Are Prisons Obsolete?

Are prisons obsolete? The answer may surprise you!
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It's ‘YES'. Yes, prisons ARE obsolete.
More specifically, prisons are a societal failure. Our punitive justice system is built not on justice, but on cruelty and slavery. Slavery was never abolished in the USA, it was merely nationalized. Read that 13th amendment a little closer.
The US prison system is a crime against humanity. It is a violation of human rights. Solitary confinement is state-sanctioned torture. Both solitary confinement and the death penalty are cruel and unusual punishments that must be outlawed.
We must evolve beyond a society that requires prisons. This starts by improving the material conditions of the impoverished (the people most likely to be imprisoned for committing crimes). Then we must demilitarize and revitalize our schooling system. We must provide universal basic services like Single-Payer Healthcare, free higher education, universal housing, public banking, and more. Doing this will drastically reduce the crime rate, and (in time) the prison population.
We must legalize marijuana and decriminalize both drug use & prostitution, providing drug treatment to those who need it instead of prison sentences. We don't treat alcoholics like we do drug addicts. That is another societal failure. We must abolish for-profit prisons, which have directly led to LESS FREEDOM by incentivizing corporations to get more people in jail.
We must strive for a more nuanced approach to criminal justice, with a spectrum of possible punishments. We must make sure whatever systems we have result in human beings LESS likely to commit crimes afterward. Every released prisoner who reoffends is a societal failure. Reducing recidivism rates must be priority number 1 in a restorative criminal justice system.
This book lights the fire to understand why our prison system is obsolete and lays a groundwork on how we can evolve beyond it. I've provided a short explanation of what needs to happen. This book was short and sparse on systemic improvements. I intend on finding more contemporary books that cover this subject in more detail.