About the Prison Moratorium Project
stands by a simple principle: do no harm. This is the animating principle behind our advocacy for a serious rethinking of the current correctional system in the United States.
Criminals are people who commit crimes.
This is common sense. They’ve broken the law and they have to pay the consequence.
A legal system that has no consequence is not much of a legal system because whatever behavior you’re trying to ban is going to happen again and again. Obviously, there has to be some sort of punishment. We’re 100% in agreement with this line of thinking.
Where we diverge involves the question of how we’re going to punish people. While undoubtedly the current penal system that we have is much better than what we had for thousands of years, it can definitely stand improvement. There is definitely a room for a tremendous amount of improvement while we’re not necessarily drawing and quartering people or slashing people open, burning them at the stake, impaling their heads on stakes in a public plaza somewhere.
Whatever system we have now is still destructive. We may not be destroying the physical bodies of inmates, but you can bet that we’re destroying their minds and, just importantly, their life prospects.
Criminals are people who commit crimes.
This is common sense. They’ve broken the law and they have to pay the consequence.
A legal system that has no consequence is not much of a legal system because whatever behavior you’re trying to ban is going to happen again and again. Obviously, there has to be some sort of punishment. We’re 100% in agreement with this line of thinking.
Where we diverge involves the question of how we’re going to punish people. While undoubtedly the current penal system that we have is much better than what we had for thousands of years, it can definitely stand improvement. There is definitely a room for a tremendous amount of improvement while we’re not necessarily drawing and quartering people or slashing people open, burning them at the stake, impaling their heads on stakes in a public plaza somewhere.
Whatever system we have now is still destructive. We may not be destroying the physical bodies of inmates, but you can bet that we’re destroying their minds and, just importantly, their life prospects.
Criminal Conviction
We already know the social stigma for criminal conviction. We are of the mind that this informal penalty is a very strong penalty.
Criminal Justice System
What we diverge on is whether the criminal justice system and its penalties are up to the job because according to statistics.
Commit Crimes
The vast majority of people who commit crimes will not commit those crimes again. We’re talking about maybe 70%.
Experience Society
Unfortunately, the discussion regarding this issue is trained solidly on the 30%. This is the 30% who go in and out of prison. They can’t seem to help it.
Our Team
Our Project
Emplyed Workers
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Worse Crimes!
Commit Crimes
They can’t seem to help it. They just go back in, and their crimes get worse and worse. The whole discussion is colored by the experience society has with these people.
Unfortunately, it turns a blind eye to other 70% who won’t be back, but who would have to face the lifelong consequences of them having been incarcerated. That’s what we’re fighting for. If you’re a convict, you already paid your debt to society. You already spent your time behind prison and then now, you’re frozen out of society. You are given a tremendous amount of incentives to commit more crime so you can go back to the life you’ve grown accustomed to.
There is no shortage of stories of today inmates who have been locked away for so long that they actually commit petty crimes once they get released. The reason they committed those crimes is not because they are habitual criminals. It’s not because they can’t help but commit crimes.
No. They commit those crimes because they want to be thrown back in jail because it’s the only world they knew. It’s pathetic. It’s sad. Unfortunately, it’s the biggest indictment to the prison system.
We, as a society, can do so much better. If we can send a person to the moon, and we can communicate with each other using our mobile phones through live video from halfway around the world, surely, we can come with a system that doesn’t routinely destroy people’s lives.
This is the challenge that the Prison Moratorium Project has fully wrapped its mind around. We are not in a position to dismiss a significant chunk of our population because they had somehow some way broken its laws. We believe in punishment. We agree with you 100% there. However, the issue is how?
In this site, we seek to open the dialogue to many different alternative forms of punishment that do not involve prisons. We believe that the prison system, the way it’s currently constituted and implemented is nonstarter. It creates more problems than it solves.