One of the points of confusion around prisons I think is that the prison system is absolutely white supremacist, and its rank and file operators (cops and guards) often openly broadcast a white supremacist understanding of their own positions...

...but the guards’ ideas about themselves, prisons, and prisoners are often in contradiction with The Prison at a system level, which doesn’t necessarily require them to be devoted little fascists.

Which is why Golden Gulag and Gilmore’s work is so important to understanding why the actual prison system(s) exists the way it does right now in this context

And also why the social Democratic response of simple redistribution and building up social programs is purely utopian. Bc this prison system emerged from the obsolescence of those new real programs to capital... not their failure, but their uselessness

Every state represents one class only (Engels, Lenin) and its particular form, which institutions or decision making processes, can and will continuously change as it comes under pressure from crises (Balibar).

Currently, punishment is one of several rationalizations for imprisonment but as Gilmore says it’s incapacitation that is primary. But it’s surplus absorption and counter Revolution that determine the US prison system not these rationalizing concepts.

If another class seizes state power, the counter-revolutionary and surplus-absorbing functions would become obsolete to the degree of the economic transformation in that process...but the bourgeois, white supremacist ideology of punishment would not simply vanish

All of which is to say in a sloppy half-formed way that abolition offers something indispensable to the cultural transformation that will be required to break from prisons as "the catchall solution to social problems" (Gilmore)...

...but only attacking prisons, police, and the repressive arm of the state isn't only insufficient, it's impossible and it suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of what the state is (bourgeois dictatorship) and what can replace it (communism via proletarian dictatorship).