On The Good Place and Prison Abolition
By: Srishti Kapur
Tags: Criminal Justice, The Good Place, Prison Abolition, Criminal Justice Reform

The Good Place is a sitcom about the justice system in the afterlife. It follows four humans (Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani), one reformed demon (Michael), and one kind-of-but-not-quite robot (Janet) as they explore and ultimately redesign the afterlife. In The Good Place, afterlife is a whimsical version of the classic Christan heaven-or-hell setup. On Earth, humans are assigned positive or negative point values for each of their actions. When they die, the afterlife accounting department tallies up the points and assigns them to either “the Good Place” or “the Bad Place.” In the Bad Place, demons torture humans using such tactics as putting spiders up butts. In the Good Place, residents achieve all their wildest dreams, including such fantasies as go-kart racing monkeys.

Heaven and hell in The Good Place are wacky, but at their core they espouse straightforward tenants; there are good people and bad people — good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell. In the course of its four seasons, The Good Place explores these concepts and questions whether they should be the backbone of the afterlife justice system.

The first major point the show makes is that people don’t make decisions in a vacuum. Humans are shaped by their childhoods, the people who surround them, their material conditions, and their societies. The first two seasons explore this theme in the lives of its main characters. Eleanor is selfish because her parents were selfish and forced her to fend for herself from a young age. Jason is impulsive because that was all he learned from his father and friends. Tahani is vain because her parents conditioned their love on her accomplishments. All of our main characters end up in the Bad Place, but the show forces us to ask — to what extent can we blame them for their actions on Earth? Once we understand the context and root causes behind the “bad” lives they lived, do we still want to condemn them to eternal damnation?

Season three expands this critique from the individual to broader societal forces. In episode ten, the protagonists discover that no one in the past 521 years has qualified for the Good Place at all. The world has become so complicated, with each individual’s actions contributing to so many unintended effects, that even the most well-intentioned people cause more harm than good.

Michael realizes this when he compares the point totals of someone giving their grandmother a flower in 1500 vs 2009. In 1500, the gift netted one individual 145 points. In 2009, the thoughtfulness of the gift was overshadowed by all its unintended effects and inadvertent support of harmful systems. The flowers were grown with harmful pesticides, picked by exploited workers, ordered via a cell phone whose manufacture had its own negative environmental and human rights impacts, and delivered from thousands of miles away. The flower picker actually lost points for his gift.

I suspect this episode of The Good Place resonated deeply with many of its viewers who face thousands of little decisions a day with complex moral implications. If these viewers are anything like me, they felt comforted by the message of the episode — I shouldn’t be classified as a “bad person” for making decisions that cause harm, because there are very few options that don’t cause harm under a system of global capitalism. I was happy to reach this conclusion when it applied to me and the way I judged myself, but upon initially watching, I failed to extend this logic beyond me. What is the actual set of choices available to people who commit crimes? Is it possible that the causes of those crimes are not only personal choices influenced by childhoods and material conditions, but entire systems far beyond the individual?

But even if you believe that at the core, there are good people who make good choices and bad people who make bad choices, The Good Place argues these classifications are nonsensical, because most, if not all people are redeemable under the right conditions.

The characters of The Good Place discover this by accident. For thousands of years, the classic Bad Place torture chamber leaves no room for rehabilitation. The sole purpose of the Bad Place is to punish those who’ve wronged; rehabilitation is not the point.

Michael, however, inadvertently creates the conditions for rehabilitation in the afterlife. His goal is to create a new kind of psychological torture. Residents are told they’re in the Good Place while Michael and his team of demons create scenarios that frustrate the residents and remind them of their deepest flaws. Michael’s fake Good Place neighborhood initially causes Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani much consternation, but it ultimately creates the right conditions for them to become better people.

In the neighborhood, the tortured humans live in close communities that foster friendship, and in turn selflessness. They have the time and resources (in the form of Chidi’s philosophy knowledge) to learn about how to be good people. Michael’s psychological torture reminds them of their flaws and encourages self-reflection. They don’t have to interact with anybody from their life on Earth who left them with baggage and they never lack for any material need, so they’re able to make good decisions without the complications of Earth.

This environment is so ripe for rehabilitation that no matter how many times Michael reboots his neighborhood and restarts the experiment, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason become better people. And they’re not the only ones; in season four, the crew explicitly sets out to prove that the same thing happens to other humans. After one year in a Good Place neighborhood, two of the new human guinea pigs, Simone and John, become objectively better people. The third test subject, Brett, is arrogant, misogynistic, and self-deluded. Despite the difficulties Eleanor and Michael face in rehabilitating him, he ends his stay in the neighborhood with his first ever apology.

If rehabilitation is possible, but the traditional Bad Place was never trying to encourage it, what was the point of all that torture? In The Good Place, the answer lies the demons’ obsession with cruelty. They don’t care what the purpose of their torture is, as long as they get to hurt their residents in increasingly creative ways.

The Good Place doesn’t suggest alternate explanations, but they’re worth exploring. Does the Bad Place exist to keep the “bad people” away from the “good people”, so the residents of the Good Place are able to enjoy it at peace? Does it exist to encourage humans to be good in their lifetimes, the stick of “carrot and stick”?

If we accept that people are shaped by their surroundings and they are redeemable, then the former explanation doesn’t hold. Why separate the “bad people” from the “good people” if the primary distinction between the two groups are forces outside their individual choices? Why not try to rehabilitate the “bad people” in order to reintegrate the two groups?

The latter hypothesis is a common explanation for religion’s existence. Divine rules and the fear of eternal damnation motivate individuals to act in “good” ways. And yet, does this system work? The characters of The Good Place are motivated to be better people when they learn the rules of the afterlife. Eleanor in particular never tried to be good during her life on Earth, but becomes deeply motivated once she understands she could be sent to the Bad Place. And yet, this fear of the Bad Place alone is not enough to push her into making good choices. She ends up looking for loopholes in order to do the minimum necessary to make it into the Good Place. In fact, within The Good Place’s point system, Eleanor can’t gain points for good actions at all if her motivation is to get into the Good Place; those actions are considered selfish. Instead, it’s Eleanor’s friendship with the other main characters that forms the motivation to improve herself.

The Good Place’s final season ends with the main characters redesigning a new afterlife justice system altogether. In the new system, everyone has the opportunity to examine their mistakes and learn about how to be a good person before taking a test that determines whether they’ll be admitted into the Good Place. By the time the system is introduced in the penultimate episode, it feels like a no-brainer, the only possible way to design a truly just afterlife. When the demons and the all-knowing Judge suddenly accept the suggested solution after many episodes of opposing this very change, I don’t mind the narrative improbability. The moral arc of the show has taken precedence over the storyline, and the ending is the fitting conclusion to four seasons of philosophical questioning.