commit fewer crimes than men, the same pattern does not appear to shrink under socialism. There is little reliable data on transgender individuals in socialist states (in part because such regimes have often restricted related rights), but the broader point remains: the utopian transformation of human nature has not occurred. Today, most socialists no longer promise an ontological change in human nature—and rightly so.
A second proposed way out is to rely on punishments other than imprisonment, such as fines or community service. But when people refuse to pay fines or to perform community obligations, the enforcement mechanism can only be backed by the threat of imprisonment or a more severe sanction. In the end, there is no effective enforcement framework that does not rely on coercion. As liberal Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter has argued, citizens should not back a law they are unwilling to enforce with lethal force.
That still leaves room for alternative sanctions that are as harsh as or harsher than imprisonment. In premodern societies, prisons were rare, but corporal punishment and the death penalty were common. It is conceivable to revive flogging and the rack or to expand the use of capital punishment. Such measures would, in effect, demonstrate the resolve of those pursuing profit at any cost. And, as a grim aside, many socialist dictators—Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot—indeed relied on mass executions as a tool of rule.
Of course, contemporary socialists who advocate prison abolition are unlikely to endorse substituting prisons with even more brutal forms of punishment. One would hope so!
Finally, there is the option of preserving prisons but renaming them. The Soviet Union, China, and other socialist states have long operated mass detention facilities that, in theory, were distinct from ordinary prisons, sometimes labeled Gulags, “reeducation camps,” or other euphemisms. Today, the Chinese state has detained well over a million Uyghurs in such facilities, though they are not officially called prisons but “vocational education and training centers.” This renaming, however, does not alter the conditions, which are at least as harsh as those in standard prisons. Serious prison abolitionists should not hide behind this kind of hypocrisy.
How to Actually Reduce Incarceration
Prison abolitionists—though not all of them are socialists—are not entirely mistaken about the need to trim down incarceration. They are simply mistaken about the best way to achieve it and, at least given the current human condition, about how far reduction is realistically possible.
Prison abolitionists correctly point out that confinement infringes heavily on liberty and that prison conditions are frequently appalling. Ironically, this is precisely because the very economic incentives that socialists tend to overlook create distorted outcomes in the penal system.
For-profit enterprises have strong motivations to maintain quality while keeping prices competitive, since customers can switch to rival providers. When a business loses market share, profits fall and closure may follow. In contrast, inmates in prison have little choice about where to serve sentences, and administrators and guards have little personal stake in delivering better treatment or facilities for inmates who cannot vote with their feet. Often, guards themselves benefit from a system that tolerates abuse or turns a blind eye to it. The result is a prison environment that can be violent and exploitative, with abuses occurring within inmate populations and, at times, among staff as well.
In practice, voters can, in theory, monitor conditions and vote out politicians who tolerate abuse. In reality, however, most voters are rationally ignorant about public policy and show little sympathy for prisoners, even when exposed to troubling reports. This makes addressing prison conditions a structurally difficult problem.
For these reasons, the case for reducing imprisonment is strong. The most straightforward path is to narrow the scope of illegal activity rather than broaden it. The DSA’s platform has a notable exception in its call to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a position I have long supported as well. But unless the broader system is reformed to avoid mass detentions and deportations, any plan to curb enforcement would still risk enabling significant abuses. To keep immigration controls workable without creating a sprawling detention regime, one would either have to legalize a great deal of presently illegal immigration or substantially cut back on mass deportations, thereby reducing enforcement pressures. If the goal is to restrict entry and removal on a large scale, that inevitably requires a detention-and-removal apparatus prone to serious violations.
Socialist abolitionists recognize this reality when it comes to immigration enforcement. Yet the same logic also applies to their own proposals to criminalize a wide range of “capitalist” economic activities. In both domains, attempts to suppress activity through prohibition tend to produce large black markets that require extensive coercion to keep in check.
Ultimately, imprisonment should be reserved for offenses so grievous that incarceration—despite its flaws and the conditions it creates—is the only viable means to deliver punishment, deter harm, and provide retribution. Crimes such as murder, rape, assault, theft, and the like clearly fit that criterion. By contrast, illegal migration does not belong in the same category. The same reasoning applies to many so‑called “capitalist acts between consenting adults” that some socialists seek to ban (as famously described by Robert Nozick). It is also worth noting that these concerns bolster the argument for ending, or at least curtailing, the War on Drugs, which accounts for a substantial portion of mass incarceration—roughly 43% of federal inmates and about 20% of all inmates across all jurisdictions are bound up in nonviolent drug offenses.
If the goal is to reduce imprisonment, then dismantling or at least drastically reducing immigration restrictions and ending the War on Drugs would be sensible starting points. By contrast, socialism runs the risk of amplifying the carceral state far beyond its current size.
We cannot utterly abolish imprisonment and similar punitive measures so long as there remain at least a few human behaviors worth suppressing. But there is ample room to significantly shrink its reach.
To be fair, some of the same flaws also appear in statist economic policies advocated by right-wing nationalists, a point I have discussed at length. Yet those flaws do not excuse the shortcomings of socialist approaches, and vice versa. Indeed, socialists would be prudent to remember that the coercive apparatus they build to enforce their economic regime could eventually fall into the hands of ideological opponents. Even if they trust their comrades to wield that power responsibly, can they place the same confidence in figures like Donald Trump?
The discussion here does not conclusively settle the broader question of the optimal role of the state in the economy. If a particular intervention yields benefits so large that they cannot be achieved by any alternative means, it could warrant a substantial increase in imprisonment and other coercive measures. Nevertheless, it is essential to weigh the tradeoff between broadening the illegal activity landscape and expanding the carceral state. This is especially critical when criminalization tends to spawn sizable black markets. You cannot realize a genuinely socialist order without an overarching system of state coercion, and that fact, at the very least, weakens the case for socialism.
