I always thought that the basic point of contention is this.
There are those who think that murder and rape won't be nearly so prevalent in a society where we eliminate social injustice. For what reason would there be to commit such crimes. Indeed, this view was so prevalent that, in the late 80s, when I took a public policy course, one where you explore "issues in american society," on the issue of crime, one side was indeed, this position.
There are those who think that such crimes will never go away, that there is some core of human being that isn't malleable, that isn't the product of social relations, and such crimes will always exist, though there will be a lot less. For example, there will be, no matter what we do, 25 year old males who will rape 11 year old males. There will always be people who find their partner in bed with another lover, and they will murder in the heat of passion, as they say.
I think there is another position, people who recognize that most of these crimes will disappear, but there will still always be people who are psychopaths, like Harris and Klebold, who have fantasies about world destruction and decide to enact them by shooting people. Psychopaths, in this view, are not produced by social relations but by something outside society - biology, genetics?
If you take the last two positions, that there is something about human nature that exists outside of social relations, then you'll never buy the prison abolition platform.
But I think there is one more division perhaps. I think justin (andie) used to articulate this view: that there has to be punishment, a form of vengeance, where the state acts on behalf of the victims to exact the same kind of harm on the criminal that the criminal has inflicted on both society and the victims. The vengeance view isn't about teaching lessons. The idea is that the criminal can't be taught a lesson and it doesn't matter if punishment deters - only that the criminal is made to suffer.
There is a related view where society is the victim, as are the actual people who suffer. To break a law is to harm society, as much as it is to harm individuals. The only satisfaction for the victims is to punish criminals by treating them as not human. A human is given a chance to live in this just and good society we create and if she fucks up by committing murder or rape or what have you, they must be imprisoned as punishment. Not punishment intended to correct behavior. But punishment intended to banish the criminal from human society altogether.
The argument is also that you need to keep people off the streets, so they don't harm again. But it's not good enough to put them in a hospital where they can be treated (if you take the view that they are sick) or in a place where, treated as human, they are understood to be capable of learning how to become people who don't harm others. We may want to do those things as well, but on this view, it's important to punish.
shag