The prison abolition movement is not seeking to release serial killers and other dangerous murderers to the streets. It could use a better name, but abolition is used to set it apart from those who want prisons to remain focused on punishment but with fewer people. Reducing
incarceration is not enough if prison remain punitive, where prisoners are abused, isolated, and thrown away without access to books, education, and other activities, where sheriffs brag about bad food, no tv, etc.
It's about transforming the prison system from punitive to rehabilitative, to having incarceration as the last, rather than the first, resort. To increase diversion, mental health, and outside-prison support to offenders so they avoid prison.
Prison abolition is about using mental health inpatient and outpatient treatment for people who are mentally ill, not prison. They want many of the same things people working on prison reform want, but more than reform, they want to transform...
to shift priorities toward prevention, rehabilitation, diversion, treatment, couseling....all less expensive than prison while being more humane as well. It's a shift away from punishment as the purpose of prison.
