By Noah Rothman
Thursday, July 30, 2026
The list of things the Democratic Socialists
of America want to abolish is long: federal immigration enforcement
agencies and the borders they police, the Pentagon, the Senate, the Electoral
College, the two-party system, and the Constitution’s separation of powers
among them. But it’s the existence of America’s prisons, and the justice system
that consigns convicts to incarceration, that seems to irritate the DSA’s
vanguard most.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for “prison
abolition” designed to “abolish
our carceral system.” The Democratic nominee in New York’s 13th district,
Darializa Avila Chevalier, couldn’t agree more. “I am an abolitionist and
oppose reform that entrenches the expansion of the carceral state,” she wrote. CNN described Zohran Mamdani as “evasive” when the New York City mayor was asked whether he
sought the end of incarceration as we know it. “There are prisons,” he replied with remarkable obtuseness when asked if there
“should be” prisons. Mamdani skeptics were probably not persuaded that he had
abandoned his longtime confusion over the “purpose” of prisons.
Of course, defunding the police is part and parcel of
this campaign. “I support defunding the police as a first step towards
abolishing the police,” the Democratic Party’s likely nominee for Wisconsin
governor, Francesca Hong, once insisted. Such reforms are a sine qua
non if we are to realize her “perfect world,” which “would be a world without prisons.”
The press rather gently describes these views as “ambitious” or even “aspirational,” but the DSA’s most notable agitators are not
dealing in metaphors. It would be foolish, however, to expect DSA candidates to
“explain the nuances of prison abolition in a hostile media environment,” the Maoist influencer Hasan
Piker brooded. “We need far more political education, power [and]
credibility before we get there.”
Some of the DSA’s candidates appear to struggle with the
concept of criminality itself. For her part, Chevalier agonized over the impossible moral conundrum presented by
murder, and whether punishing the murderer renders us complicit in some cosmic
injustice. And yet, for all the DSA’s hostility toward the conventional methods
for punishing criminals, most of them can still summon passion for prosecuting
crime as they define it.
Among the far-left activist class, for example, there is
all but universal agreement that the Israeli government should be in prison.
Some, like Mamdani, contend that American law enforcement should facilitate
their arrest in deference to the concept of “international law” — a conceptual
framework that should trump the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.
But the representative government freely chosen by the Israeli people isn’t the
only object of DSA hatred. So, too, are the American officials who have enabled
them.
Trump, too, is a war criminal. Trump’s impertinent tweets
aren’t merely unstatesmanlike — they are “a war crime,” according
to AOC. Representative Rashida Tlaib agrees. His airstrikes on Iranian entities,
even those in command of U.S.-designated terrorist outfits, in nations covered
by congressional authorizations for the use of force are “lawless.” Trump
should probably, therefore, feel the full brunt of “international law.” But so,
too, should Joe Biden. He’s another “war criminal,” in Chevalier’s estimation, as well as a “rapist.”
The U.S. criminal code’s circumspection often vexes the
Democratic Socialists. They’d seek to expand it to include what they view as
violations of the social compact.
Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, co-sponsored legislation that would “amend the Fair Labor Standards Act
of 1938 to provide for increased criminal and civil penalties for wage theft,”
including imprisonment. The DSA’s advocacy, however, blurs the discrepancy
between clear and intentional fraud and run-of-the-mill workplace disputes.
During her bid for district attorney, socialist NYC councilwoman Tiffany Cabán
advocated “wage theft” enforcement priorities that thrilled her socialist boosters. They went “beyond a narrow view of law
enforcement” and would, in practice, “free the poor and jail the rich.”
Lawmakers should pursue new anti-wage theft laws, the DSA’s Los Angeles chapter averred, as well as “criminal
penalties against non-compliant employers.”
If the DSA had its way, polluters and other environmental
miscreants would likewise find themselves in the dock. In New York City,
DSA-endorsed figures like Kristen Gonzalez and Emily Gallagher, as well as the
self-described Democratic Socialist Jessica González-Rojas, pushed prosecutors to “press criminal charges against big
oil for its role in fueling hurricanes and other climate disasters.”
The Mamdani administration’s plan to seize properties
from “negligent owners and property managers” will run into constitutional
obstacles, as the Cato Institute’s Ilya Somin explained. “The mayor’s
proposal doesn’t just violate the federal and state constitutions,” he wrote.
“It would also make the city’s shortages worse” as owners sit on vacant
properties rather than expose them to expropriation. Mamdani has a plan for
that: criminal penalties.
The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development announced
in May that it will “pursue criminal charges and engage with lenders to force
compliance or immediately begin foreclosure proceedings when landlords refuse
to comply” with Mamdani’s anti-owner “Fix the City” initiative. It’s a
small step toward remediating the damage done by private property ownership,
which the mayor’s tenant organizer, Cea Weaver, called “a weapon of white supremacy
masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”
In the future our would-be socialist overlords imagine
for us, there might be no jails, but there would still be criminals. Whereas
the DSA’s more whimsical figures struggle with how to deal with murderers,
arsonists, and rioters, the radicals among them are not so conflicted when it
comes to America’s political officials, employers, industrialists, and property
owners. The unconstitutionality of their policy preferences doesn’t seem to
bother them much. And why should it? That’s what the revolution is for.
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