“The more that people think prisons are a good idea, the more their world and lives will, by necessity, take on this basic likeness. The idea of punishment and retribution is too ridiculous and expensive a luxury to support. It has no effect on the problem, and distributes the harm and expense to every person who has to pay to torture other people. Since when does answering initial harm with egregiously extended harming comprise a solution?

Whatever framework of ‘justice’ we commit to, it must be one that traces signals to their source, and resolves the cultural problems that produce those signals. Punishing the signals simply intensifies the problem. It is really too expensive a idiocy to contemplate, let alone continue. We must completely change our whole perspective on crime, its meanings, its causes, and our response.”

— an anonymous informant