Same with cars, global climate change, and pollution. People only know how to respond to events.
You're confusing corruption for incompetence.
It's true. You have to look far outside of the system to find people who take prison abolition seriously. Anarchists, mostly.
Step 1 is do not look to abolish prison. When you start with such an extreme position no one is going to listen.
Considering that prisons in their current form overflowing with brutality and cruelty are an acceptable mainstream position, I'd rather not care about being extreme. If one believes that prisons as a structure inevitably lead to arbitrarily bad abuse of power, then one is for the abolition of prison.
Without prison, people would demand eye-for-an-eye justice. Without that either, people would dish it out themselves. We'd be back to lynchings.
Be careful what you wish for.
Lynchings were aided and abetted by the state and the prison-industrial complex.
What do you propose as an alternative? No law enforcement at all?
There are many traditions of communal justice that aren't retributive. Keywords that can be googled are restorative justice and transformative justice, for example. Traditional conflict resolution still persists in areas where the reach of the state does not extend. Approaches to justice that eschew centralized authority have a very different character, and I understand that it can be difficult to come up with such examples on one's own. It requires a different approach to the problem.
In any case, prison abolition is a wide topic with a lot of point of views and I could not do any of them justice in an Internet comment. I hate referring someone to wikipedia, but all the other sources I'd cite have a distinctly leftist approach and I think wikipedia is probably the most approachable entrypoint for someone who does not already ascribe to certain ideological premises: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternatives_to_incarceration
I can't speak for OP, but I'd think Anarchists can swing to both extremes. Self defense is not the same as enforcing a dictated law. This is reduction ad absurdum, but still worth thinking about. IMHO, anarchy is not an alternative to other rules, it's the foundation of free will, the empty set that is part of every other set. Of course, anarchism as a label is used with a different message.
It seems that there are many unreported rapes in American prisons. When you read the real stories and how wardens don't care or enable such system, your faith in human nature is over. You realize how fucked up bureocrats are. If Americans – liberals and conservatives – truly cared about human rights they would have started a riot about such issues years ago. They set up a mass whining for the new president of US in less than 24 hours, people clearly don't care about the inhuman treatment of prisoners. Read the testimony of activist Stephen Donaldson. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-20/news/ls-60064_1_priso...