Prisons in an anarchist society? Paedophiles, Dangerous individuals, ppl who get kicks from murder?
Apr 21 2009 18:35
#32
back2front wrote:
Why do people commit 'crime'? What are the main causes? The responsibility for the majority of crime lies with dominant philosophical trends e.g. capitalism and monotheism.Since the end of WW2 and to curb community depression at the horror of warfare capitalism creates the idea that possession of goods will dull the pain. Get the new washing machine, the new car, the new games console or the new anarchist book and feel the blues disappear. The problem with this mode of thought, which is deeply engrained in society, is a culture of want rather than a culture of need. Capitalism supplies the demand but it also demands your supplying by continuous and insidious adverts. It creates the class war, the haves and the have-nots. The have-nots aspire to be the haves by hook and by crook.
How many people are in prison because of theft or non-payment of fines/bills etc? These people are for the large part not criminals.
Now to continue to examine why other people are in prison - drugs - again either for recreation or escapism where is the crime? A pusher is a different phenomenon however but still many of them sell to promote their own habit?
But let's get contraversial - in a society which is domninated by possesive relationships, petty jealousy , monogomous and heterosexual relationships, person as sex object for use, porn and psedu porn etc etc and coupled with a barage of dreadful role models from anorexic girls to macho men - there are a great many confused and lonely people. Is this the ground that breeds sexual deviance? In a society based on a different set of models would such deviance still occur? These are questions and not statements.
So realistically speaking only repeat offender sexual deviants and murderers may need to be seperated from the rest of the community but how many would their number be if anarchist ideas became the dominant cultural voice?
Prison then, as it is today, is an example of the failure of capitalist society. I'm not saying we don't or won't need them but patriarchial religious ideas and the greed culture must be made responsible.
Where are you directing this?
Everyone accepts there would be a lot less crime and a lot fewer prisons. This isn't disputed. The issue is whether it will eliminate crime entirely.
Apr 21 2009 18:43
#33
"We would obviously have prisons under communism...Anyone who thinks otherwise is...playing silly semantic games about what a prison is."
Well, I think there's a lot of people out there who feel that anarchists are 'playing silly semantic games' about what a state is, when they say that they want a highly-organised, potentially force-applying, society 'but not a state'.
So we probably do have to play some games, if only by defining or being specific about what we mean, rather than assuming that the way we want to use a word is the 'obvious' way.
So for example, part of why I'm against the state is that its whole ethos and design reflects authoritarian practices and ways of thinking - but at the same time it tries to present itself as natural and inevitable, so that when we think of the British state we think of 'Britain' and vice versa.
Similarly, with the social phenomenon called 'prisons': their whole ethos and design reflects, for example, a desire to see 'criminals' as different from everyone else, as 'outsiders' in relation to society, and to act this out by physically separating them in the company of other such 'criminals' in a systematically brutalising environment. The result is to teach them that they are in fact enemies of 'society' and encourage them to re-offend as soon as they get out.
Also, prisons systematically destroy the people inside them, resulting in widespread self-harm, violence between prisoners, abuse of prisoners by guards, suicide attempts. Some people argue that solitary confinement or indefinite confinement are forms of torture.
If institutions for dealing with violence were radically re-built to reflect a different ethos, there's no real fact of the matter about whether they would be 'prisons'. Differences might include:
1) being anti-violence, instead of law-enforcing: we don't know how far-reaching might be the effects of making physical punishment something that only follows upon physical violence against another person (or animal) rather than something that follows from asserting oneself against the authority of 'the man' and his rules;
2) being an accepted part of life - continuous with mental health services more generally so that the average person might go into something not rigourously separated from 'prison' at some point in their lives, in response to some personal crisis;
3) seeking to keep offenders in contact with other members of 'normal' society, rather than forcing them to build empathy with other offenders;
4) putting the victim in a central position to manage the rehabilitation of the offender so as to keep the offense clearly marked as a crime against a person, not the breaking of a rule;
etc. Of course some of this might be inappropriate in some cases (especially 4) but what we have at the moment is hardly a system that involves the victim 'only as appropriate' - it's one that involves the victim where necessary to serve the goals of the grand state patriarch whose rule has been broken.
Of course the idea of prison as rehabilitation not retribution, as trying to provide people with skills and connections and greater mental health and so forth, that's mainstream as an idea but not really as a practice. We shouldn't assume that a system built on those kinds of principles from the ground up would look like what we have, i.e. a system built on entirely different principles (discipline and violence) but with a few small reforms or experiments to make it slightly more rehabilitative and healing.
The point is, the sort of institutions and practices that would emerge would be very different from 'prisons' so it seems to me that it's up in the air what to call them.
Apr 21 2009 21:00
#34
Jack wrote:
Where are you directing this?
Everyone accepts there would be a lot less crime and a lot fewer prisons. This isn't disputed. The issue is whether it will eliminate crime entirely.
What do you mean Jack? What will eliminate crime completely? Define crime?
Yes there will be fewer prisons and fewer prisoners in a culture based on anarchism. That is what I am saying. Whether prisons can eradicated entirely is debatable, idealistic and perhaps unimportant. I accept that we need to consider what causes these problems and how we might solve these problems for this is more immediate.
If capitalism wasn't the dominant culture there would be less crime, of that I'm almost certain...
Apr 21 2009 21:07
#35
back2front wrote:
Jack wrote:
Where are you directing this?
Everyone accepts there would be a lot less crime and a lot fewer prisons. This isn't disputed. The issue is whether it will eliminate crime entirely.
What do you mean Jack? What will eliminate crime completely? Define crime?
Yes there will be fewer prisons and fewer prisoners in a culture based on anarchism. That is what I am saying. Whether prisons can eradicated entirely is debatable, idealistic and perhaps unimportant. I accept that we need to consider what causes these problems and how we might solve these problems for this is more immediate.
If capitalism wasn't the dominant culture there would be less crime, of that I'm almost certain...
Nah, agree with this basically. Except that we would keep some prisons, that's not debatable. 
Apr 22 2009 07:16
#36
I think Alderson's post was a good one, though i'd come at it a bit differently.
All societies contain forms of force, power and authority, and a stateless one wouldn't be different. It would be markedly different from where we are now in terms of the relationship between power and the population, and the ends to which its used, but I think we need to agree that its there.
As we'd all agree, now we have a state which arrogates to itself the use of force, and its purpose currently is to underpin a system of accumulation, capitalism. It uses force to attempt to contain its contradictions, to maintain the property system, manage capital in its collective interest, intervene abroad if necessary etc. Its a complicated thing, but essentially thats what it comes down to. The police force and prisons are organised violence, and were understood to be this when they were set up, as Steven has said. But in the same way that the state assumes various useful functions, like healthcare and utilities in lots of countries, so do the police. But the relationship between the police and the population in capitalism is the same as the relationship between any other part of the state and the population - as organised force it will defend the interests of capital against our interests.
In a future anarchist/communist society there'd still be power and 'authority' of sorts, as we'd need the power and authority to transform society and our world, something that will be a continuous process. There'd be power and authority involved in deciding to build all the advanced mass-transit systems we'd need to move away from individual car ownership, to move to sustainable forms of energy production, to transform food production, and the rest. This power would be exercised through forms of assemblies and councils which bring everyone into the decision-making process on whatever level it affects them. But the relationship between the 'authority' in society and the population is obviously totally different, as decisions are taken collectively in order to advance our collective human needs.
So there'd still be forms of power over people which they'd have to deal with, the difference is that is the collectively exercised power of society (ultimately humanity) at large. And that power would have to deal with the various problems that stem from people being complicated creatures. I think we can all agree there's be secure hospitals for dangerous sociopaths and the rest, and that these would need to be very strictly accountable. But when it comes to everyday things people do - drunken vandalism, fighting, crimes of passion, we'd need a way to deal with them. Prisons don't work very well, as our society shows. So I think there'd be some kind of process where people who commit antisocial behavior of this kind are reintegrated through mediation and some kind of restorative justice, which is onerous for the perpetrator. There'd be different social pressures against antisocial behavior in a communist society, as opposed to a capitalist society where this stuff is practically encouraged too.
There'd have to be a way of taking over the useful roles of the police, like dealing with genuinely antisocial behaviour and solving actual crimes. Thats why in revolutionary periods there have between militias doing patrols. But these would obviously be part of the area they work in and accountable to it - larger bodies that would be needed to work on a larger scale would have to be acountable to whichever level of delegation operates on that scale.
Obviously we'd all agree that the vast majority of crime currently is related to property and capitalism.
Apr 22 2009 10:26
#37
Prevention is better than cure right? Often these terrible crimes are preceded by associated deviant behaviour, e.g. child porn, cruelty to animals, collecting weapons. Are individuals displaying deviant behaviour going to be publicly identified so they can be watched more closely? Or is it 'one strike and you're out'. At the first sign of deviant behaviour you get sent to prison (or perhaps see a shrink) to be cured? Perhaps everyone should be seen as being on a deviancy spectrum, and be regularly sent to prison (or a shrink etc.) to be cured so that those individuals with deviancies more likely to result in sociopathic crimes don't feel victimised and therefore more likely to commit those crimes?
Apr 22 2009 11:41
#38
Being careful here not to misinterpret you, but are you saying that all anti social behaviour can be dealt with by using hospitals for the mentals and restorative justice for the rest?
Django wrote:
I think Alderson's post was a good one, though i'd come at it a bit differently.All societies contain forms of force, power and authority, and a stateless one wouldn't be different. It would be markedly different from where we are now in terms of the relationship between power and the population, and the ends to which its used, but I think we need to agree that its there.
As we'd all agree, now we have a state which arrogates to itself the use of force, and its purpose currently is to underpin a system of accumulation, capitalism. It uses force to attempt to contain its contradictions, to maintain the property system, manage capital in its collective interest, intervene abroad if necessary etc. Its a complicated thing, but essentially thats what it comes down to. The police force and prisons are organised violence, and were understood to be this when they were set up, as Steven has said. But in the same way that the state assumes various useful functions, like healthcare and utilities in lots of countries, so do the police. But the relationship between the police and the population in capitalism is the same as the relationship between any other part of the state and the population - as organised force it will defend the interests of capital against our interests.
In a future anarchist/communist society there'd still be power and 'authority' of sorts, as we'd need the power and authority to transform society and our world, something that will be a continuous process. There'd be power and authority involved in deciding to build all the advanced mass-transit systems we'd need to move away from individual car ownership, to move to sustainable forms of energy production, to transform food production, and the rest. This power would be exercised through forms of assemblies and councils which bring everyone into the decision-making process on whatever level it affects them. But the relationship between the 'authority' in society and the population is obviously totally different, as decisions are taken collectively in order to advance our collective human needs.
So there'd still be forms of power over people which they'd have to deal with, the difference is that is the collectively exercised power of society (ultimately humanity) at large. And that power would have to deal with the various problems that stem from people being complicated creatures. I think we can all agree there's be secure hospitals for dangerous sociopaths and the rest, and that these would need to be very strictly accountable. But when it comes to everyday things people do - drunken vandalism, fighting, crimes of passion, we'd need a way to deal with them. Prisons don't work very well, as our society shows. So I think there'd be some kind of process where people who commit antisocial behavior of this kind are reintegrated through mediation and some kind of restorative justice, which is onerous for the perpetrator. There'd be different social pressures against antisocial behavior in a communist society, as opposed to a capitalist society where this stuff is practically encouraged too.
There'd have to be a way of taking over the useful roles of the police, like dealing with genuinely antisocial behaviour and solving actual crimes. Thats why in revolutionary periods there have between militias doing patrols. But these would obviously be part of the area they work in and accountable to it - larger bodies that would be needed to work on a larger scale would have to be acountable to whichever level of delegation operates on that scale.
Obviously we'd all agree that the vast majority of crime currently is related to property and capitalism.
Apr 22 2009 12:18
#39
no1 wrote:
If you ask questions in a Daily Mail way it can only lead to Daily Mail-type answers. I think that's stupid because it isn't appropriate, it doesn't help you deal with the problem. First you need to work out why some people carry out certain intolerable acts. For example paedophiles (I hate the word, it's a euphemism that literally it means 'friend of children'). As far as I know, it hasn't been properly researched, it's not clear if it is similar to a sexual orientation or not, and if sexual attraction to children is something that can be 'cured' or not. From what I've read, only a small percentage of convicted child abusers are the kind of sadistic psychopath which the tabloids go on about and who tend to kill their victims. A large proportion of convicted child abusers are in fact not paedophiles but opportunistic child abusers. That means if you imprison everybody who feels a sexual attraction towards children, then you're still not protecting children - which after all has to be the aim, rather than having lots of prisons as the Daily Mail wants.
Yeah I think this was kinda Jack's point, that there'd be even less of those sorts of offenders in a communist society, and that of course, only a small amount of those commiting violent sadistic crimes do it out of pure 'psychopathy'. Yeah, for many it's clearly just part of a cycle of violence and abuse they themselves have been subjected to.
Apr 22 2009 17:47
#40
Quote:
Are individuals displaying deviant behaviour going to be publicly identified so they can be watched more closely? Or is it 'one strike and you're out'.
I think this might be a point at which we need to try to blur the public/private distinction. Like, we can imagine how someone's husband or wife or children or parents might try to respond to worrying behaviour (in the best case scenarios - in worst case scenarios they're a big part of the cause). I think that sort of response is often much better than an 'outside' response by law-enforcement or mental health services - especially because outside responses usually only come when something serious goes wrong (e.g. people need to cut themselves in order to get help to stop feeling like cutting themselves).
At the moment, we tend to either have people who don't get any 'private sphere' attention, only interventions by anonymous state functionaries, or we have people being supported by family members/friends, who then, taking all of that burden themselves, get burnt out or fucked up - especially because they don't have access to the kinds of resources, training, knowledge, that they need.
So the ideal solution to my mind would be to try to get the best of both worlds: take the resources and skills of the public sphere and make them universally available, but try to dissolve the distinction between 'society' and 'personal relationships' to some extent. What exactly that looks like or involves, I have no clue. But I think that's a good direction to look in.
Apr 23 2009 09:39
#41
Choccy wrote:
no1 wrote:
A large proportion of convicted child abusers are in fact not paedophiles but opportunistic child abusers. That means if you imprison everybody who feels a sexual attraction towards children, then you're still not protecting children - which after all has to be the aim, rather than having lots of prisons as the Daily Mail wants.Yeah I think this was kinda Jack's point, that there'd be even less of those sorts of offenders in a communist society, and that of course, only a small amount of those commiting violent sadistic crimes do it out of pure 'psychopathy'. Yeah, for many it's clearly just part of a cycle of violence and abuse they themselves have been subjected to.
It's nice to think that a lot of bad things will disappear once we have libertarian communism, but I'm not sure. Wikipedia has some interesting figures on child sexual abuse. Offenders incarcerated for abusing pre-pubescent children are mostly paedophiles (in the sense of having a sexual preference for children) , but the majority of child sex offenders are incarcerated for abusing teenagers rather than prepubescent children. A 2002 study classified this type of abuser who don't have a sexual preference for pre-pubescent children into 3 categories:
* Regressed - Typically has relationships with adults, but a stressor causes them to seek children as a substitute.
* Morally Indiscriminate - All-around sexual deviant, who may commit other sexual offenses unrelated to children.
* Naive/Inadequate - Often mentally disabled in some way, finds children less threatening.
I'm not sure how libertarian communism will affect these categories, but I don't see an obvious reason why they should be less common, especially the last one.
Something else that needs to be pointed out is that even a crime as clear-cut as child abuse is dependent on changing social norms, definitions of childhood, rape etc. For an adult to have sex with a 12 year old is universally considered a disgusting almost unimaginable crime today but until 1929 girls could be married from the age of 12, boys from 14, in England. Or that rape within marriage didn't become criminalised in England until 1991.
Also, the theory of a cycle of violence, i.e. that many child abusers become abusers because they were abused themselves doesn't fit the evidence and has been dismissed as a general explanation for sexual abuse of children. Although about 1 in 10 people have been sexually abused as children, the vast majority of victims do not become abusers, and most abusers were not abused themselves.
Apr 23 2009 10:27
#42
In my opinion, the main problem isn't what libertarian communism will do to child abusers etc, but what prisons will do to libertarian communism. Prisons, police, the whole repressive apparatus are a tool of class domination, it's an essential part of the state. As long as you leave it in place, the possibility of using it for class domination remains. Also, I think that as long as you have a complex economy with a division of labour, there will be some groups of workers that are more powerful, more influential than others. So I believe that if you don't dismantle the whole repressive apparatus of prisons and so on, then libertarian communism will sooner or later revert to some form of class domination.
For that reason I believe that a fundamentally different approach is needed to enforce social norms and deal with those that break them. Instead of using punishment, the approach I advocate is to use treatment for those who cannot be held responsible for their actions because they are mentally ill, some process of re-integration for those who have breached rules of social life but who still recognise their validity and want to observe them ; exclusion from society (but not imprisonment) for those who don't want to observe them. I envisage that under libertarian communism there will be many different communities with different rules of social life that are democratically agreed on - e.g. some may ban marriage because they think it's a bourgeois institution, while others may ban non-monogamous relationships ; some may want to ban abortion ; some may want to permit all kinds of drugs, while others may even want to ban alcohol because of its social destructiveness; etc. So if you're a religious fundamentalist or straight-edge - don't worry, there will be a community for you ; while if you're a polyamorous stoner, there'll be another one for you too.
Oct 23 2009 16:50
#43
Well, I tend to think that the number of people who commit such crimes would reduce greatly with the removal of authoritarian oppression. As evidenced by the link between pedophilia and priests when people are deprived of being able to act of their own free will it tends to form strange deviations in their minds. As far as violent crime is concerned most such crimes are committed as acts of desperation, typically with economic stresses (poverty) being the main catalyst or in passion as is the case with jealousy killings and vengeance, and these often also stem from an unhealthy system of life. Within an anarchist communism we would see things change such as racial prejudices, gender bias, unhealthy marriages, sexual orientation bias, etc. and this would alleviate a good deal of crimes of passion as well as hate crimes.
That being said there would still be some incidence of bad seeds acting out of depraved mind sets and in these cases we should focus more primarily on actually rehabilitating these individuals as opposed to only punishing them. In extreme cases of antisocial behavior where it becomes apparent that an individual is unwilling to change or is unable to change, we should just shoot the fucker in the face or, in my opinion, deliver them to the families of their victims and let nature take it's course.
So, the prisons would exist but not in nearly the same form they do now and in far less number than they do now.
Nov 20 2009 17:51
#44
We should have prision in our society to put those fuckers away, so yes
Nov 20 2009 18:01
#45
I think an authoritarian society have nothing to do with pedos and other fuck up individuals, It just how they become do to the crap that went on in their family cause them to affect them so much and the environment they were in.
Nov 20 2009 20:28
#46
I think a prison is a specifically capitalist thing; it represents the deliberate curtailment of bourgeois freedoms. But yeah, nothing wrong with locking people up in anarchism.
~J.
Why do people commit 'crime'? What are the main causes? The responsibility for the majority of crime lies with dominant philosophical trends e.g. capitalism and monotheism.
Since the end of WW2 and to curb community depression at the horror of warfare capitalism creates the idea that possession of goods will dull the pain. Get the new washing machine, the new car, the new games console or the new anarchist book and feel the blues disappear. The problem with this mode of thought, which is deeply engrained in society, is a culture of want rather than a culture of need. Capitalism supplies the demand but it also demands your supplying by continuous and insidious adverts. It creates the class war, the haves and the have-nots. The have-nots aspire to be the haves by hook and by crook.
How many people are in prison because of theft or non-payment of fines/bills etc? These people are for the large part not criminals.
Now to continue to examine why other people are in prison - drugs - again either for recreation or escapism where is the crime? A pusher is a different phenomenon however but still many of them sell to promote their own habit?
But let's get contraversial - in a society which is domninated by possesive relationships, petty jealousy , monogomous and heterosexual relationships, person as sex object for use, porn and psedu porn etc etc and coupled with a barage of dreadful role models from anorexic girls to macho men - there are a great many confused and lonely people. Is this the ground that breeds sexual deviance? In a society based on a different set of models would such deviance still occur? These are questions and not statements.
So realistically speaking only repeat offender sexual deviants and murderers may need to be seperated from the rest of the community but how many would their number be if anarchist ideas became the dominant cultural voice?
Prison then, as it is today, is an example of the failure of capitalist society. I'm not saying we don't or won't need them but patriarchial religious ideas and the greed culture must be made responsible.