Mamdani: What's the Point of Having Prisons?

Communist Zohran Mamdani, Democrats' nominee for Mayor of New York City, has all sorts of radical ideas. One of them is defending the police, which he's now lying about, having explicitly made this demand over and over and over again. He loathes law enforcement, calling NYPD a "wicked" and "racist" organization that represents a "major threat to public safety." He wants to outsource a large amount of policing to social workers. He also has a harebrained scheme to drive more homeless people, many of them mentally ill, down into the already-crime-plagued subway system. He appears to give very little thought to the implications of his preferred policies, which have been demonstrated as disastrous failures elsewhere. But he spouts them -- often, but not always -- with a big grin on his face. Here is the likely next chief executive of America's largest city wondering if prisons serve any real purpose:

Zohran Mamdani on abolishing prisons and jail: "What purpose do they serve, besides making people feel good?" pic.twitter.com/KYgD1nRP8U
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 17, 2025

Allow me to help: Prisons serve the essential purpose of locking up criminals, in order to protect innocent people from their predations. Incarceration also serves as punishment for anti-social, illegal, and violent behavior. I can understand leftists questioning whether we have an over-incarceration issue in the United States. That's at least a defensible stance to take, and it should be robustly debated. But Mamdani suggests that prisons serve no real purpose at all, aside from offering some silly psychological benefit to the masses. This is, candidly, insane. Although yes, it does make law-abiding people "feel good" that convicted rapists and murderers are kept behind bars, away from the rest of us. Is that a problem? You'll notice that I referred to the Big Apple's mayoral frontrunner as a Communist above, and it's an accurate description of his extreme ideology. More evidence continues to pile up on this front. He quotes Marxist pronouncements, from seizing the means of production, to this:

Each according to their need, each according to their ability
— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) May 27, 2020

He hasn't deleted any of the madness he's tweeted in recent years because he's a true believer. A zealot. In case you missed it, he also thinks abolishing private property is a preferable housing policy to the current status quo:

Fights, shoplifting, drug use, public sex: The Sun Fresh grocery store at 31st Street and Prospect Avenue has been battling these issues to the brink of crisis over the past few years. Now, it seems Sun Fresh is running out of food. On Thursday morning, the shelves across wide swaths of the store — the snacks aisle, the soup aisle, entire walls of refrigerated meats — were almost completely bare...One of the two employees The Star was able to find in the building said she had been reporting to work every day unsure if the place would even be in business when she arrived...As the store has struggled — it lost $1.3 million in 2023 — the city has continued to invest in the shopping center. In November, the city council approved an additional $750,000 to the shopping center’s community improvement district for to cover additional security and upgraded lighting. That’s on top of millions more since the city bought the shopping center in 2014. Pierson says it’s not enough.

I'll leave you with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' reaction to disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's threat to move to the Sunshine State if Mamdani defeats him in another election:

Don’t New York our Florida! https://t.co/j5ZA5sLqnM
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) July 20, 2025

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