- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@piefed.social
- tankiejerk@piefed.social
- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@piefed.social
- tankiejerk@piefed.social
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I’m kind of on the fence about absolute prison abolishment.
Even in a perfect Anarchist utopia, you’re still going to have the occasional unreformable sociopath, violent lunatic, child rapist, etc. The kind of person who’s hurting other people and isn’t going to stop unless forced to. (Not to mention malicious actors who might be trying to corrupt or destroy your Anarchist utopia, funded by or sent from outside states.)
Okay, sure, there are other options. You could call these issues mental health issues and lock such dangerously unwell people up in mental health treatment … but in such cases, isn’t that just a prison with a different name? You could summarily execute such people, but if anything, that sounds even worse than operating prisons. You could exile them and banish them from your Anarchist utopia … but where are you going to send them? To some other state … which will probably end up locking them up in prison? That’s just prison with extra steps. To some wilderness, if there’s even any available? But what if they keep trying to sneak back in? You could mutilate them, physically disabling them and making them unable to hurt anyone, but again … that’s sounding more horrific than prisons.
Now, I don’t want anybody to get me wrong – these unreformable threats to society are rare. Any prison operated should be tiny, as it won’t need to house very many people at all. An Anarchist utopia prison system should be less than 1% the size of a normal state’s prison system (and a tiny fraction of a percent compared to the USA’s prison system). And the people kept there should be kept absolutely as comfortably and humanely as possible. They should even be offered entertainment and ‘luxury’ if practical to do so. For those very few locked up in prison, they should still have a full, enjoyable life there, as much as possible.
But … I don’t quite see how it can be abolished completely … not without replacing it either with something that’s the same thing wearing a different name, or with something worse. (And no, I don’t buy into the hopium that a utopian and just society would never create such monsters in the first place. That might reduce their number, but it won’t stop them completely. Some of it is just genetic issues and random mental illness.)
I’d like to push back on the idea that a mental health treatment facility would just be prison by another name. The goal would be rehabilitation and release. While I agree with your assessment that mental illness and genetic issues are just part of the human condition and will always produce problematic individuals, I don’t think that makes these individuals permanently dangers to society. I believe that treatment is always possible. Prison is a punitive place created to punish those that society believes has transgressed against them; these facilities would be a place of healing to improve the lives of the people who go to them. The goals and motivations of the facilities would be entirely different.
I don’t think that makes these individuals permanently dangers to society. I believe that treatment is always possible.
Maybe in theory, eventually. But there are definitely conditions that we don’t yet know how to treat or cure, and which may never be treatable or curable without developing some sci-fi tech to literally rewrite people’s minds … and then that’s a whole new horror story in the wrong hands.
Then there’s the trust issue. Say you’ve got a psychopathic serial killer or a repeat child rapist who’s been in treatment for a few years and seems to be cured. How can we trust them to actually be cured, and not just be pretending to be cured so they’ll be released where they can do it again? Or, perhaps worse, they think they’re cured, but when the opportunity and temptation presents itself after release, they relapse…
Without some very sci-fi mental health treatments, I’m pretty sure there are some individuals that you can never rehabilitate well enough to release, and the best you can do is to separate them from society to remove their opportunity to hurt anyone else.
(But I do agree – whether or not there’s any hope of mental health treatment ‘fixing’ them – that prisons-as-punishment should not be the goal at all, ever. It should be for treatment and rehabilitation … or if those aren’t possible, then containment and protection. In any case, these people should be treated as nicely as possible and given pretty much anything they want … except an opportunity to hurt others.)
Prison abolition doesn’t mean removing all forms of spatial containment of sentient beings from society, it means abolishing prisons.
The question is always what is the least amount of violence necessary to stop someone from harming others. Reconstructing a prison cell would require a very contrived threat profile.
First, why can’t they be in a house with a garden? What harm are you preventing by putting someone in a stone and metal box instead of somewhere comfortable? What harm are you preventing by prescribing what room they are located in, when they eat their meals, what meals they eat, or when they go outside?
Second, why can’t they have visitors? What harm are you preventing by preventing people who give informed consent from meeting them, or touching them, or doing whatever with them?
Third, why can’t they have stuff to do their hobbies? If they are a flight risk, what are they flying to? Can it be brought to them safely, can they find closure some other way, or can they be brought to it under guard?
Fourth, why are they physically contained at all? Could the harm they could cause be mitigated in a less invasive way? Could a sociopath be offered a strict social contract where they have no incentive to harm others? Could a “lunatic” be brought to an environment they don’t want to leave because it’s nice? Could a child rapist move into a child-free commune?
Fifth, why are we making this choice for them? At the very least they should be able to have a say in how things are structured, and they should be able to choose from all available options that are safe given their situation. Maybe they’re okay with trying out chemical sterilization, maybe they’re okay with a face tattoo warning others of how dangerous they are, maybe they would prefer to live in a mediterranean beach cove or on a tropical island or in a house near the people that would still enjoy hanging out with them.
It might be true that sometimes people prefer something that can reasonably be called prison over other options. It might be true that sometimes the only viable options are something that can reasonably be called prison, or death. But in every case, every liberty that is taken away, every option discarded as unsafe, and every restriction has to be justified.
There will be no crimes that carry prison as a sentence, no prison buildings that look like what we today call prison buildings, and no natural divide between safety restrictions that constitute a prison and ones that do not. I’m okay with summarizing that as “prison abolition”.
Going to reopen the struggle session about AES states, because I need The Atlantic Council to cover my rapidly inflating food costs.
tbf, most CNT-FAI prison camps didn’t much resemble modern (ie post-1800) incarcerative systems.
