Annie K.
18th December 2008, 07:43
The question has already been asked here.
I can link two thread (1 (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newbie-question-crime-t95252/index.html), 2 (http://www.revleft.com/vb/police-and-courts-t88835/index.html?t=88835)) where I posted my replies, but you would probably find interesting answers in other threads if you search.
What happens to prisons, criminals, and psychos ?
The curious thing with that question is that it became the center of a debate not so long ago, in comparison to the 150 years of the history of anarchism. I think that before at least 1950, it was only one of those questions we dispel as we start talking about anarchism. Like when we are asked about the nature of the humanity, or about the existence of god. A question reserved to the OI forum.
But now, it divides the anarchists. An important part of the anarchists in this forum are sincerely thinking that any society, and the postrevolutionnary one first, must have a police, a system of justice, and enough prisons and mental institutions.
To me, it is absurd. Anarchy is not direct democracy. Anarchists oppose the state because authoritarian power is definitely oppressing, even if it is no longer in the hands of the capitalist class or in the hands of a bureaucracy, but in the hands of the proletariat itself. It isn't more easy to opress a nation than a collectivity. Cops, judges, prison screws and shrinks cannot collectively be members of a revolutionnary class.
This question should disappear in the course of the revolution.
Now my answer.
Criminality, and mental health too, are not apolitical questions. These concepts are associated with predefined but unstable structures of human relations.
We can take for example the death of Alexandros Grigoropoulos. He's been killed, that's for sure. But on the way from this homicide to the crime, a lot of interventions are needed.
The more obvious of these interventions are the one of the justice and the ones of the protesters. The justice mandates an investigation and will judge if the murderer commited a crime or not, according to its own rules. The protesters protest to impose their own definition of this murder as a crime, to obtain justice and to prevent similar crimes from happening (I simplify the situation, as the bourgeois justice is not accepted by all). A third intervention should be obvious for any leftist, it is the one from the government. It wants to preserve its power : as long as it doesn't endanger its existence, it will prevent its cop to be convicted for a crime because it would damage the authorithy of the state, and if the crowds leave it only the choice between the conviction of the murderer and the fall of the state, it will order its judges accordingly.
Crime is a concept we shouldn't accept too quickly because of that : justice is a political institution. First, the laws are made to match the interests of the dominant class. If murder is a right in some situations and a crime in others, it is because the corresponding laws (and case laws) ensure the continuity of the authority which uphold them. The dominant class can't keep for a long time its right to kill members of a dominated class, because its authority would soon be challenged, but it can allow the police to kill and preserve the domination. It can't outlaw murder in all situations (like in some christian doctrines) except for the police because it would soon reveal and end the violence of its domination, but it will allow murder to defend property, because it antagonizes the middle and working classes with the concrete forms of opposition to the capitalist order.
Secondly, the justice is not independent. The governments, even in liberal democracies, can give instructions to the judges on particular cases or on general matters, choosing them, exerting pressures on them, or asking nicely. But in the normal order of things in our democracies, the judges know and do what is expected from them without need for instructions.
And less evident interventions are engaged to make or not a crime of this death.
The judges are exerting a class justice not only on orders, but also because their own consciences are not independent form their lives, and because of their exposure to the dominant ideology.
But other parts of the society are concerned by this. The protesters who are insisting on the criminal nature of the murder of this kid, first. They want to substitute their judgement to the one of the judges, and what allows them to want it is that they are already submitted to a similar environment : the state's pressures, of course, but also the opposition in their own lifes' conditions with the criminality, and their subjection to the dominant ideology. The state doesn't exert justice for the sake of it, but because justice means order. The judges and this part of the protesters want justice because they think justice is a good and necessary thing.
Napoleon once said that religion is the only thing that keeps the poor from murdering the rich. Since Thiers, we know that religion is only a temporary solution. Now if the poor can't identify themselves to the murderers of the rich, it is also because the organisation of the society creates the social category of the criminals in a separated geographical and political space.
It is not a coincidence if the development of incarceration as the main response to crime is concurrent to the development of the capitalist state. It is easier to supress the solidarity of the middle class and working class with the most concrete victims of the power of the state if their punition is concealed behind high walls. You add some ghettos and you have an autoreplicant opposition with a lumpenproletariat, and it's really effective to get the working and middle class to accept "protection" of the state, and to accept the ideology of crime that covers this.
Psychopaths are the same as criminals. A lie behind a lie. The only difference is that their prisons are called differently and that this is the medical community that ensure their separation from the "normal" people. But the political potential of every psycho is still more important in a revolutionnary perspective than most marxist-leninists'. Aus der Krankheit eine Waffe machen !
An anarchist society have no such prejudice.
Crime and mental health would no longer exist, because these concepts, as the concept of justice, would no longer be needed. The abolition of all sorts of misery will abolish behaviours that are now considered as criminal, in the same time as it will abolish the opposed and authorized behaviours.
And for example, the political question will then no longer be "what happens to murderers", but "which death rate is the most suited to our society, and how will we apply it".
Pogue
18th December 2008, 08:55
I think its absolutely insane to suggest there would be no crime in an Anarchist society. For one, there'd still be all the criminals left in the prisons from before the revolution, and some people commit crimes because they're mental, evil, not to do with capitalism.
Annie K.
18th December 2008, 09:33
If i'm insane, I'm more entitled to talk about mentals than you, don't you think ?
Crime is a social construct. The question is not if the criminals or crime subsist after the revolution, but if the social institutions that created them subsist. If we open the prisons like they did in 36, or if we kill them all like they did in 93, there would be no remaining criminals. If the revolution last enough time, too.
But we can also confirm their condamnations and take the place and role of the judges. It's just not anarchy.
some people commit crimes because they're mental, evilOh. That's because they are genetically determined to this. The only solution now is to castrate all criminals. But with the progress of the science, we will soon be able to discover the evil ones in utero and abort them, and realize communism. And may God bless us.
Ts. Capitalism is not just about accumulating money, and anarchy isn't just about destroying capitalism.
apathy maybe
18th December 2008, 12:05
The question of crime and punishment is an old one. That has been answered many times by many people.
I suggest that you search RevLeft.
But a quick answer here we go:
Most crime will just go because there would be no need, for stealing a loaf of bread.
Much murder and mayhem is caused, also by property. Other social ills will be gone, for the same reason.
The "crimes" that remain (and there will be no laws), will be dealt with on an individual basis. Remember the maxim, "self-defence", the community has the right to defend it self (stemming from the right of individuals to do the same).
Some suggestions are execution and exile (though it isn't meant to be punishment). The locking up of folks is repungent, if that is mean to be punishment.
I suggest once again a quick search, and also look at the thread in the Anarchist forum.
The Feral Underclass
18th December 2008, 12:40
Read what's below, linked here: http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secI5.html
For anarchists, "crime" can best be described as anti-social acts, or behaviour which harms someone else or which invades their personal space. Anarchists argue that the root cause for crime is not some perversity of human nature or "original sin," but is due to the type of society by which people are moulded. For example, anarchists point out that by eliminating private property, crime could be reduced by about 90 percent, since about 90 percent of crime is currently motivated by evils stemming from private property such as poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and alienation. Moreover, by adopting anarchist methods of non-authoritarian child rearing and education, most of the remaining crimes could also be eliminated, because they are largely due to the anti-social, perverse, and cruel "secondary drives" that develop because of authoritarian, pleasure-negative child-rearing practices (See section J.6 -- "What methods of child rearing do anarchists advocate?" (http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secJ6.html))
"Crime", therefore, cannot be divorced from the society within which it occurs. Society, in Emma Goldman's words, gets the criminals it deserves. For example, anarchists do not think it unusual nor unexpected that crime exploded under the pro-free market capitalist regimes of Thatcher and Reagan. Crime, the most obvious symptom of social crisis, took 30 years to double in Britain (from 1 million incidents in 1950 to 2.2 million in 1979). However, between 1979 and 1992 the crime rate more than doubled, exceeding the 5 million mark in 1992. These 13 years were marked by a government firmly committed to the "free market" and "individual responsibility." It was entirely predictable that the social disruption, atomisation of individuals, and increased poverty caused by freeing capitalism from social controls would rip society apart and increase criminal activity. Also unsurprisingly (from an anarchist viewpoint), under these pro-market governments we also saw a reduction in civil liberties, increased state centralisation, and the destruction of local government. As Malatesta put it, the classical liberalism which these governments represented could have had no other effect, for "the government's powers of repression must perforce increase as free competition results in more discord and inequality." [Anarchy, p. 46]
Hence the paradox of governments committed to "individual rights," the "free market" and "getting the state off our backs" increasing state power and reducing rights while holding office during a crime explosion is no paradox at all. "The conjuncture of the rhetoric of individual freedom and a vast increase in state power," argues Carole Pateman, "is not unexpected at a time when the influence of contract doctrine is extending into the last, most intimate nooks and crannies of social life. Taken to a conclusion, contract undermines the conditions of its own existence. Hobbes showed long ago that contract -- all the way down -- requires absolutism and the sword to keep war at bay." [The Sexual Contract, p. 232]
Capitalism, and the contract theory on which it is built, will inevitably rip apart society. Capitalism is based upon a vision of humanity as isolated individuals with no connection other than that of money and contract. Such a vision cannot help but institutionalise anti-social acts. As Kropotkin argued "it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience -- be it only at the stage of an instinct -- of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man [and woman] from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one's happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his [or her] own." [Mutual Aid, p. 16]
The social atomisation required and created by capitalism destroys the basic bonds of society - namely human solidarity - and hierarchy crushes the individuality required to understand that we share a common humanity with others and so understand why we must be ethical and respect others rights.
We should also point out that prisons have numerous negative affects on society as well as often re-enforcing criminal (i.e. anti-social) behaviour. Kropotkin originated the accurate description of prisons as "Universities of Crime" wherein the first-time criminal learns new techniques and have adapt to the prevailing ethical standards within them. Hence, prisons would have the effect of increasing the criminal tendencies of those sent there and so prove to be counter-productive. In addition, prisons do not affect the social conditions which promote many forms of crime.
We are not saying, however, that anarchists reject the concept of individual responsibility. While recognising that rape, for example, is the result of a social system which represses sexuality and is based on patriarchy (i.e. rape has more to do with power than sex), anarchists do not "sit back" and say "it's society's fault." Individuals have to take responsibility for their own actions and recognise that consequences of those actions. Part of the current problem with "law codes" is that individuals have been deprived of the responsibility for developing their own ethical code, and so are less likely to develop "civilised" social standards (see section I.7.3 (http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secI7.html#seci73)).
Therefore, while anarchists reject the ideas of law and a specialised justice system, they are not blind to the fact that anti-social action may not totally disappear in a free society. Therefore, some sort of "court" system would still be necessary to deal with the remaining crimes and to adjudicate disputes between citizens.
These courts would function in one of two ways. One possibility is that the parties involved agree to hand their case to a third party. Then the "court" in question would be the arrangements made by those parties. The second possibility is when the parties cannot not agree (or if the victim was dead). Then the issue could be raised at a communal assembly and a "court" appointed to look into the issue. These "courts" would be independent from the commune, their independence strengthened by popular election instead of executive appointment of judges, by protecting the jury system of selection of random citizens by lot, and by informing jurors of their right to judge the law itself, according to their conscience, as well as the facts of a case. As Malatesta pointed out, "when differences were to arise between men [sic!], would not arbitration voluntarily accepted, or pressure of public opinion, be perhaps more likely to establish where the right lies than through an irresponsible magistrate which has the right to adjudicate on everything and everybody and is inevitably incompetent and therefore unjust?" [Anarchy, p. 43]
In the case of a "police force," this would not exist either as a public or private specialised body or company. If a local community did consider that public safety required a body of people who could be called upon for help, we imagine that a new system would be created. Such a system would "not be entrusted to, as it is today, to a special, official body: all able-bodied inhabitants [of a commune] will be called upon to take turns in the security measures instituted by the commune." [James Guillaume, Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 371] This system would be based around a voluntary militia system, in which all members of the community could serve if they so desired. Those who served would not constitute a professional body; instead the service would be made up of local people who would join for short periods of time and be replaced if they abused their position. Hence the likelihood that a communal militia would become corrupted by power, like the current police force or a private security firm exercising a policing function, would be vastly reduced. Moreover, by accustoming a population to intervene in anti-social as part of the militia, they would be empowered to do so when not an active part of it, so reducing the need for its services even more. Such a body would not have a monopoly on protecting others, but would simply be on call if others required it. It would no more be a monopoly of defence (i.e. a "police force") than the current fire service is a monopoly. Individuals are not banned from putting out fires today because the fire service exists, similarly individuals will be free to help stop anti-social crime by themselves, or in association with others, in an anarchist society.
Of course there are anti-social acts which occur without witnesses and so the "guilty" party cannot be readily identified. If such acts did occur we can imagine an anarchist community taking two courses of action. The injured party may look into the facts themselves or appoint an agent to do so or, more likely, an ad hoc group would be elected at a community assembly to investigate specific crimes of this sort. Such a group would be given the necessary "authority" to investigate the crime and be subject to recall by the community if they start trying to abuse whatever authority they had. Once the investigating body thought it had enough evidence it would inform the community as well as the affected parties and then organise a court. Of course, a free society will produce different solutions to such problems, solutions no-one has considered yet and so these suggestions are just that, suggestions.
As is often stated, prevention is better than cure. This is as true of crime as of disease. In other words, crime is best fought by rooting out its causes as opposed to punishing those who act in response to these causes. For example, it is hardly surprising that a culture that promotes individual profit and consumerism would produce individuals who do not respect other people (or themselves) and see them as purely means to an end (usually increased consumption). And, like everything else in a capitalist system, such as honour and pride, conscience is also available at the right price -- hardly an environment which encourages consideration for others, or even for oneself.
In addition, a society based on hierarchical authority will also tend to produce anti-social activity because the free development and expression it suppresses. Thus, irrational authority (which is often claimed to be the only cure for crime) actually helps produce it. As Emma Goldman argued, crime "is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, moral conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statues can only increase, but never do away with, crime" [Red Emma Speaks, p. 57]
Eric Fromm, decades latter, makes the same point:
"It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole of life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities. Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived . . . the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually interdependent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive towards life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive towards destruction; the more life is realised, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which particular hostile tendencies -- either against others or against oneself -- are nourished" [The Fear of Freedom, p. 158] Therefore, by reorganising society so that it empowers everyone and actively encourages the use of all our intellectual, emotional and sensuous abilities, crime would soon cease to be the huge problem that it is now. As for the anti-social behaviour or clashes between individuals that might still exist in such a society, it would be dealt with in a system based on respect for the individual and a recognition of the social roots of the problem. Restraint would be kept to a minimum.
Anarchists think that public opinion and social pressure would be the main means of preventing anti-social acts in an anarchist society, with such actions as boycotting and ostracising used as powerful sanctions to convince those attempting them of the errors of their way. Extensive non-co-operation by neighbours, friends and work mates would be the best means of stopping acts which harmed others.
An anarchist system of justice, we should note, would have a lot to learn from aboriginal societies simply because they are examples of social order without the state. Indeed many of the ideas we consider as essential to justice today can be found in such societies. As Kropotkin argued, "when we imagine that we have made great advances in introducing, for instance, the jury, all we have done is to return to the institutions of the so-called 'barbarians' after having changed it to the advantage of the ruling classes." [The State: Its Historic Role, p. 18]
Like aboriginal justice (as documented by Rupert Ross in Returning to the Teachings: Exploring Aboriginal Justice) anarchists contend that offenders should not be punished but justice achieved by the teaching and healing of all involved. Public condemnation of the wrongdoing would be a key aspect of this process, but the wrong doer would remain part of the community and so see the effects of their actions on others in terms of grief and pain caused. It would be likely that wrong doers would be expected to try to make amends for their act by community service or helping victims and their families.
So, from a practical viewpoint, almost all anarchists oppose prisons on both practical grounds (they do not work) and ethical grounds ("We know what prisons mean -- they mean broken down body and spirit, degradation, consumption, insanity" Voltairine de Cleyre, quoted by Paul Avrich in An American Anarchist, p. 146]). The Makhnovists took the usual anarchist position on prisons:
"Prisons are the symbol of the servitude of the people, they are always built only to subjugate the people, the workers and peasants. . . Free people have no use for prisons. Wherever prisons exist, the people are not free. . . In keeping with this attitude, they [the Makhnovists] demolished prisons wherever they went." [Peter Arshinov, The History of the Makhnovist Movement, p. 153] With the exception of Benjamin Tucker, no major anarchist writer supported the institution. Few anarchists think that private prisons (like private policemen) are compatible with their notions of freedom. However, all anarchists are against the current "justice" system which seems to them to be organised around revenge and punishing effects and not fixing causes.
However, there are psychopaths and other people in any society who are too dangerous to be allowed to walk freely. Restraint in this case would be the only option and such people may have to be isolated from others for their own, and others, safety. Perhaps mental hospitals would be used, or an area quarantined for their use created (perhaps an island, for example). However, such cases (we hope) would be rare.
So instead of prisons and a legal code based on the concept of punishment and revenge, anarchists support the use of pubic opinion and pressure to stop anti-social acts and the need to therapeutically rehabilitate those who commit anti-social acts. As Kropotkin argued, "liberty, equality, and practical human sympathy are the most effective barriers we can oppose to the anti-social instinct of certain among us" and not a parasitic legal system. [The Anarchist Reader, p. 117]
apathy maybe
18th December 2008, 15:14
Id suggest reading Crime and Punishment by Errico Malatesta
http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/crime_and_punishment.html
I was pointed towards this by Rorschach and it cleared up quite a few of my questions on the subject...
To follow up on this excellent link, I just did a quick search and come up with a few more texts on the subject. (I don't agree with all of them, but they provide the basis for discussion at least.)
Thinking about Anarchism - Crime (http://struggle.ws/wsm/ws/2004/82/crime.html) doesn't really provide any answers, but does provide some places to start thinking about the answers.
Crime, punishment & community policing (http://struggle.ws/rbr/rbr6/crime.html) provides an examination, in the context of Northern Ireland, of "community policing", with an anarchist analysis.
Anarchism and Crime (http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/tucker/tucker9.html) gives an "individualist anarchist" perspective (the author is Benjamin R. Tucker), and identifies the state as the cause of most crime.
Prisons and Crime (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_archives/bright/berkman/iish/prisonsandcrime/prisonsandcrime.html), a piece by Alexander Berkman.
http://struggle.ws/ws92/crime37.html
http://struggle.ws/ws/crime48.html
And so on. There is heaps of stuff by the "classical" anarchists authors on crime as well, though for some reason I can't just find it...
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