The End of Imprisonment

Sommer argues that imprisonment as a method for dealing with crime has failed on every justification offered for it—deterrence, rehabilitation, retribution, and incapacitation—and should be discontinued rather than reformed. He explicitly rejects the reformist tradition: past efforts failed because they 'concentrated on reforming prisons rather than on the use of imprisonment in itself'. A reviewer noted that Sommer approaches the subject as 'a work of advocacy' with 'the impatience and zeal of an outsider who is puzzled and enraged that obviously needed and regularly acknowledged changes have not even been started'. His program is abolition: empty the prisons of the 85 to 90 percent of inmates who are not violent predatory offenders.

Sommer's training in environmental psychology is evident in his context-building approach, which sets both people and abstract concepts in clearly definable spaces and relationships. Philip Zimbardo's review noted that Sommer 'exposes the obstacles to clearer thinking about imprisonment—the myths, verbal games, and euphemistic changes' that rename the 'hole' as 'solitary confinement' and then as 'management cells'. Sommer treats the pathological consequences of prolonged prison terms as products of both the people who end up there and 'the ecology of the system itself that creates and perpetuates abnormal reactions'. His analysis of crowding, personal space, and territoriality in carceral settings applies the same spatial-behavioral framework developed in Personal Space (1969).

Sommer proposes abolishing long-term imprisonment and replacing it with short-term detention modeled on California's handling of mental patients—an institutional analogy he stresses throughout the book. Under this plan, offenders would receive a mandatory six-month sentence; to incarcerate longer, the state would bear the burden of proving semiannually to a jury that the offender remained a danger to society. A reviewer noted this 'would move us toward incapacitation and away from vengeance' and would end much of the inhumanity, discrimination, and costs of long-term imprisonment. The plan also includes expanded community alternatives and amnesty for some offenders.

The most sustained criticism targets Sommer's use of the mental hospital analogy. A reviewer in Crime and Delinquency noted that 'the deinstitutionalization of most mental patients over the last half century is evidence that basic social change is possible,' but drawing a close analogy between mental hospitals and prisons 'ignores much of what we do know about prisons'. Another reviewer pointed out that anti-psychotic drugs were mainly responsible for maintaining former mental patients outside hospitals, and that the label of mental illness allows drugs for behavior control in ways that would be intolerable with prisoners. The same review argued Sommer's work is 'based on the political reality of the late 60's, not the present,' addressing mainly the incarceration of addicts, marijuana smokers, and perpetrators of victimless crimes who no longer find themselves in prison for those offenses.

Zimbardo praised Sommer's 'literate analysis of a variety of issues, problems, orientations, and information pertinent to criminal justice and to the injustice of long-term imprisonment'. He highlighted Sommer's rejection of behavior modification approaches, despite their initial appeal for psychologists: 'There can be no therapy that results in meaningful personal change when it is conducted in a coercive atmosphere dominated by intimidation and arbitrary power—and secrecy, too'. Zimbardo also noted Sommer's exposure of the absence of empirical research on imprisonment, which he attributed to the veil of secrecy prison administrators maintain between 'them' and all 'outsiders'.

The National Criminal Justice Reference Service annotation states the book was 'intended for both law enforcement personnel and the general public'. But a reviewer in Crime and Delinquency observed that Sommer 'approaches the subject as though cutting from whole cloth and seems all but unaware that many have thought deeply and written extensively about imprisonment before him,' noting that 'scholarly reflection is not his agenda'. The same reviewer characterized Sommer as an outsider whose cause is abolition, acknowledging that 'professionals in correction often regard books by outsiders as utopian'. A later review noted that Sommer's book 'encounters tremendous problems bridging the gap between scientific arguments and practical correctional policy'.