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Every country in the world has some kind of prison system—some humane, others not so much.

According to the World Population Review, the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation.

Incarceration begins with policing.

According to WorldAtlas, the United States ranks third in the world, behind the more heavily populated China and India, with the number of police.

The American Bar Association instructs that the purpose of policing in America is: safeguard individual freedoms, preserve life and property, protect the constitutional rights of citizens, maintain respect for the rule of law through its proper enforcement, and preserve the nation’s democratic processes.

Criminal defense attorneys generally recognize that there are three primary purpose of penal incarceration: deterrence, punishment, and rehabilitation.

A donation appeal from The Appeal appeared last month in my email inbox. I’ve never donated to The Appeal, although I have hyperlinked them as a source in some of my writings because I respect some of their work.

Written by Olayemi Olurin, the email opened with this first line:

“Yes, when abolitionists say abolition, we do really mean abolish prisons, policing, and America’s entire criminal justice system.”

I know a thing or two about police, prison, and American justice.

I have been in the “custody” of the Louisiana justice system—one of the most corrupt and racist in America—for more than 57 years. The state’s police tried on several occasions to kill me; its violent prison system tried to destroy me as a human being for more than 40 years; and its corrupt parole system is determined to keep me in its custody until I die.

So by no means am I a champion of police, prison, and traditional justice.

There are, I believe, more bad cops than good ones; mass penal incarceration is a $200 billion industrial complex that is a form of modern day slavery; and the entire nation’s criminal justice system is systemically racist and corrupt, perhaps irreparably so as some like Olayemi Olurin reasonably argue.

However, arguments for the abolition of all these social safety nets are misguided, I believe.

I am not about to disparage the abolitionists. They are well-meaning, good-intention folks trying to bring fairness, reason, decency and transparency in efforts to protect society and preserve the nation’s democratic institutions.

But the harsh reality is that in America today—a nation bitterly divided by systemic racism of every stripe, the increasing development of white supremacy, and the staggering harm caused by inexcusable, profit-driven gun violence—policing and penal incarceration, as well as the larger justice system of which they are components, are necessary to maintain some semblance of law and order.

Nihilistic anarchy and violent fascism lurks at the doorstep of every democracy.

There are roughly 330 million people in America today—20 to 30 million of whom are incorrigibly criminal, dangerously mentally ill, white nationalists bent on civil war, and racists who want to harm all other races.

Within this social mix are ruthless murderers, serial killers, mass shooters, drug cartels, organized gangs, pedophiles, and an endless assortment of rage killers who are psychologically primed to harm anyone at any given moment.

All of our social institutions have been harmed by these dangerous, lawless forces—schools, places of worship, work places, the family unit, the public square, and even in our child foster care and elderly treatment centers.

Group counseling, neighborhood watch groups, diversionary programs, alternatives to incarceration, social policing, and vigilante justice will not protect law-abiding and decent people trying to survive from cradle to grave.

Bottom line: the group must be protected from the self-centered interests of the individual. Abolitionists believe—or so I think—that the individual must be protected from the group.

Believe me; neither the group nor the individual is without sin. The divergent interests of the two have robbed mankind of decency and humanity since the proverbial bite out of the apple.

I once read that mankind will never know peace until the last general is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Most probably true.

Worldwide wars and religious strife between groups today have given some individuals in the groups a license to be as criminal, mean, and violent as they please.

Georgetown Law Center’s Associate Professor Allegra M. McLeod coined the phrase “prison abolitionist ethic”—a rooted ideological belief that this ethic will eliminate prison and policing’s “brutality, violence, racial stratification, ideological rigidity, despair, and waste.”

It will not.

Look at history.

The Marxism-Leninism ideology promised mankind economic equality and social fairness free of the privileged class.

Yet as Yuri N. Maltsev wrote in a November 2, 2017 piece for Fee Stories, “Never has there been such an insidious and deadly ideology as Marxism-Leninism.”

This ideological belief system carried out an estimated 28,000 executions a year between 1917 and 1922 to replace the Czarist police, prison, and criminal justice systems.

That was the “justice” it gave to Russia.

Abolition of any stripe born from the belly of anarchy, whether inspired by nihilism or socialism, will always produce mass murder and injustice.

Rudolph Rummel estimated that socialism, and its pledge for social justice, killed roughly 61 million people in the Soviet Union, another 78 million in China, and an estimated 200 million worldwide during the 20^th century—all in the name of “justice” of one kind or another.

That’s why I believe repair is better than abolition.

America’s police, prison, and criminal justice systems can be repaired.

More people than not in this country favor a justice delivery system that is fair, equitable, and humane. This objective can be achieved through the power of the vote—by electing people to public office committed to bringing about such a system.

The one lesson I’ve learned in this life, more than half of which has been spent in penal incarceration, is that protection of the group must always trump the freedom of the self-centered individuals

Humans survive as a group, not as individuals.