I don't think we'll get too far in our anarchist society unless we make real progress in dealing with antisocial behaviour and people start to change their attitudes and way at looking at such crime, its causes and how to deal with it.
To conclude the official libcom position on prisons is:
We would obviously have prisons under communism. Obviously. There is no doubt about this.
There would be fewer, and would be different. But they would definitely exist. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either mental, or playing silly semantic games about what a prison is.
Makes sense, certain ppl im afraid would get shot at times...especially just after the revolution (if it happens). I mean this may sound very 'sun' but im not gonna have paedos running round my community acting out there sick fantasies...just cos all the prisons have been all opened in some libertarian act of misplaced comradeship.
In ref to Entdinglichung, whether you call them prisons or cops is largely semantics, but for the tiny tiny tiny minority who would engage in extremely violent behaviour there'd be some sort of method of detention to protect other people. it's not really particularly relevant to class struggle in the here and now, but it doesn't mean it wouldn't be an issue in an anarchist society.
I agree that primitive societies offer no model for a liberated society on today's stage of development of productive forces ... but there are also many accounts that some primitive societies were less violent (San, Cree, Mangyan, etc.) ... the first British traders and missionaries who met Cree in today's Canada in the 19th century found it outrageous and uncivilized that the concept of corporal punishment for children was unknown in that society ... the missionaries and the Canadian state changed it by introducing the residential school system
the concepts of "Britain" or "Germany" were unknown in pre-historic times ;-) ... of course, among the San or Iniut before the introduction of modern statehood, the usual punishment for severe crimes was being forced to leave the community
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.
If the question is simply if it's right to restrict the freedom of psychopaths to protect everybody else - well, obviously it is.
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.
If the question is simply if it's right to restrict the freedom of psychopaths to protect everybody else - well, obviously it is.
Next time I shall ask my questions in a financial times type manner. Its a difficult subject. I know that alot of people who abuse children, were abused themselves as kids.
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.
"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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
personally the way I see it, it depends on teh crime. for example with the abolision of capatilism then there will be less theft and and other proffit driven crimes (at least once people's attitudes start chainging)
same with rape, a lot of the time rape is due to people wanting power over others, so hopefully as people's attitudes chainge it will go down (but is unlikly to be wiped out)
the problem is a lot of crimes are due to psycological problems rather than society so no matter what you do they will still exsist, teh question is how to deal with them, prisons, at least how they are right now won't do much good. reabilitation will work with all but the worst cases. which leaves that small minority do you lock them up and throw away the key, shoot them or do something else with them?
and I appologise for the typos as I'm in a rush right now
Aye, prisons, yes definately. They don't have to be the same as they are now though. Enclosed, almost self-reliant communities where prisoners work to produce most of what they need to survive so they have useful activity to engage in (that isn't some form of prison slavery), open association within the prison community (unless the nature of someones particular pathology means they need to be isolated from others but that should be exceptional), classes and leisure activities provided for...
and a big fuck off wall topped with barbed wire, turrets and machinegun posts so none of the anti-social fuckers escape to torture decent members of society ever again!
A bit like Shutter Island - that is what we should aspire to really.
let us not forget that "sociobiology" is mostly right wing bullshit excuses for present society. There is no murderer gene or rapist gene. We are what society makes us, and the various accidents in our life makes us.
There is no reason to think that there will always be rapists or murderers. Certainly such crimes do not just dissappear with the social revolution (though crime was much reduced immediately after the July revolution in Spain thanks to the revolutionary elan). Individuals should be restrained not as punishment or revenge but to protect the freedom and equality of the rest of us, especially the eldest and youngest, the most vulnerable. Freedom is freedom from as well as freedom to. If someone is a risk then they should be imprisoned as much for their sake as the rest of us.
The difference is they would not be tortured or made to do slave work but educated, given a chance to see what they had done was wrong. Whether they can be trusted again is up to the wider community.
Clearly everyone is innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt in a properly constuted court of law by a jury of their peers.
Such courts of law are properly constituted in anarchist communist society precisley because they are not perverted by the current class system. By "jury of their peers" I mean the direct democracy of the community (though it could be argued that an outside community/jury would be fairer, more objective, less emotional). Of course, being anarchists we could not have judges but a chair of the court, a rotated position, with all decisions, on guilt and sentancing, made by the jury/the direct democracy of the community.
As crime occurs less and less in anarchist society we would eventually be able to dispense with prisons. I don't think that's utopian. But in the mean time and just in case prisons, methods of restraint would/will remain even in anarchist communist society for the anti-social minority but care assistants would replace screws.
I'm not entirely certain I'd object to 'slave work' myself. I know it sounds bad, but...
Prisons (indeed 'justice' as it exists currently) exist for 4 reasons:
1 - punishment (ie vengeance); we don't like what you did, we do things to you that you don't like;
2 - safety; you abused people, we will put you somewhere away to stop you doing it to others;
3 - rehabilitation; you did naughty things, we'll 'help' (make) you get 'better';
4 - restitution; you broke something, you should fix something.
'Slave work' might be another work of looking at restitution as a principle of justice. In the case, the question is, does the community have the right to expect that someone acting against society should try to make things right? This could be seen as 'slave work' in that the individual might not want to but the community might consider it has the right to demand it - in other words, exploit his/her labour power in an unequal relationship of power (or domination).
Just tossing that out there as an idea, not volunteering to organise punishment battalions come the glorious day.
A prison is in essence the use of coercive force to alter or dictate the acts of another. I don't think that such an institution is compatible with anarchism as I would like to see it practiced.
The society, as a collective a free, consenting individuals, cannot appropriate any power over a member of that society which they do not freely relinquish. There are, admittedly, arguments to be made of implicit social contracts, but I feel that the most an anarchist society can do is to expel an offender.
The topic also brings up a few interesting questions as to the definition of a paedophile and even murderer - both of which have been constantly evolving over human history and are open, to some degree, to the question of individual's right to undertake acts which a majority may find unpleasant.
I agree with this. I don't know how far you could take it but its definitely a constructive way of thinking about the problem.
Tag/ monitor people with persistent problems instead of using prison. and instead of imprisonment deal with people by focusing on their motivation or lack of it. their drug problems and a society that concentrated on this would have far less 'prisoners'
"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."
I know the plural of anecdote is not data but... one of my family members was a paedophile. He had an abusive, alcoholic father, and was sexually abused as a child (he says by "neighbours" and by his older brother, but possibly also by his father). About 20 years ago he entered a stopping violence program focused on sexual abuse. He became a much better person, and as far as any of us know, has never abused a child since, sexually or otherwise. I presume this is because he was finally able to talk about his experiences, understand the distorting effect they had on his thinking and emotional coping mechanisms, and envision a new way of being in the world that put into practice the Ghandian nonviolence he had always preached.
Paedophilia is a classic case of what psychologists call "multifactorial causation". In other words, there are as many causes and combinations of causes as there are paedophiles. That said, I think it would be much harder for paedophiles to rationalize their behaviour in a society in which children's human rights to make decisions about their bodies are fully respected, and all forms of "discipline" involving physical attacks on children are understood as the child abuse they are. All forms of corporal punishment need to be understood as unconsciously grooming children to tolerate physical and sexual abuse, along with forcing children to allow hugging and kissing from family members when they don't want to ("be nice to Uncle, he's just giving you a hug").
Bringing it back to the topic, are prisons necessary to protect children from paedophiles? No. Just like mass surveillance and internet censorship are not necessary to prevent kiddy porn. Putting paedophiles in prison does nothing to heal them, and makes it harder for them to continue any positive contributions they are making to society. The resources required to keep one paedophile in prison for one year could fund many fulltime places on the stopping violence courses we actually need to fix the problem. In Aotearoa, even the Chief Justice has quoted studies showing that prisons create the very problems they are proposed as the solution to. I see no reason to keep prisons in an anarchist society. I would like to see them replaced with the current practice of forcing people to stay in mental health wards if they are likely to be a danger to themselves or others, with the consent of a spouse or next-of-kin.
I agree with this. I don't know how far you could take it but its definitely a constructive way of thinking about the problem.
Tag/ monitor people with persistent problems instead of using prison. and instead of imprisonment deal with people by focusing on their motivation or lack of it. their drug problems and a society that concentrated on this would have far less 'prisoners'
Thats so lame. tagging a serious offender like a sadistic killer or a paedophile will not stop them harming people if that is what they want to do- there are many cases of that happening. It's not really that different from putting harrassment orders or restraining orders on people- who then totally ignore them and then commit violent crime.
The society, as a collective a free, consenting individuals, cannot appropriate any power over a member of that society which they do not freely relinquish. There are, admittedly, arguments to be made of implicit social contracts, but I feel that the most an anarchist society can do is to expel an offender.
You appear to be putting the freedom of the offender above that of everyone else. I think those that abuse the rights of others and harm others need to be rehabilitated, but that requires (in my view) their rights being, at least partially, taken away. And those who do harm to others don't deserve their own freedom- atleast not until they are fully rehabilitated.What they did with their freedom- seriously enjoying harming other people, is very important and rehabilitation may well not be possible.
Personally I'm happy with less prisons in a post-revolution society, and ones that are different from what we have now. I'm happy with that and I think thats a more realistic goal to aim for.What you are saying is that just to expel a sadistic killer or paedophile is enough and frankly -thats pathetic, worrying, and could even be perceived as suspicious that you would be so soft and ineffective at dealing with such dangerous and vicious people, and that you would be enabling them to get their kicks harming people. These are people who have ensured that they have crossed the line, and pissed and shat on that line and gleefully celebrated doing so. What you are allowing them to do is to just move on to the next location and continue killing and abusing people, doing so from one place to the next. Paedos and perverted, sadistic murderers are going to love your ideal post-revolutionary society and thats seriously bad news for the rest of us- sorry to be so authoritarian and coercive. It's also not going to go down well with most working-class people.
I see no reason to keep prisons in an anarchist society. I would like to see them replaced with the current practice of forcing people to stay in mental health wards if they are likely to be a danger to themselves or others, with the consent of a spouse or next-of-kin.
No- fuck their spouses and families. If they feel the need to torture people to death or sexually abuse people, or both, then I don't think their spouses or family should have much of a say in the matter. As for your mental health wards- could they not be said to be some type of prison if people are forced to stay there? Are the other patients and staff protected from likely harm?
Violence begets violence. I'm not saying there's no place for violence in society but what we have now is violence passed on both horizontally from society to prisoners and vertically through the cycles of deprivation that prisons cause and perpetuate.
I think this article has something valid and important to say on the subject.
I don't think we'll get too far in our anarchist society unless we make real progress in dealing with antisocial behaviour and people start to change their attitudes and way at looking at such crime, its causes and how to deal with it.
Who is the real perpetrator of antisocial behaviour? Surely anarchist 101 acknowledges that capitalism/ governement and businesses are at the moment.
Who is the real perpetrator of antisocial behaviour? Surely anarchist 101 acknowledges that capitalism/ governement and businesses are at the moment.
That capitalism may be the source of antisocial behaviour doesn't change the fact that something has to be done with people engaging in such behaviour. I really can't stand this argument that basically says that as soon as capitalism is kaput, everything will magically sort itself out. It just won't.
Who is the real perpetrator of antisocial behaviour? Surely anarchist 101 acknowledges that capitalism/ governement and businesses are at the moment.
That capitalism may be the source of antisocial behaviour doesn't change the fact that something has to be done with people engaging in such behaviour. I really can't stand this argument that basically says that as soon as capitalism is kaput, everything will magically sort itself out. It just won't.
No I don't think that capitalism going will magically sort everything out. Equally the present system isn't magically sorting everything out. I think the biggest perpetrators of antisocal behaviour are the entities I mentioned. I think a very different approach to antisocial behaviour is needed, those two aren't particularly related statements.
However a class based analysis of antisocial behaviour needs to acknowledge that many if not most if those commenting on antisocial behaviour are probably disproportionately unaffected by it, I mostly fall into that category.
It's also worth noting that antisocial behaviour as a concern is probably not well established and to a degree a moral panic about antisocial behaviour is fuelled by the media. If you ask the working class what their concerns are, generally I think extremely outlying antisocial behaviour like paedophilia and murder falls far down the list. Poor housing, poverty etc are probably bigger concerns.
I wouldn't consider that many kids being abused an outlier issue. That said, I really don't have any ideas about what to do with them, but I think it's naive to say the least to imagine that they will just go away.
I did read an interesting article about rehabilitating paedophiles. General wisdom is that all you do is teach them to do better in psychological risk evaluations etc. The article argued that a large amount of sexual abuse of children is carried out by general abusers, rather than paedophiles specifically. Certainly an interesting idea, but not one that helps deal with the issue.
One thing that does bug me is prisons as a place of violence. Prisons should be places of rehabilitation or isolation for protection of society. It really angers me when people gloat over the idea of paedophiles and other criminals being raped in prison. If a prison serves any purpose other than petty vengeance then allowing the nature of the experience to depend on how well-connected/ tough the prisoner is abhorrent. They also forget that the rapists will also be enjoying themselves.
Cactus #54 ‘However a class based analysis of antisocial behaviour needs to acknowledge that many if not most if those commenting on antisocial behaviour are probably disproportionately unaffected by it…’
This may well be so as those who suffer most from antisocial behaviour are less inclined to draw attention to themselves by publicising the objectionable behaviour.
From my own experience antisocial behaviour is often in terms of the age group of the working class recipient. As a child everyone inhabited the same play area, the close, the street, and the woods. Young children were sometimes ripped off by older children and parasitical adults. So many ‘ganged up’ after a fashion. And the rest of us ran like the wind.
As a teenager the threat of physical assault, though in fact infrequent, was always part of my recreational planning. I stopped going to the dancing at the Flamingo on Paisley Road West, after two stabbings in the one week. From what I’ve read the same stuff is still going on now.
People with children are concerned for their welfare. An ex-fireman I knew bailed out of a teacher training degree as he felt sick at the prospect that anyone might question his motives for wishing to teach children.
A number of the elderly people living on my housing scheme complain about the fly-tipping and the parking of cars on green spaces. Most changes are perceived as physical encroachments on their well-being. This attitude is not restricted to the elderly.
With the end of capitalism I believe the pressures that generate these negative behaviours and attitudes will diminish though only time will dispel the anger and fear.
On a more positive note, it was only twenty years ago that an elderly relative of mine was asked by the police to lock her front door when she went on holiday. She was living in a small town in Angus, had no phone and shared a stair head toilet. She thought it impolite to lock the door, as a relative might call and finding her out, they could at least make themselves a cup of tea. The moral is – we do not have to live in hell.
http://libcom.org/search/nod
http://libcom.org/search/node/prisons
cheers =)
cheers =)
I don't think we'll get too
I don't think we'll get too far in our anarchist society unless we make real progress in dealing with antisocial behaviour and people start to change their attitudes and way at looking at such crime, its causes and how to deal with it.
shoot them
shoot them
No, my answer. Shoot them
No, my answer.
Shoot them every day.
Jack wrote: To conclude the
Jack
Makes sense, certain ppl im afraid would get shot at times...especially just after the revolution (if it happens). I mean this may sound very 'sun' but im not gonna have paedos running round my community acting out there sick fantasies...just cos all the prisons have been all opened in some libertarian act of misplaced comradeship.
are there still
are there still "Paedophiles, Dangerous individuals" in a classless/stateless society?
Yes I think there
Yes I think there are...Throughout history there has and always will be (thats my opinion).
"Goodies and baddies will
"Goodies and baddies will always exist."-me when i was 7
Jack wrote: Even a 7 year old
Jack
Although I probably used to think anarchists were baddies judging by the bad press they have always received in the media.
stateless societies in the
stateless societies in the past had no need for institutions like prisons, cops, etc. (probably pre-historic Britain was an exeption) ;-)
In ref to Entdinglichung,
In ref to Entdinglichung, whether you call them prisons or cops is largely semantics, but for the tiny tiny tiny minority who would engage in extremely violent behaviour there'd be some sort of method of detention to protect other people. it's not really particularly relevant to class struggle in the here and now, but it doesn't mean it wouldn't be an issue in an anarchist society.
Entdinglichung
Entdinglichung
I heard pre-historic Germany was a utopia :mrt:
I agree that primitive
I agree that primitive societies offer no model for a liberated society on today's stage of development of productive forces ... but there are also many accounts that some primitive societies were less violent (San, Cree, Mangyan, etc.) ... the first British traders and missionaries who met Cree in today's Canada in the 19th century found it outrageous and uncivilized that the concept of corporal punishment for children was unknown in that society ... the missionaries and the Canadian state changed it by introducing the residential school system
corporal punishment for
corporal punishment for children is in no way comparable to what we're talking about here.
the concepts of "Britain" or
the concepts of "Britain" or "Germany" were unknown in pre-historic times ;-) ... of course, among the San or Iniut before the introduction of modern statehood, the usual punishment for severe crimes was being forced to leave the community
But in Rambo4 he rips the
But in Rambo4 he rips the rapist's windpipe out through his neck.
Quote: So a serial rapist
The British Empire and the old Norse had figured that out. Just ship them to Australia or Iceland.
or do what Rambo4 did?
or do what Rambo4 did?
Choccy wrote: or do what
Choccy
Rambo should be held accountable for his crimes. He should be tried at the Hague. Im talking about all his other stuff.
If you ask questions in a
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.
If the question is simply if it's right to restrict the freedom of psychopaths to protect everybody else - well, obviously it is.
sickdog24 wrote: Choccy
sickdog24
Pff you are wrong, he was a freedom fighter.
Choccy wrote: Pff you are
Choccy
Yeah, he saved like Vietnam, Afghanistan and Burma. He's a hero, not a zero.
no1 wrote: If you ask
no1
Next time I shall ask my questions in a financial times type manner. Its a difficult subject. I know that alot of people who abuse children, were abused themselves as kids.
Why do people commit
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.
"We would obviously have
"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.
Jack wrote: Where are you
Jack
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...
I think Alderson's post was
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.
Prevention is better than
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?
no1 wrote: If you ask
no1
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.
Quote: Are individuals
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.
Choccy wrote: no1 wrote: A
Choccy
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.
In my opinion, the main
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.
Well, I tend to think that
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.
We should have prision in our
We should have prision in our society to put those fuckers away, so yes
I think an authoritarian
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.
I think a prison is a
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.
personally the way I see it,
personally the way I see it, it depends on teh crime. for example with the abolision of capatilism then there will be less theft and and other proffit driven crimes (at least once people's attitudes start chainging)
same with rape, a lot of the time rape is due to people wanting power over others, so hopefully as people's attitudes chainge it will go down (but is unlikly to be wiped out)
the problem is a lot of crimes are due to psycological problems rather than society so no matter what you do they will still exsist, teh question is how to deal with them, prisons, at least how they are right now won't do much good. reabilitation will work with all but the worst cases. which leaves that small minority do you lock them up and throw away the key, shoot them or do something else with them?
and I appologise for the typos as I'm in a rush right now
Aye, prisons, yes definately.
Aye, prisons, yes definately. They don't have to be the same as they are now though. Enclosed, almost self-reliant communities where prisoners work to produce most of what they need to survive so they have useful activity to engage in (that isn't some form of prison slavery), open association within the prison community (unless the nature of someones particular pathology means they need to be isolated from others but that should be exceptional), classes and leisure activities provided for...
and a big fuck off wall topped with barbed wire, turrets and machinegun posts so none of the anti-social fuckers escape to torture decent members of society ever again!
A bit like Shutter Island - that is what we should aspire to really.
let us not forget that
let us not forget that "sociobiology" is mostly right wing bullshit excuses for present society. There is no murderer gene or rapist gene. We are what society makes us, and the various accidents in our life makes us.
There is no reason to think that there will always be rapists or murderers. Certainly such crimes do not just dissappear with the social revolution (though crime was much reduced immediately after the July revolution in Spain thanks to the revolutionary elan). Individuals should be restrained not as punishment or revenge but to protect the freedom and equality of the rest of us, especially the eldest and youngest, the most vulnerable. Freedom is freedom from as well as freedom to. If someone is a risk then they should be imprisoned as much for their sake as the rest of us.
The difference is they would not be tortured or made to do slave work but educated, given a chance to see what they had done was wrong. Whether they can be trusted again is up to the wider community.
Clearly everyone is innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt in a properly constuted court of law by a jury of their peers.
Such courts of law are properly constituted in anarchist communist society precisley because they are not perverted by the current class system. By "jury of their peers" I mean the direct democracy of the community (though it could be argued that an outside community/jury would be fairer, more objective, less emotional). Of course, being anarchists we could not have judges but a chair of the court, a rotated position, with all decisions, on guilt and sentancing, made by the jury/the direct democracy of the community.
As crime occurs less and less in anarchist society we would eventually be able to dispense with prisons. I don't think that's utopian. But in the mean time and just in case prisons, methods of restraint would/will remain even in anarchist communist society for the anti-social minority but care assistants would replace screws.
I'm not entirely certain I'd
I'm not entirely certain I'd object to 'slave work' myself. I know it sounds bad, but...
Prisons (indeed 'justice' as it exists currently) exist for 4 reasons:
1 - punishment (ie vengeance); we don't like what you did, we do things to you that you don't like;
2 - safety; you abused people, we will put you somewhere away to stop you doing it to others;
3 - rehabilitation; you did naughty things, we'll 'help' (make) you get 'better';
4 - restitution; you broke something, you should fix something.
'Slave work' might be another work of looking at restitution as a principle of justice. In the case, the question is, does the community have the right to expect that someone acting against society should try to make things right? This could be seen as 'slave work' in that the individual might not want to but the community might consider it has the right to demand it - in other words, exploit his/her labour power in an unequal relationship of power (or domination).
Just tossing that out there as an idea, not volunteering to organise punishment battalions come the glorious day.
A prison is in essence the
A prison is in essence the use of coercive force to alter or dictate the acts of another. I don't think that such an institution is compatible with anarchism as I would like to see it practiced.
The society, as a collective a free, consenting individuals, cannot appropriate any power over a member of that society which they do not freely relinquish. There are, admittedly, arguments to be made of implicit social contracts, but I feel that the most an anarchist society can do is to expel an offender.
The topic also brings up a few interesting questions as to the definition of a paedophile and even murderer - both of which have been constantly evolving over human history and are open, to some degree, to the question of individual's right to undertake acts which a majority may find unpleasant.
I agree with this. I don't
I agree with this. I don't know how far you could take it but its definitely a constructive way of thinking about the problem.
Tag/ monitor people with persistent problems instead of using prison. and instead of imprisonment deal with people by focusing on their motivation or lack of it. their drug problems and a society that concentrated on this would have far less 'prisoners'
"As far as I know, it hasn't
"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."
I know the plural of anecdote is not data but... one of my family members was a paedophile. He had an abusive, alcoholic father, and was sexually abused as a child (he says by "neighbours" and by his older brother, but possibly also by his father). About 20 years ago he entered a stopping violence program focused on sexual abuse. He became a much better person, and as far as any of us know, has never abused a child since, sexually or otherwise. I presume this is because he was finally able to talk about his experiences, understand the distorting effect they had on his thinking and emotional coping mechanisms, and envision a new way of being in the world that put into practice the Ghandian nonviolence he had always preached.
Paedophilia is a classic case of what psychologists call "multifactorial causation". In other words, there are as many causes and combinations of causes as there are paedophiles. That said, I think it would be much harder for paedophiles to rationalize their behaviour in a society in which children's human rights to make decisions about their bodies are fully respected, and all forms of "discipline" involving physical attacks on children are understood as the child abuse they are. All forms of corporal punishment need to be understood as unconsciously grooming children to tolerate physical and sexual abuse, along with forcing children to allow hugging and kissing from family members when they don't want to ("be nice to Uncle, he's just giving you a hug").
Bringing it back to the topic, are prisons necessary to protect children from paedophiles? No. Just like mass surveillance and internet censorship are not necessary to prevent kiddy porn. Putting paedophiles in prison does nothing to heal them, and makes it harder for them to continue any positive contributions they are making to society. The resources required to keep one paedophile in prison for one year could fund many fulltime places on the stopping violence courses we actually need to fix the problem. In Aotearoa, even the Chief Justice has quoted studies showing that prisons create the very problems they are proposed as the solution to. I see no reason to keep prisons in an anarchist society. I would like to see them replaced with the current practice of forcing people to stay in mental health wards if they are likely to be a danger to themselves or others, with the consent of a spouse or next-of-kin.
nialld wrote: I agree with
nialld
Thats so lame. tagging a serious offender like a sadistic killer or a paedophile will not stop them harming people if that is what they want to do- there are many cases of that happening. It's not really that different from putting harrassment orders or restraining orders on people- who then totally ignore them and then commit violent crime.
Kirillov wrote: The society,
Kirillov
You appear to be putting the freedom of the offender above that of everyone else. I think those that abuse the rights of others and harm others need to be rehabilitated, but that requires (in my view) their rights being, at least partially, taken away. And those who do harm to others don't deserve their own freedom- atleast not until they are fully rehabilitated.What they did with their freedom- seriously enjoying harming other people, is very important and rehabilitation may well not be possible.
Personally I'm happy with less prisons in a post-revolution society, and ones that are different from what we have now. I'm happy with that and I think thats a more realistic goal to aim for.What you are saying is that just to expel a sadistic killer or paedophile is enough and frankly -thats pathetic, worrying, and could even be perceived as suspicious that you would be so soft and ineffective at dealing with such dangerous and vicious people, and that you would be enabling them to get their kicks harming people. These are people who have ensured that they have crossed the line, and pissed and shat on that line and gleefully celebrated doing so. What you are allowing them to do is to just move on to the next location and continue killing and abusing people, doing so from one place to the next. Paedos and perverted, sadistic murderers are going to love your ideal post-revolutionary society and thats seriously bad news for the rest of us- sorry to be so authoritarian and coercive. It's also not going to go down well with most working-class people.
strypey wrote: and as far as
strypey
I'm afraid thats not as particularly reassuring as you think it sounds.
strypey wrote: I see no
strypey
No- fuck their spouses and families. If they feel the need to torture people to death or sexually abuse people, or both, then I don't think their spouses or family should have much of a say in the matter. As for your mental health wards- could they not be said to be some type of prison if people are forced to stay there? Are the other patients and staff protected from likely harm?
Violence begets violence.
Violence begets violence. I'm not saying there's no place for violence in society but what we have now is violence passed on both horizontally from society to prisoners and vertically through the cycles of deprivation that prisons cause and perpetuate.
I think this article has something valid and important to say on the subject.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/12/obama-clemency-pardons-commutations-war-on-drugs
akai wrote: I don't think
akai
Who is the real perpetrator of antisocial behaviour? Surely anarchist 101 acknowledges that capitalism/ governement and businesses are at the moment.
Quote: Who is the real
That capitalism may be the source of antisocial behaviour doesn't change the fact that something has to be done with people engaging in such behaviour. I really can't stand this argument that basically says that as soon as capitalism is kaput, everything will magically sort itself out. It just won't.
Khawaga wrote: Quote: Who is
Khawaga
No I don't think that capitalism going will magically sort everything out. Equally the present system isn't magically sorting everything out. I think the biggest perpetrators of antisocal behaviour are the entities I mentioned. I think a very different approach to antisocial behaviour is needed, those two aren't particularly related statements.
However a class based
However a class based analysis of antisocial behaviour needs to acknowledge that many if not most if those commenting on antisocial behaviour are probably disproportionately unaffected by it, I mostly fall into that category.
It's also worth noting that antisocial behaviour as a concern is probably not well established and to a degree a moral panic about antisocial behaviour is fuelled by the media. If you ask the working class what their concerns are, generally I think extremely outlying antisocial behaviour like paedophilia and murder falls far down the list. Poor housing, poverty etc are probably bigger concerns.
Actually, I think paedophilia
Actually, I think paedophilia would be high up anyone's list of priorities given just how prevalent it is. 47,000 sexual offences against children were recorded last year in the UK according to the NSPCC. And that's just the recorded ones.
https://www.nspcc.org.uk/services-and-resources/research-and-resources/2016/how-safe-are-our-children-2016/
I wouldn't consider that many kids being abused an outlier issue. That said, I really don't have any ideas about what to do with them, but I think it's naive to say the least to imagine that they will just go away.
I did read an interesting
I did read an interesting article about rehabilitating paedophiles. General wisdom is that all you do is teach them to do better in psychological risk evaluations etc. The article argued that a large amount of sexual abuse of children is carried out by general abusers, rather than paedophiles specifically. Certainly an interesting idea, but not one that helps deal with the issue.
One thing that does bug me is prisons as a place of violence. Prisons should be places of rehabilitation or isolation for protection of society. It really angers me when people gloat over the idea of paedophiles and other criminals being raped in prison. If a prison serves any purpose other than petty vengeance then allowing the nature of the experience to depend on how well-connected/ tough the prisoner is abhorrent. They also forget that the rapists will also be enjoying themselves.
Cactus #54 ‘However a class
Cactus #54
‘However a class based analysis of antisocial behaviour needs to acknowledge that many if not most if those commenting on antisocial behaviour are probably disproportionately unaffected by it…’
This may well be so as those who suffer most from antisocial behaviour are less inclined to draw attention to themselves by publicising the objectionable behaviour.
From my own experience antisocial behaviour is often in terms of the age group of the working class recipient. As a child everyone inhabited the same play area, the close, the street, and the woods. Young children were sometimes ripped off by older children and parasitical adults. So many ‘ganged up’ after a fashion. And the rest of us ran like the wind.
As a teenager the threat of physical assault, though in fact infrequent, was always part of my recreational planning. I stopped going to the dancing at the Flamingo on Paisley Road West, after two stabbings in the one week. From what I’ve read the same stuff is still going on now.
People with children are concerned for their welfare. An ex-fireman I knew bailed out of a teacher training degree as he felt sick at the prospect that anyone might question his motives for wishing to teach children.
A number of the elderly people living on my housing scheme complain about the fly-tipping and the parking of cars on green spaces. Most changes are perceived as physical encroachments on their well-being. This attitude is not restricted to the elderly.
With the end of capitalism I believe the pressures that generate these negative behaviours and attitudes will diminish though only time will dispel the anger and fear.
On a more positive note, it was only twenty years ago that an elderly relative of mine was asked by the police to lock her front door when she went on holiday. She was living in a small town in Angus, had no phone and shared a stair head toilet. She thought it impolite to lock the door, as a relative might call and finding her out, they could at least make themselves a cup of tea. The moral is – we do not have to live in hell.