"Decarceration’s Inside Partners"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper now available via SSRN authored by Seema Saifee.  Here is its abstract:

This Article examines a hidden phenomenon in criminal punishment.  People in prison, during their incarceration, have made important, sometimes extraordinary, strides toward reducing prison populations.  In fact, stakeholders in many corners, from policymakers to researchers to abolitionists, have harnessed the legal and conceptual strategies generated inside the walls to pursue decarceral strategies outside the walls that were once considered impossible.  Despite this outside use of inside moves, legal scholars and reform-minded actors have disregarded the potential of looking to people on the inside as partners in the long-term project of decarceration.

Building on the change-making agency and revolutionary ideation inside the walls, this Article points the way to a new, alternative approach to decarceration: thinking alongside people banished from the polity.  Criminal law scholars routinely recount their stories but rarely do we consider people held in prison as thought leaders, let alone equal partners, to progress toward a noncarceral state.  Despite conducting extensive research on prisons and those held inside them, legal scholars know — and wonder — tremendously little about the decarceral work, decarceral ideas and “think tanks” that surge behind bars.  The absence of our curiosity reflects and reproduces the ideological work of carceral punishment.

This Article demonstrates that an alternative vision of decarceration that resists this ideological work opens up more promising paths to create the legal and social change that our current moment demands.  It calls on law scholars to find ways to discover, ignite and emancipate more decarceral visions on the inside.  And it argues that, unless we make this challenging shift, we suppress innovative, effective and more conceivable possibilities to radically transform our carceral state.