I don't believe we will ever be able to eliminate prisons completely.

I believe that there will always be a small subset of people who have become so out of touch with society that the only way to keep everyone else safe is to remove them from society.

However, I do believe that that is a very, very small subset of the number of people currently in prison in the U.S.

Ideally we could release to alternative punishment 90% of the people in prison. Practically, though, I'd imagine a lot of prisoners have becone institutionalized and can't simply be released without help or they're going to wind up homeless, reoffending, whatever. Our prison system is so bad we need to rehabilitate people from prison.

The Norway system is an excellent transitional goal. I read somewhere that all the maintenance on all the vehicles in the corrections system is done in prison shops by prisoners who can then seek employment as auto mechanics when they get out. So they're getting training and actually doing something useful.

Again, I think we will always need prisons to house the people who just will not stop hurting others, but that's not that many people.