Against Prisons

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It is time to close the chapter of prisons in the history of punishment. It is time to say good-bye to imprisonment as a punishment for crime. It is time to tear down the buildings where the punishment of imprisonment has been executed for years, decades, ages. With a somewhat antiquated German term for court-ordered punitive deprivations of liberty we could say: let us abolish the Strafgefängnis once and for all. The demand to abolish all jails, prisons, penitentiaries and correctional institutions where convicts have been (and are) serving time may seem audacious to some - and utopian to others. And, indeed, to do away with prisons would certainly be a step of historical dimensions - more wide-ranging than a moratorium on prison construction and more than any plan to shrink the current prison systems to half or less their current size. To do away with all serving prisons without exception and regardless of their often euphemistic self-descriptions represents a qualitative leap. It means the end of the era of punishment by incarceration. To send people to prison - new or old, large or small, and whatever they might be called - must become as obsolete as galley slavery.

Such demands require a serious explanation. One that shows awareness for all the counterarguments put forward to justify the status quo. This is what we set out to do in this contribution. For instance, we acknowledge without hesitation that "this is not the right time to talk about prison abolition". We do not deny that the invention of the penitentiary had been a significant advance over preceding sanctions. We give the prison credit for the attempt to find a compromise between the divergent and conflicting objectives that it is burdened with. But we insist on the fact that it is high time to abandon both the ideology and practice of imprisonment as modernity's standard response to crime. And we hope to convince readers that it is not only possible to overcome the age of confinement without losses in terms of victims' rights, security concerns or the rule of law, but that this taks is also an urgent one.

Prisons Work

Prisons are not without merits. Probably the best thing that can be said about them is that they are much better than the punishments that immediately preceded the birth of the modern penitentiary. Just think of executions like this one. The description (from Evans 1997: 194) takes us back to the Berlin of the year 1800, decades before Prussia abolished this specific form of punishment:

“The woman was tied down and quickly strangled, and her limbs and neck were broken by a series of blows with the heavy cartwheel wielded by the executioner. In accordance with standard practice her body was then untied and fastened to the wheel, which was placed horizontally on a long upright pole fixed into the ground next to the scaffold … The head was cut off and stuck on top of the pole.”

Since imprisonment was seen as something like the more humane successor of all those repugnant spectacles (including the pillory, public whippings, brandings, mutilations or at times having the offender boiled in oil or burned at the stake) the modern cell prison was greeted with almost unanimous relief. Designed as a keeper, not a killer, the prison sentence manifested a revolution in the attitudes towards delinquency: those behind its walls were seen as sinners who could be redeemed and who – in principle – deserved a second chance. A chance not only to walk through its gates once they they had done their time, but to be willing, able, and permitted to re-insert themselves into the day-to-day life of ordinary citizens. Free to start, as one says, a new life. That was a stunning turnaround that explains why the promise of the prison never to return to the atrocities of earlier times was and still is one of the strongest arguments in its favour.

The second best thing that can be said about prisons is that they do "work" - at least in a certain sense, to a certain extent, and with relation to the expectations of a significant part of the general public.

They may not work all too well with regard to the (re-) socialization of inmates, but they seem to satisfy those whose role has been described by Michelle Brown (2009) as that of the "penal spectator". For penal spectators, prisons are there to punish. They are meant to inflict pain on criminals in return for the wrong they did to others. This is their primary purpose, and they fulfill it reasonably well considering the diversity of opinions and attitudes within what sufficiently well , even though . They are a strong signal of disapproval. They visibly inflict pain on those found responsible for criminal activities - and they intentionally stigmatize offenders, while symbolically siding with the victims of crime, thus also exonerating them from potential feelings or ascriptions of guilt or co-responsibility. In other words: incarceration punishes the offender, but it also supports the victims, and it re-assures the public of the continuing validity and enforcement of the norm that the offender had broken. Symbolically, prisons send out a clear message that violations of the penal code will not be tolerated - and that potential future offenders should think twice before succumbing to the seductions of crime (Katz 1988).

If punishment is the first purpose of imprisonment, then incapacitation is second. The prison prevents its inmates from continuing to steal and rob, to rape and to kill - at least for a time, but hopefully (by either intimidation or treatment) also for the rest of their lives and in their post-prison environments. Surely, there is no way to prevent crimes from happening within the prison system - but that is another story. For the penal spectator, what counts is to be able to safely walk the streets at night (and during daytime). The very existence of prisons conveys an atmosphere of relative safety.

Thirdly, and in more cases than none, the prison even lives up to its promise of helping offenders to some kind of cognitive and/or emotional maturity and thus enable them to lead a law-abiding life after release. post-internment life by developing both cognitively and emotionally, so that at the time of release they can lead a better and a law-abiding life (rehabilitation).

As Vivien Stern (2006, ch. 2) explains:

“All may not be well within the high walls of the prison, but for those outside, the high walls, the watchtowers and maybe also the stories of dreadful happenings within are symbols of the power of the state to punish. They are a reassurance to the public that they will be protected from people who prey on them and threaten public peace. (…). Whether prisons are unjust and violent inside, whether they make the people who go to them better or worse, need not concern the law-abiding citizen. One thing is sure. Prisons protect society by holding people who would otherwise be outside, stealing, robbing, terrorizing, smuggling, causing damage and spreading fear.
So prisons – with their grey walls, watchtowers, razor wire and brooding blocks with small barred windows – symbolize the maintenance of law. They keep locked away people who would do harm to others. More than that, they also prevent crime in another way (…). Prison is such a grim place and loss of freedom is a very harsh punishment. People do not want to lose their freedom and the thought of being sent to prison stops the potential law-breaker committing a crime that would otherwise have been committed. The existence of the prison punishment deters people from committing crime. (…)
[A]lso (…) prisons can be good places, serving a useful purpose. They can be places of reform where criminals go in as bad people and come out a little better. Being sent to prison will teach them a lesson […or…] give them a chance they never had before to learn a trade, give up taking illegal drugs or get educated (…).”

In this sense, prisons work. They may generate all sorts of unpleasant phenomena. But they are an accepted part of social reality. Last but not least because they can also be seen as a positive economic factor. Prison construction creates jobs - as does the running of a prison. On a worldwide scale, prisons employ hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of individuals. Not to mention the shareholder profits of such giants of the prison-industrial complex as the Corrections Corporation of America. Seen from the perspective of Realpolitik, the history of the prison has all ingredients of a tremendous success story. 

An Untimely Issue

We cannot claim originality for our abolitionist intentions. As a matter of fact, the institution of the prison has often been wished away, albeit so far to no avail. As Peter Kropotkin had already said in 1887:

"Si on me demandait — 'Que pourrait-on faire cependant pour améliorer le régime pénitentiaire?' - je répondrais: Rien! On ne peut pas améliorer une prison. Sauf quelques petites améliorations sans importance, il n’y a absolument rien à faire qu’à la démolir."

In his memoirs, Kropotkin reaffirmed his conviction that prisons could not be reformed, just abolished:

"Every one knows that absence of education, dislike of regular work, physical incapability of sustained effort, misdirected love of adventure, gambling propensities, absence of energy, an untrained will, and carelessness about the happiness of others are the causes which bring this class of people before the courts. Now I was deeply impressed during my imprisonment by the fact that it is exactly these defects of human nature - each one of them - which the prison breeds in its inmates; and it is bound to breed them because it is a prison, and will breed them so long as it exists."

Almost a century later, in 1981, the Canadian Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, approved a "Minute on Prison Abolition". This memorable minute (Nr. 93) first remembers the Quakers' advocacy of prisons as an alternative to corporal and capital punishment and their subsequent work for prison reform. Then the text takes a turn. It reads:

"Today, Friends are becoming aware that prisons are a destructive and expensive failure as a response to crime. We are, therefore, turning our efforts to reform prisons to efforts to replace them with non-punitive, life-affirming and reconciling responses. - The prison system is both a cause and a result of violence and social injustice. Throughout history, the majority of prisoners have been the powerless and the oppressed. We are increasingly clear that the imprisonment of human beings, like their enslavement, is inherently immoral and is as destructive to the cagers as the caged."

In contemporary high crime societies (Garland 2000), to most observers the very idea of doing away with prisons lacks both plausibility and feasibility, though. Some even see a nuisance in those who (still) argue for the end of imprisonment. They contend that this kind of talk could seriously impede any real progress in prison reform and in criminal policy as such, which, by its very nature, has to deal with the world of facts, not fiction. And they can certainly point to one undisputable fact: empirical data seem to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that there has been - and still is - an almost insatiable demand for ever more prisons to be built in almost all countries of the world.


The Demand for Prisons

To assess the force of this demand for prisons realistically one has to look back in time until, let us say, the early 1970s. At that time, the imprisonment rate in the Netherlands was "was around 20 per 100,000" (Tak 2001: 151), and in Norway it stood at 37. At that time, the goal of these countries' prison systems was to send ever fewer people to prison and to get ever more people out. International experts widely seemed to see them as models to be followed - not only in terms of quantity, but also quality. Prison conditions in these countries were then sometimes described as "a home away from home", with the social distance between inmates and guards so reduced that it became hard to tell who was a guard and who an inmate (Pratt 2002: 145).

Almost half a century later, the Dutch and Norwegian rates are hovering around 70. Globally, a punitive turn that had started still in the 1970s, has resulted in ever-expanding prison system in a majority of the world's countries and in more people behind bars today than at any other time in human history (about 10 million). A report on global prison trends (PRI 2015: 7) states:

"Over the last fifteen years or so, prison populations have seen particularly sharp rises in Latin America, where Brazil has seen a 150 per cent increase, Colombia a 125 per cent increase, and Mexico, 53 per cent. (...) In Asia, particularly steep rises in the use of prison have been seen in Indonesia (183 per cent) and Vietnam (136 per cent). Prison numbers rose by 58 per cent in the Philippines and by 38 per cent in Iran. Thailand’s prison population fell between 2001 and 2007 but then rose again – its 325,000 prisoners in 2014 amounted to 30 per cent more than in 2001. India’s prison numbers rose by a similar percentage between 2001 and 2013. China with the largest absolute numbers of prisoners in Asia appears to have seen a more modest rise although data is incomplete in respect of pre-trial detainees and those subject to administrative detention. In the Gulf region, the use of prison has doubled in Saudi Arabia (from 23,700 prisoners in 2000 to 47,000 in 2013) and in Qatar – from 569 in 2002 to 1,150 in 2013."

Interestingly, the quantitative surge seems to go hand in hand with an improved reputation of the prison system in science and public opinion. In spite of lasting and widespread academic prison-bashing fuelled by such as works as Georg Rusche's and Otto Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Strucure (1939) and Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975) the public's generally supportive perception of the prison as a standard response to crime seems not to have suffered any serious setback. And even in academic circles, radical criticism of prisons has reached a new low.

All told, imprisonment as a swift and easy way of dealing with troublemakers is as popular today as never before. Gone are the days when heavy reliance on imprisonment - often instead of a sound social policy - used to be regarded as a kind of informal monopoly of dictatorships and similar regimes of little sophistication. Meanwhile none other than the global flag bearer of freedom and democracy has assumed the leading role in selling incarceration as a panacea for all kinds of social ills. From Richard Nixon's declaration of the War on Drugs (1971) over "get-tough" approaches based on neo-classical just deserts ideologies and their manifestation in sentencing guidelines all the way to Bill Clinton's 1994 Violent Crime Control Act which, among other things, expanded the death penalty, encouraged states to lengthen prison sentences and helped skyrocket the population behind bars in the United States of America by more than 600 percent between the 1970 and 2000 (Mauer 2001; 2003: 1), the superpower's incarceration rate has long surpassed those of Russia and China and has now reached a flabbergasting 716 per 100 000 (Williams 2016). With a prison population of 2.2 million (including thousands on death row), the world's socio-cultural role model has also been at the forefront of nurturing a prison-industrial complex that combines the fight against rising crime rates with substantial financial gains for diverse prison-related lobbyists and industries (Christie 2016), thus adding another thrust to the rising number of incarcerated individuals. While the nation is slowly waking up to the fact that mass incarceration also means mass releases from prison (with yearly more than 600 000 citizens seeking reintegration after doing time; Harty 2012: 1)), there is no doubt that the prison has attained a more significant role in American society than ever.

In such a situation, a radical critique of prisons - one that is envisaging neither a "mere" improvement of living conditions in prison nor a reduction of imprisonment rates, but an outright abolition of all prisons - is a rather untimely endeavor, to say the least. Often, it is even being reproached of being counterproductive. Criminal policy makers deplore the paradoxical consequences of the abolitionist discourse which in their opinion - while chasing the end of the rainbow - fails to engage in realistic reform projects, belittles the seriousness of crime, estranges itself from both victims and public opinion (e.g., van Dijk 1989; Guimarães 2016).

Anti-Abolitionism

In this vein, the then British Minister of State for Police and Criminal Justice, Nick Herbert (2008), made himself the spokesperson for anti-abolitionist resentment when commenting on the 12th International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA) hosted by the Howard League at King's College, London, in the summer of 2008. Coming out in defense of prisons he accused the organizers of what he called the abolitionists' criminal conspiracy, and went on to say that

"Jails may have changed, but the enduring truth that they are necessary has not. We will always have a small minority of offenders who, by their behaviour, pose so great a threat to the lives and property of the law-abiding majority that they must be kept apart from us. Ignoring this reality and arguing for the total abolition of prison is a hopelessly utopian goal that does the credibility of penal reformers no service. (...) What do the abolitionists really want? If it's the end of all custody, including for the most serious and dangerous offenders, then we can dismiss their demands as truly silly. (...) It would be nice to live in a society where there were no prisons, just as it would be nice if there were no hospitals because there was no illness. But until someone steps forward with a ten-year plan to Make Crime History, jails are here to stay. The challenge is to create prisons with a purpose – not to hold lazy conferences making futile calls for their abolition."

A typical reader's comment in the online version of the newspaper article read:

"An excellent, well argued and logical article. Thanks. Now lets hear from the lunatic lefties who disagree, and see what kind of referenced counter arguments they can put up to convince us that you are wrong."

Expanding these arguments one might even point to the current global trend to skate round the prison altogether and to resort to non-custodial and non-judicial methods of conflict resolution such as torture and/or summary executions. Such practices have, of course, always existed alongside the regular criminal justice systems. In dictatorships and many populist regimes, iron fist policies were tacitly understood as an authorization for extrajudicial executions by police, militias, secret services or death squads (Denyer Willis 2015). With the gradual adoption and increased respectability of extra-judicial liquidations in leading Western countries, though (Cockburn 2015), such non-custodial crime policies are gaining more ground all over the world now. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duarte could elect himself president with a landslide victory by promising to have 100,000 drug dealers and other gang members killed in order to make the country safe again. Since penal procedures would be too cumbersome and time-consuming, he authorized police as well as bounty hunters and ordinary citizens to do the job and cash in on the rewards promised by the new president of the republic (Fähnders 2016; Placido 2016). In the face of such stunning developments (once initiated in Asia in the days of former Thailand's premier Shinawatra Thaksin) it might be hard for prison abolitionists to justify their demand to close prisons, thus potentially increasing the risk of turning potential prison inmates into aims of state-sponsored killer squads. Why slam the last bastion of the rule of law in countries where the alternative would be instant assassination? Speaking of referenced counter arguments, this is exactly what this contribution is about. Our objective is to show that a radical critique of prisons is not only justifiable, but an urgent necessity, because prisons do much more harm than good, and because they can and must be abolished without jeopardizing neither the rule of law nor public safety or the interests of the victims of crime.

There is no reason to easily dismiss these criticisms, but neither is there reason for prison critics to let themselves be discouraged by them. The urgency of combatting the recent spread of torture, the surge of capital punishment in many (and of extra-judicial executions in even more) countries in no way lessens the importance of the prison question. A punishment that affects ten million people at any given moment must not be treated as a trifling matter - and to be called all kinds of names by those who think that the prison is here to stay forever is not a shame (and much less an argument). Abolitionist arguments are not as far from reality as some politicians want us to believe. They are simply untimely. They do not fit nicely into the great issues of the mainstream media in post-democracy. That should not deter us from raising the issue, though. At the beginning of any substantial reform process, the topic in question has always been derided as marginal or lunatic. That is completely normal. It had been the fate of the early British opposition to the transatlantic slave trade (Thomas Clarkson), to US-Americans questioning the legitimacy of slavery in the United States (William Lloyd Garrison; Elijah Lovejoy), and, last not least, of the suffragettes when they started fighting for women's voting rights (Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst).

Our objective is to show that a radical critique of prisons is not only justifiable, but an urgent necessity. It is an urgent necessity, because prisons do much more harm than good, and because they can be abolished without hazard to the rule of law, public safety, or victims of crime. And one thing should be undisputed, after all: any harmful policy that can be abolished without detriment is a policy that has to be abolished - with urgency.

Given the state of affairs in the real world, it may not be the right moment to speak about abolishing prisons altogether. But what does that mean, after all? Does it mean to hide the truth and to shut up, does it mean to tolerate the misery of imprisoned persons all over the world without even making it known? That cannot be the answer. In our opinion, French abolitionist Catherine Baker (2004: 13) was right when she insisted that prison abolition must be discussed at inopportune times - this being the only way to ensure that one day it will be the right moment: "Autrement dit, ce n’est pas le moment de parler de supprimer les prisons. Mais l’abolition de ce châtiment aussi cruel qu’irrationnel doit être discutée à contretemps, c’est le seul moyen pour qu’un jour il en soit temps."

Unattained goals

It is certainly true that there is a demand for prisons. In some cases, the prison-industrial complex may have stipulated such a demand in the first place. But however this may be: prison systems are expanding almost all over the world, and in most places, this expansion is still finding approval and consent. Expansion and acceptance are only one side of the coin, though. The other side consists of shortcomings and costs both material and human. To begin with the shortcomings, we have to scratch the surface - and we will find a list of unkept promises ranging from unsatisfactory offender rehabilitation and incapacitation all the way to the limits of deterrent effects.

Offender Rehabilitation

As far as rehabilitation is concerned, the history of the prison has been built upon a truly tragic illusion. The fundamental idea behind the Philadelphia penitentiary and its method of solitary confinement for all prisoners from day one until their release was utterly flawed from the start.

Inspired by medieval monasteries the idea was to isolate prisoners from all contacts and thereby direct their attention to their own conscience and the search for salvation. But this parallel was a misconception. Even monks were not confined to their cells 24 hours a day. Their voluntary segregation from the world did not hinder them to have a gratifying and productive community life within the walls - praying, singing, worshipping, talking, eating and drinking together. And it was this part of the monastery that the cell prison did not replicate. The Pennsylvanian invention of the penitentiary with its principle of sensory deprivation had to drive inmates into desorientation, depression, insanity, and suicide. Insofar, the single-cell prison was justly dubbed a "petrified giant error" by Eberhard Schmidt (1961: 5). But that did not hinder its expansion over the whole globe in the wake of 19th and 20th century colonialism and imperialism.

Offender rehabilitation was and still is the most noble and the least effective of the prison's purposes. The endless story of reform attempts are an impressive manifestation of both the seriousness and the futility of those efforts. After the separate system came the silent system Auburn style, followed by the so-called progressive or Irish system and its diverse ramifications all the way to the idea that what prisoners really needed was psychological treatment so they would be "healed" at the time they went throgh the prison gates and back into society. But in the end, nothing worked to a sufficient degree. The treatment ideology exhausted itself and confirmed the professional scepticism of experienced practicioners concerning the possibilities of constructive treatment under prison conditions (cf. Busch 1986).

The high hopes once invested in the promise of the prison have given way to a deep and general disillusionment. Once hailed as a panacea that was both humane to the convict and effective in protecting society, contemporary descriptions of the reality of mass incarceration make it hard to believe that the difficulties by which the prison system is beset could ever be resolved by reform. There is no way to bridge the gap between the rehabilitative ideal on the one hand and the abusive and degrading reality in the world's prisons.

Imprisonment is one of the least likely ways to bring convicts back into a legal existence - be it with or without intramural treatment efforts. Re-integration into society requires the strengthening of social bonds; it needs everyday experiences of autonomy and responsibility to build a sense of personal identity and self-efficacy; it needs support and accountability, self-control, cooperation, and success at coping with the challenges of everyday private and professional life. The prison is not conducive to such experiences - rather to the contrary. The deprivation of liberty does not facilitate the right kind of social learning. This is, by the way, a simple truth already spelled out by John Howard himself back in the 18th century. The 20th century delusion to see crime as an illness to be "treated" led prison policies on a collision course with the parameters of punishment. As John P. Conrad said: "We should never have promised as hospital".

Incapacitation

But there are more limits to prison than just its inability to correct. While it is a truism (and an important fact) that dangerous individuals cannot commit street crimes while in prison and that serial killers are best prevented from pursuing their gruesome activities by keeping them locked up, imprisonment's general necessity and capacity to incapacitate offenders is not quite what it is deemed to be.

On the whole, the incapacitating effects of prison are much more limited than most people think. Contrary to current beliefs, most sexual offenders belong to the group of inmates with a low risk of recidivism. To prevent them from committing more crimes, an extramural web of counseling and accountability would serve the best interest of both convicts and communities. The same holds true for the majority of offenders serving time for violent crimes. They, too, have a low basic rate of re-offending, while most new violent crimes in the communities are being committed by hitherto unknown young people with no prior record. All in all, the idea that prison is needed for purposes of incapacitation with regard to all those who are being kept inside is largely unfounded. With regard to the bulk of prisoners, including those convicted of sexual and violent offenses, incapacitation is a pretense and a sham rather than an empirically founded function.

The distance between common notions and empirical data is exacerbated in the case of drug cartels and similar economic networks supposed to severely harm society. Prosecutors, police, secret services and special agencies like the globally active Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) are used to invest virtually unlimited amounts of time and money into the penetration of such organizations. Informants and undercover agents risk their own lives and sometimes take the lives of others for the sole purpose of infiltrating and finally busting a cartel. The preferred method of doing so is getting all the way to the top of the hierarchy and to take out the all-powerful chiefs or kingpins by either killing them or sending them to prison for the rest of their life-times. Logical as this incapacitation strategy sounds, it did not and does not deliver the expected results.

On the contrary, even the most costly, time-consuming and successful operations against drug cartels - like that against Pablo Escobar - did not harm the drug market in the least. Even with a significant number of kingpins dead or arrested and sent to prison with accumulated sentences of hundreds or thousands of years, things on the ground only went from bad to worse. As analysts Barry Crane and Rex Rivolo (1997) found out to the chagrin of U.S. policy makers, the effect of the successful "incapacitation" of kingpins was exactly the contrary of what had been expected. It did have an effect on prices and supply of cocaine in the United States, but the effect was not the one intended: "Far from impeding the flow of cocaine onto the street and up the nostrils of America, it was accelerating it. Eliminating kingpins actually increased supply" (Cockburn 2015).

All told, there is an undisputed need to keep some people under lock and key - with two important caveats, though. The first being that this need is not to be confused with the need for punitive segregation prison-style, and the second, that - contrary to popular belief - this small group does not comprise the majority of violent and sex offenders (for whom a tightly woven net of community control and support would be a superior method of crime prevention). As far as illegal markets are concerned, the successful incapacitation of leading kingpins and even the successful destruction of economic entities (cartels) has proven to be an inefficient tool of criminal policy. In the case of illegal markets, the strategy of incapacitation via the locking up of kingpins produces counterintuitive effects. As far as, e.g., the cocain market is concerned, even successful arrest and destruction policies just lead to increased supplies of illegal goods in the affected communities.

Deterrence

Similary, the deterrent effect of prisons has to be put under scrutiny. On the one hand, it is easy to prove (ex negativo) that there is, indeed, a deterrent effect of prison. We only have to look at the habitual abuse of power by police forces (e.g. extrajudical killings) in many countries. Researchers agree that one of the main elements in any explanation of such happenings is the certainty of delinquent police officers that they will not be punished for their misdeeds. This means, in other words, that an eventual replacement of present-day impunity (or impunization; Genelhú 2015) by an expectation of imprisonment would be a promising way of reducing police transgressions: the prospect of imprisonment would have a deterrent effect. Speaking a little more generally: the knowledge that some actions can entail a prison sentence might be a deterrent in some cases.

On the other hand, there are severe limitations to the deterrent effect of prison. Firstly, the deterrent effect only seems to work rather well with (the minority of) rational actors who have a sober assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of varying courses of action. Secondly, even if the prospect of imprisonment does have a deterrent effect this does not mean that this effect could not be brought about by an unlimited number of functional equivalents. Deterrence does not depend on the existence of the prison. The prospect of a dishonourable discharge, a heavy financial penalty or any other fine-tuned sanction could produce the same or better effects. Besides that, one of the soundest criminological research results pertains to the fact that what counts is not the expected severity, but rather the anticipated certainty of negative sanctions.

Therefore, the deterrent effect of imprisonment has little or nothing to do with the prison as such. It could be substituted by the risk of simply being caught. In other words, in a world without prison, the mere risk of negative reactons might have the same or an even higher deterrent effect than the expectation of imprisonment.

Fundamental Problems

The prison's limited effectiveness in reaching its conflicting goals can be seen as an indicator that it should not be impossible to find more efficient alternatives. This rather technical approach is not the only aspect in the critique of imprisonment, though, and it is certainly not the most relevant one. There are more preoccupying deficiencies that have to do with the prison's outdatedness as a means of social control and with its denial of human rights.

Obsoleteness

One striking feature of prison buildings is their rapidly increasing obsoleteness. In an age of unprecedented mobility and expanded personal freedom, the prison seems to have fallen out of time. Compared with the time of the first penitentiaries, when ordinary people often spent their whole lives within small dark housings and seldom travelled to far away places, the relative deprivation that an inmate experiences as compared to his everyday life in freedom, has been growing by the decade. Today, when travel for educational, business, and leisure purposes has become a most usual phenomenon, and when the average mobility and horizon of citizens are much higher and broader than only two or three generations before, when freedom of movement is of paramount importance for the freedom of the person, the act of imprisonment into a cell measuring 6 by 8 feet with a steel or brick wall and one solid or barred door that locks from the outside is bound to be a more traumatizing event than ever before and an infringement of a cherished human right (Schumann 1988: 19). What in the early 19th century might have been adequate, has not only become inadequate for our times, but scandalous.

The prison has exhausted itself both as an ideal and as a standard response to crime. According to French philosopher and social theorist Gilles Deleuze (1992), the digital age and its specific modes of free-floating control are about to ring the death bell for all 19th century closed environments of the total institution type - and, among other things, for the prison:

"We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. (...) The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. (...) What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours."

In a similar vein, the French philosophers Michel Onfray and Tony Ferri as well as the member of parliament Noël Mamère, the former president of the International Observatory of Prisons, Gabriel Mouesca, the lawyers Lucie Davy and Yannis Lantheaume as well as the ex-prisoner Philippe El Shennawy and many other public figures, intellectuals, ex-prisoners and practicioners pronounced themselves in favor of overcoming "cette maudite habitude qui permet à l'homme d'enfermer l'homme et de le tenir emmuré". In their 2014 manifesto in favor of abolishing not only the prison but also its mechanisms and logics, they state:

"Nous affirmons qu'au XXIe siècle, enfermer quelqu'un, ce n'est pas le punir : c'est agir par paresse et par prolongement d'un système archaïque, dépassé et inadapté aux sociétés postmodernes. Nous exigeons que soit jetée aux oubliettes de l'Histoire cette maudite habitude qui permet à l'homme d'enfermer l'homme et de le tenir emmuré. Nous prétendons qu'il ne se passera pas longtemps avant que la prison apparaisse aux yeux des vivants comme le signe irrécusable de l’état de brutalité, d’arriération des mœurs et des sensibilités dans lequel vivait l’humanité au XXe siècle, et encore au début du XXIe. Et refusons que la Justice continue à condamner à des peines de prison en notre nom" (Onfray et al. 2014).

For good reasons, this idea - that imprisonment has become an anachronistic way of dealing with crime and delinquency - seems to be spreading in recent times (cf. for Italy, Ferrari 2015, Ferrari & Pavarini 2014; for the USA Davis 2003; and for Great Britain, Scott 2015).

In a certain way, criminal justice trends do support the suspicion of the obsoleteness of the prison. Whereas many people still believe that committing a crime and being found guilty by a court will automatically mean jail or prison, this is certainly not what the reality is like today. In ever more countries, more than half - and sometimes more than four fifths - of all sanctions do not lead directly to prison. Rather, justice systems rely on financial penalties, community work or different degrees of supervision. There is probation which lets the offender stay out of prison as long as he duly meets his obligations - and there is intensive supervision probation which implies reporting to the probation officer three to five times a week plus unscheduled visits to the offender at home or work. Ever more offenders are being sentenced to restitution and fines - alone or in conjunction with probation, with payments to the crime victims or to the court - and/or to community service to the benefit of both the individual and the community. Others are sentenced to substance abuse treatment and/or to day reporting with offenders reporting each day how each hour will be spent during the day. Last not least there is the sanction of house arrest and/or electronic monitoring which substitutes imprisonment by restricting the offender to his or her home except for work, school or treatment.

Excessive Punishment

Prisons had been invented, among other things, to safeguard the rights of convicts to be kept alive and to be respected as human beings even though they were serving a criminal sentence. In our time, the concept of human rights has been enlarged considerably if compared with the situation at the end of the 18th century. On the other hand, in most of the world's prisons, the respect for human rights has not followed suit. The question is unavoidable: if the prison had not been invented yet - could present-day societies allow themselves in the light of the human rights ethos of our days, to invent and to operate such systems? In out opinion, doubts are allowed. For one thing, the very institutional design of prisons is a denial of essential human rights. Secondly, the very situational variables governing prison life are conducive to abuses of power and helpless misery that - by themselves - would be sufficient cause for a Supreme Court to ban this kind of punishment altogether.

Ideally, imprisonment deprives the convict of his or her freedom of movement, but nothing else (cf. European Prison Rules 102.2). It leaves the person intact and leaves him or her all the rest of human, civil and social rights as guaranteed in national constitutions and international conventions - with the sole exception, of course, of being confined to a restricted area (the prison), because that is the very idea of the prison sentence: to single out the freedom of movement as the one freedom that the culprit has to to without for the time of his punishment. Notabene: The idea of imprisonment is not to drive the culprit into desperation, deprivation, and destruction, but to teach him or her a lesson by restricting the freedom of movement. As for all the rest: within the walls the highest goal of prison policy should be to make the inmates fit for legally earning their livelihood and leading a socially productive life after prison.

Sadly, though, this limitation is not at all reflected in the very organization imprisonment. Much to the contrary, the prison still displays features of its pre-constitutional past that make it hard to believe that it can ever develop into a constitutional sanction that could be recognized as being in line with the most fundamental values of a free and democratic society under the rule of law. Let it suffice here to point to the following four inherent contradictions of imprisonment: forced labour, imposed poverty, sexual deprivation, and the co-punishment of innocent third parties.

Forced Labour

Most prison systems require prisoners to work (van Zyl Smit/Dünkel 1999). This is an extra burden that is not an inescapable part of imprisonment and therefore must be considered an additional punishment. Its existence goes back to the pre-constitutional days in which prisoners were seen as "slaves of the state" who were deprived of the status of normal citizens. Later, this feature was legitimized as part of the punishment, today it is more often seen as part of the prisoner's path to re-integration. Prison work is supposed to prepare prisoners for the outside labour market (just in case they happen to find work), to help them structure their everyday life (as if they were industrial workers), and to help them compensate the crime victims for their loss (made all but impossible, at the same time, by the extremely low wages for prison work). Since all of these justifications are debatalbe and brittle, the overriding reason for the persistence of forced labour in prison appears to be the maintenance of order within the institution. Prison authorities firmly believe that the system would break down without this implicitly disciplinary tool. This explains, too, why even meaningless work is seen as better than no work at all by prison staff and chiefs.

Imposed Poverty

In the beginning of the prison system, most inmates were poor anyway. Early workhouses that preceded the penitentiaries were warehousing prostitutes, debtors, beggars, poor people, sick people, orphans, and delinquents alike. It was evident they were not being paid for their work, and they only received what was deemed necessary to sustain them. This is another heritage of pre-constitutional times. Today, in Germany, the "wage" of a working prisoner has been frozen at 9 per cent of the average wage which keeps it far below the minimum wage (one fifth of the current eight euro and fifty cents per hour). Trade unions traditionally do not see working prisoners/imprisoned workers as part of their clientele. Needless to say that old age poverty of prisoners is being pre-programmed by their formally legal, but highly discriminatory exclusion from social security. Months and years of prison work are not even being counted in as work time when it comes to pension claims. Like a few other countries, too, Germany had promised to do something about all this in the late 1960s, when the reform of imprisonment was higher on the agenda than today, but since then this legal promise has been annulled and never made it back to the political agenda.

Repressed Sexuality

Prison is a single sex institution. This is not a necessary condition of the deprivation of liberty, as proven by the Russian Gulag system or, to cite another example, Bolivia's Palmasola prison village. In Europe, North America, and many more areas and countries, though, the idea of whole families living together with the inmate seems strange, and even unjust towards the innocent but imprisoned family members. On the other hand, the common single-sex method of confinement imposes involuntary celibacy, thereby adding significantly to the pains of imprisonment. It means that male and female prisoners alike depend on masturbation and/or (sometimes voluntary, but mostly involuntary) prison homosexuality, with a substantial risk of prison rape and abuse. Studies from the U.S. suggest that every year four to five prisoners out of every 100 are being raped or otherwise abused by fellow prisoners (not to mention guards; NYRB). In spite of some mostly half-hearted attempts to counteract this tragedy by granting prison leaves or long-time visits by spouses or families this collateral effect of imprisonment persists all over the word, and it remains not only a source of infectious diseases, but beyond that a serious and permanent violation of elementary human rights.

Co-Punishment of Third Parties

There is no punishment of offenders that does not - by way of collateral damage - also affect their families, friends, and colleagues. This is especially true for the punishment of imprisonment. It does not only impede a normal sexual, but also a regular social life, with all relations to family and friends radically reduced to rare, tightly regulated and supervised elements of communication such as (often censored) letters, phone conversations, and visits. In a time of exponential growth of interpersonal communications, inmates are not being kept in cages that not even a modern zoo would subject its animals to, but they are also being kept away from cell phones, internet and the social media, while social life beyond the walls is ever less imaginable without those resources. The growing gap between the outside world and the prison's artificial backwardness makes imprisonment more hurtful and harmful than it would have to be. Beyond all this, one of the saddest affairs in the world of the prisons is the much-neglected phenomenon of the co-punishment of offenders' children. There is no doubt that the imprisonment of parents has negative outcomes for the children. To make prisons "family-friendly" is an understandable wish, but lastly a fruitless endeavour as long as the prisons persist.

No Remedies

To hope for improvements here is as illusionary as it would have been to plead for gradual improvements in slavery instead of realizing its basic flaws and acting accordingly. Can all those ills of the prison be abolished without abolishing the institution as such? Some may think that it would suffice to just abolish the old buildings and the cages and the tortures that characterize the not-so-modern prisons (and some of the very modern ones), but to spread the kind of prisons that could be called model prisons - with apartments instead of cells, and service personnel. Hotel-type correctional facilities, though, are a weird thing to imagine as a standard response to serious crime. A less utopian way of dealing with the prison problem seems to us to abolish prison punishment altogether and to move on.

Permanent Crises

The institution of the prison had started with high aspirations. Early work houses and penitentiaries were often rich in ornaments, objects of admiration by both the cities' inhabitants and visitors from near and far. This did not shield inmates from humiliation and maltreatment (Brietzke 2007). But with the prison system's long-term colonial expansion on the one hand and a certain decline of the rehabilitative ideal on the other hand, the prison lost its place of prominence in public funding and attention in many parts of the world. For politicians, prisons became an uncomfortable subject of conversation. This even more so as the new millenium started with the emergence of top secret "black sites" as a kind of illegitimate offspring of the prison system under the auspices of secret services worthy of any ancien régime. While not even aspiring to be part of criminal justice, those eery makeshift prisons certainly did cast a dazzling light on the inhumane potential of post-modern institutions of confinement and the dangers of state barbarism.

The prison cannot be judged by a mere look at the normative order alone. The law-in-the-books, penological monographs and internationally consented minimum rules are just one side of the coin. The other one is the prison system's social reality and structural conduciveness to recurrent crises of overcrowding, contagious diseases, and intramural violence. It is this what the law-in-action is all about, or the second code of the prison (McNaughton-Smith 1968). To discuss imprisonment only platonically - without reference to what it looks like in real terms - would not do justice to the seriousness of the matter. Our attitude towards the prison should be informed not only by the letter of the law, but also by the law in action. In other words, it is important to know what the prison is like in the real world.

One problem with a look at prisons in the real world is their enormous qualitative diversity. There are high class prisons in which inmates have space, medical attention, and a respectful social environment. But there are also locations in which imprisonment can easily be a veiled death sentence. Unfortunately, in many countries it is not a rare event for a prisoner not to return alive, be it because of disease or violence by guards or gangs (Stern 1999).

A second problem is the inherent bias in the penological discourse when it comes to having an empirical look at the prisons of the world. Many researchers have either roots in the prison-industrial complex or they are dependent on the good-will of governments or private prison operators - all of which may make them lean towards the status quo. Moreover, most researchers look at their own countries and neighboring countries when it comes to prison research - and since something like an estimated 80% of all criminologists and penologists come from the USA, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium or any of the other countries that make up the world's 36 richest countries, our knowledge about the prison system is likely to be biased in favour of generalizing conditions that are not typical for the system in general, but only for a privileged section of it. For any person to be a prisoner, though, chances are that he or she would not be imprisoned in of the 36 richest countries of the world, because their prisoners make up only a minority of all prisoners in the world (for a list of the richest and poorest countries cf. Pasquali 2015). Chances are, when you are a prisoner, that your prison is located in one of the poorer countries like, e.g., Russia (wealth-rank 51 of a list of 185 countries), Romania (rank 61), China (83) or Egypt (96). If you are less lucky, your prison might be in one of the very poor countries such as the Philippines (118), India (125), Pakistan (134), Bangladesh (140), Haiti (166) or the Democratic Republic of Congo (185 out of 185).

Given the number of prisoners in those areas of the world, it would clearly be unfair to leave them out of the picture when debating the merits and deficiencies of the prison as an institution of punishment. This is why we should look at both the rich and the poor countries. We should not close our eyes when it comes to horror stories (with "Attica" and "Carandiru" as the tips of the iceberg), and we should find out as much as we can about first-hand experiences in various prison systems (Dreisinger 2016; Whetter 2016). Once the link between the systemic structure of the prison and all those deficiencies and injustices has been established, we shall see more clearly that there is only one way of overcoming the inhumane and degrading conditions of confinement: the abolition of prisons altogether.

Prisons in Rich Countries

The 36 richest countries presumably house the "better" prisons. These also happen to be in the focus of the international criminological prison discourse. But the rich countries have a tendency to take the plan for the reality. They discount uncomfortable scandals as extraordinary cases that should be ignored when judging the prison system itself. The contrary might be more adequate though. The smoothly running model prison is probably an absolute exception to the rule and should not be mistaken for what constitutes the reality of the prison. In such a view, prisons cannot be separated from the recurrent crises that they go through. Much to the contrary, the prison must be recognized as the structural condition from which those recurrent crises emerge.

Even in rich countries prisons most of the time do not even meet their governments' self-declared and undersigned minimum standards. Prison buildings are often too old and too large in terms of capacity, while at the same time overcrowded and not giving enough space to each individual. The command and obedience structure of the internal prison regime is often exacerbated by inadequate qualifications of prisons staff due to a negative recruitment steered by low wages and unattractive work atmospheres in the setting of total institutions with a difficult clientele. Prisoners see themselves dressaged and bullied around by wardens who are often undertrained and overly bossy. They see themselves confronted with disinterest, malperformance or even harassment by often equally untertrained functionaries from specialist services such as prison psychologists, social workers, or even doctors. Regularly, their lawyers do not belong to the A-list of their profession (those are where the money is). Therefore, their access to legal protection is not as it should be. All in all, it would take a good deal of operational blindness to ignore or deny the inadequacy of prison reality as compared with the officially proclaimed standards. This is even true for such a model country as Norway (Henley 2016).

In this sense, and seen from the experience of imprisonment itself in the real world, the prison system as such is, even in the rich countries, the venue of permanent multiple crises. Recurrent themes of the permanent crises are overcrowding, the lack of hygiene, of medical attention, and of respect for basic human rights. Objective conditions plus the respective subjective perceptions and coping strategies of prisoners themselves result in what can be said to be the experience of imprisonment. This is different, of course, for young and old, male and female, wrongly and rightly convicted inmates, but also for different personality types (and those with various personality disorders). But they are also similar in that the experiences always concern themes like the pains of imprisonment, the stigma, the power relations and how differing vulnerabilities are being shielded, detected, and exploited (Reeves 2016).

Prisons in Poor Countries

In poor countries the same is true, but on a different scale. This is due to insufficient economic resources and the state‘s inability or unwillingness to secure even minimum standards of prison conditions. Because of the low salaries of prison employees, corruption is endemic. As a prisoner in a poor country, you will have a high likelihood of suffering from infectious diseases, from the lack of hygiene, from inadequate medical and psychological assistance, from unhealthy diets, and - very importantly - from lack of respect by undertrained (semi-) professionals and sometimes violent guards.

There are not many published reports detailing prison conditions in poor countries. As a matter of fact, the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture (SPT) has visited the prisons of many poorer countries, but only few of them agreed to the publication of the respective reports. What follows here, are a few probably exemplary findings excerpted from published reports - one each for an Asian country (ranked 142 on Pasquali's list), a Latin American one (ranked 106) and an African one (ranked 55):

13. Despite some positive measures taken by the authorities to tackle the issue, torture and ill-treatment is prevalent in the country,primarily driven by the following alarming structural and systemic problems:
(a) Weak rule of law, including the absence and/or non-observance of basic legal safeguards and inadequate registration system;
(b) The reliance of the law enforcement and justice sectors on confessions and the lack of effective prosecutorial and judicial oversight of law enforcement activities;
(c) The lack of access to independent and qualified medical examinations and the insufficient access for detainees to appropriate health care;
(d) The prevalent corruption within the system, including in the legal profession, and exacerbated inter alia by the low level of professionalism in all sectors;
(e) The impunity and general lack of accountability of officials;
(f) The overall poor material and financial conditions of places of detention, psychiatric hospitals and institutions for persons with disabilities which often in itself lead to inhuman or degrading treatment;
(g) The on-going discriminatory practices faced by minority communities at both the institutional level and within the public at large.
14. All these factors create a vicious circle of systemic problems in which the widespread practice of torture and ill-treatment represents an integral part of the law enforcement and justice system reality. While acknowledging the commitment of the Prosecutor-General to fight impunity for torture and ill-treatment by strengthening prosecutions against perpetrators and increasing the prosecutorial oversight over law enforcement officials , the lack of recognition of the depth and systematic nature of the problem by most officials and consequently the lack of political will (with few exceptions) to address the problem, is further combined with a general atmosphere of impunity. As a result, persons deprived of their liberty are at continued and systematic risk of being ill-treated and are deprived of effective protection from the State. (SPT Report on the visit of the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment to Kyrgyzstan, 2013).
55. Overcrowding remains a cause of concern. Tacumbú has capacity for approximately 1,200 inmates but houses far more than double that number. The Subcommittee is aware that the Government has made an effort to increase the number of beds in Tacumbú Prison, but would point out that those efforts will not be sufficient, since the prison structure is inadequate. ... The Subcommittee is of the view that Tacumbú National Prison should be closed as soon as possible and requests confirmation from the State party of the above-mentioned announcement, together with information on the timetable for its closure...
57. According to statements made to the Subcommittee, torture and ill-treatment have continued to be commonplace and have been the usual means employed by prison guards to impose their authority...
59. Although prison authorities report having removed corrupt prison staff from their posts, inmates and other credible sources have told the Subcommittee, in great detail, how corruption continues to affect each and every area of prison life. “Fees” continue to be charged for the different services (such as access to a doctor, to a given block or wing, etc.), with some modifications. “If anything has changed”, some inmates said, “it is that now you have to pay more for certain things.” Whereas, slightly over a year ago, inmates had to pay the guards 5,000 guaraníes in order to be allowed to carry a knife, the sum had risen to 50,000 guaraníes by September 2010. The Subcommittee has also been informed of other illegal fees now being charged by the guards (e.g., a fee of 2,000 guaraníes for allowing an inmate’s visitor to sit on a chair or to return a mobile phone to a visitor who was required to leave the phone at the prison entry hall)...
61. The Subcommittee is extremely concerned by information received from credible sources which indicates that corruption is not confined to a given prison or operational level. On the contrary, it seems to exist in almost all of the country’s prisons and to be very well coordinated and organized. The Subcommittee has repeatedly been apprised of consistent allegations that certain political circles are profiting from this nationwide form of organized corruption.(SPT Report on the follow-up visit to the Republic of Paraguay from 13 to 15 September 2010).
15. Le SPT constate qu’en dépit de quelques mesures , la torture et les mauvais traitements demeurent répandus, favorisés principalement par un certain nombre de problèmes structurels et systémiques préoccupants, liés:
- Au faible respect des garanties édictées par la Constitution, les traités internationaux, les lois et règlements applicables au Gabon ;...
- A l’absence d’accès à des examens médicaux indépendants et qualifiés et l’accès insuffisant des détenus à des soins médicaux appropriés ;
- A l’impunité et l’absence générale de responsabilisation des fonctionnaires de police et de gendarmerie ;
- A une indifférence généralisée à l’égard des personnes privées de leur liberté et une certaine résignation des victimes et du public en général;
- A l’impassibilité et le consentement passif des pouvoirs publics vis-à-vis des abus entre codétenus induits par le système d’autogestion observé dans les trois établissements pénitentiaires visités ;
- Aux mauvaises conditions matérielles et financières inhérentes aux lieux de privation de liberté qui entraînent généralement des mauvais traitements (et sont même, dans certains cas, constitutifs de torture). (SPT Rapport sur la visite au Gabon, 2014).

The situation is not so different in some of the poorer countries in Europe. Consider the conclusion from the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) (on their visit to a country ranked 61 by Pasquali):

Regarding the situation in prisons, numerous credible allegations consistent with physical ill-treatment (punches, including with reinforced gloves, kicks with the knee and feet and blows with a truncheon) were received by the delegation. They were mainly inflicted on prisoners under a maximum security regime (“RMS”) and in the closed regime units of Arad and Oradea prisons by members of the intervention group (wearing balaclavas or masks). Medical evidence compatible with the allegations made was found in a certain number of prisoners' medical files in these two establishments. As regards material conditions in prisons, the report notes an overall high-level of overcrowding, with barely 2m² of living space per person in Târgşor Women’s Prison; these conditions were further aggravated by the fact that prisoners generally spent 20 to 22 hours a day in their cells. (CPT News Flash on the visit to Romania 2014, for a detailed report see the French version). What also throws a light on local Romanian prisons: in 2016 the ECHR took the unusual step of according almost 100,000 euros in compensation to 18 (ex-) convicts in compensation for the poor conditions they had to endure - instead of the much lower symbolic sums that it normally accords to successful plaintiffs.

Relatively speaking, European countries are, however, far better off than their African or Latin American counterparts. For one thing, most European prisoners may take their cases before the ECtHR whose jurisdiction only covers the 47 member states of the Council of Europe. A second important difference is that many European countries can count on substantial finacial aid from the European Union.

A Violent System

Prisons are breeding grounds for an incessant stream of seemingly isolated events sometimes called "scandals" - but they go by that name only if they make the news (which they normally don't). The ubiquitous presence of unreported and underreported cases waiting in vain to be scandalized betrays the institution's brutish nature. In most prison systems, episodes involving degrading maltreatment or outright violence are so frequent that insiders look upon them with just a shrug of their shoulders, knowing that this kind of thing - while it should not happen according to the impeccable legal statutes governing the prison regime - can neither be prevented nor eliminated as long as there are prisons.

This undercurrent of harshness and harassement that is part and parcel of the institution and that belongs to the prison like choirs and prayers belong to a church is something like a trademark. It characterizes the essence of imprisonment - including its pains and its futility. Above all else, it ensures the perpetuity of discontent, of the feeling of injustice and the urge to resort to vengeance as a means of self-assertion. It is not only the small-scale warfare of resentment and mobbing, of pestering and bullying that flourishes under the conditions of a total institution.

There is an air of violence pervading the prison systems' ground operations. What characterizes prisons almost all over the world is the use and abuse of the power to punish - with violent abuse being more the rule than the exception. And while one would like to think of those irregularities as nothing more than a collection of atypical events, empirical research (Milgram 1965, Zimbardo 1995) as well as theoretical concepts (e.g. Tittle 1995) could demonstrate and explain how specific structures routinely produce situations in which even "good people turn evil" (Zimbardo 2007). The prison itself has to be understood as an institution inherently conducive to recurrent human rights violations of all degrees of seriousness. While such violations may be especially dramatic and newsworthy when connected to famous standoffs such as the Chinese crackdown on the Tienanmen protests or the West's War on Terror (cf. Hersh 2005; Liao 2013; Ratner & Ray 2004), the real lesson to be learned is an even more general one.

What is at the root of the scandalous nature of the prison, of its ubiquitous flow of cases of abuse and violence, is not the much lamented lack of funds, but - first and foremost - the systemic disparity of power in combination with the power-holders' subjective conviction that they neither deserve moral reprehension nor will be reprimanded for what they did or do.

In an average prison, the guards are the ones who really know - and determine - what is going on, who deserves which kind of treatment, and who will be informally sanctioned (and how). With little administrative oversight, guards tend to become rather autonomous. The inmate social system with its own hierarchies functions as a parallel power and makes use of its own ways and means - often in accordance with the guards' tacit or explicit acquiescence.

The prison allows for informal power holders to indulge in a "control surplus" - exercising more control over others than being controlled. Such a control surplus is conducive to a kind of delinquency that is characterized by abuse, degradation, exploitation, and sometimes sadism (Tittle 1995).

With the increasing abandonment of therapeutic benevolence, the state of the prisons in the world is more and more that of a human warehouse characterized by overcrowding, poor hygiene, abuse of power, general misery - and no amends. That is, to be sure, not the official penal policy, but it is the result of a systemic fault in the system, exacerbated by a syndrome of material and psychological neglect that has its own structural roots and foreseeable consequences. That is why it is time to look out not for better prisons, but for something better than prisons. It is time to look out for either alternative punishments that fulfill the legitimate functions of imprisonment while avoiding its illegitimate ones - or for alternatives to punishment.

The Meaning of Prison Abolition

Prisons are no way to deal with crime. They are outdated and they are unnecessarily cruel. So they are illegitimate. And should be illegal. So they have to be abolished. Done away with. Wholly. Once and for all. It is clear that prisons are not the way. - But what exactly does it mean to "abolish prisons”?

The answer to this question is both easy and difficult. It is easy, because, evidently, to abolish prisons means to do away with them wholly. With the buildings (be they called gaols, jails, penitentiaries, prisons, remand centers or correctional facilities) including walls and watchtowers, bricks, barbed wire, steel and concrete. Of course, a few of them might remain and function (like Alcatraz and Auburn already do) as prisons-turned-tourist-sites. To walk through those abandoned prisons will send shudders down the tourists’ spines, and it will make them grateful for living in the contemporary world and not having to suffer through the times neither of the guillotines and scaffolds, nor of the pains of imprisonment.

It is difficult when we start thinking not of buildings, but of inmates. A serious answer to the question needs some reflection and - above all - differentiation. As a matter of fact, to find out what can and should be done about today’s prison population (and their future equivalents) might require that we first take a step back, calm down, and think about - what it does not mean to abolish prisons.

First and foremost, to abolish prisons does not mean to abolish all kinds of involuntary confinement. That might sound strange at first, but it becomes less so when we realize that “imprisonment” and “involuntary confinement” are not synonymous. As a matter of fact, “imprisonment” is only one (albeit outstanding) example of procedures, contexts, and institutions which restrict people’s freedom of movement against their will.

Just think of quarantine for people affected by a severe communicable disease. While extreme cases of quarantine also do raise serious moral and legal issues that have to be dealt with, there is no question that - as long as there is no less obtrusive way to protect public health - quarantine is a legitimate response to a social necessity. Similarly, the anti-asylum movement of the 1960s and 1970s together with progress in the development of more efficient (especially anti-psychotic) drugs has greatly helped reduce the number of involuntary hospitalizations of persons suffering from mental illness - but still there are cases in which individuals are being subjected to involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital in order to avert dangers to themselves or others.

As we can see, to abolish prisons does not mean to abolish all kinds of involuntary confinement. Even if we believe it to be possible that societies might one day be able to afford to let their offenders go unpunished, this would certainly not imply the end of all involuntary confinement. There will still will be a need to lock up suspects who otherwise would either evade trial or - worse - continue to be a threat to the community. Some things just have to be prevented from happening, be it the spread of an infectious disease, or be it a serial killer’s hunt for his next victims. Once imprisonment as punishment is abolished, there will still be a need for confinement. But that will be for other reasons - foremost for reasons of security - and it will be a type of confinement that must not be carried out under prison-like conditions, but in well-supervised residential settings instead of a cell prison. There is no need to impose prison conditions or prison-like conditions on anyone on earth.

This is really an important point worth repeating. To say that even after prison abolition there will continue to be some form or forms of involuntary confinement is not equal to saying that any of the remaining deprivations of liberty would be allowed to take place in prison-like facilities. With no punishment intended, the living conditions of those affected by spatial separation from the rest of society must not be modeled after the penitentiary. With regard to size and comfort, they should rather resemble a decent middle-class home or at least apartment. Whoever thinks that is exaggerated should halt a minute and consider this: these people are being forced to sacrifice essential parts of their (quality of) life for the life and liberty of others - without necessarily being bad, evil, guilty, or even responsible for the risk they pose. With no reproach involved and no vengeance, those who deprive these individuals of their liberty have good reasons to do everything they can to try and compensate their sufferings the best they can. This can be done by, e.g., an artificially elevated level of comfort in their living conditions. Since they cannot be set free, they should at least live their restricted lives as good as possible, with their living conditions tailored to their needs and individual priorities, as long as that does not endanger the purpose of their confinement.

Secondly, what the abolition of prisons does not mean is to keep all those prisoners in prison and only change the name of the institution and its inmates to “hospital/patients”, “treatment center/clients”, or “prevention house/residents”. Fraudulent labelling is a real danger, because it is both seductive (as a kind of subversive resistance open to all those who are part of the system and who are either unable or unwilling to accept a radical de-institutionalization) and sometimes hard to distinguish from a valid label (e.g., a correct risk assessment). It is also a real danger, because today’s prisons are fulfilling a hybrid function of both inflicting pain on inmates because of their past crimes (= deprivation of liberty as a punishment) and preventing them from committing more crimes in the future (= deprivation of liberty as a preventive measure).

Hence, to abolish prisons means to abolish the possibility for a criminal court to sentence an accused person to the punishment of imprisonment. Wherever and whenever that is achieved, prisons are just not needed anymore. Just like the abolition of the death penalty means to abolish the possibility for a criminal court to sentence an accused person to death. Wherever and whenever that is achieved, execution chambers are just not needed anymore.

The abolition of prisons also means to condemn the penitentiary type of prison buildings with their rows of solitary cells as their basic element to oblivion. The classical cell prison as it had been invented in the United States and exported to Europe (Pentonville), from where the colonial administrations spread it to the remotest corners of the world, has never fulfilled the high moral expectations of its founders and philanthropic friends. As of today, it is safe to say that it is both obsolete and a shameful disgrace. Wherever they stand, prisons make good museums, but they must not be abused by still holding living people in captivity.


Security without Prisons

To many reformers it is a comforting thought that alternatives to imprisonment are on the rise, and that the prison sentence itself might eventually be eclipsed by the massive increase of non-custodial sanctions. This trend, though, will not automatically bring the age of prison-as-punishment to an end. There would still remain a qualitative question pertaining to the - maybe few - very dangerous criminals. Even if one raised the minimum age of criminal responsibility, found alternatives to prison for women offenders, and de-criminalized large parts of non-violent property offenses there would still be a number of crimes and criminals that would challenge any abolitionist imagination. Supposing the availability of non-custodial alternatives for most or all non-violent delinquents, there would still remain the question of how to deal with cases of extreme horror and/or dangerousness. Similarly to the well-known shanty song with its insistent repetition of the question "What shall we do with the drunken sailor", any abolitionist proposal will invariably be confronted with the same question pertaining to the dangerous few, and that would raise questions like these: What shall we do with the serial killer? What shall we do with the child molester? What shall we do with the roaming rapist? What shall we do wit the genocidical general? What shall we do with the ex-dictators?​ The question that is puzzling all participants in criminal justice reform discussions is therefore completely legitimate: Would societies be less safe without prisons?

The answer is: Not necessarily - and there is a real chance that they would become even safer, if they learn to distinguish between punishment and security and if they act accordingly. Today, punishment by imprisonment is by and large expected to take care of both the retributive aspect (looking back at the offender's crime in the past) and the preventive one (which envisages risks from the offender's future behavior). For all practical purposes, "punishment by imprisonment" is thought to automatically include the answer to the community's security needs as far as risks from the (now imprisoned) delinquents are concerned. Once the serving prisons are not around any more, the security question has to be treated independently of punishment, as a matter in its own right. For some of the most definitely dangerous individuals - the archetype of whom is the serial killer - the absence of the prison-as-punishment option will invariably revive calls for capital punishment (or extrajudicial elimination). Alternatively it is conceivable (and from our point of view also preferable) to resort to decreeing the arrest and involuntary confinement of such individuals on the grounds of preventive detention, regardless of criminal liability and the question of punishment. Whereas this aspect can hide behind the question of punishment as long as there is the prison-as-punishment, the removal of this specific sanction forces the highly delicate matter of preventive detention out in the open.

If the abolition of the prison-as-punishment is not to fail miserably because of public fears of unsolved safety issues, the ethical, legal, and practical questions involving preventive detention will have to be dealt with in a most serious and exhaustive manner. Questions that will have to be answered will include the following: how many of the present-day prison inmates would need continued confinement because of their dangerousness - and for how long? And how can solid criteria of dangerousness be established in the first place? What about the concept of dangerousness when the behavior in question is not the violation of rights of others, but only an abstract concept (as in the case of drug dealing between consenting adults)? How can the rights of dangerous individuals be protected? In the worst case, all those of today's prison inmates that have been defined by the criminal justice system as dangerous and who are serving prison sentences would continue in confinement even after the abolition of the prison-as-punishment. "Remain" is not quite the right term, though, because the cell prisons would be torn down as inhumane and ineffective, so they would move to other locations not built upon the model of the Quakers' penitentiaries, but on the model of residential living.

How much preventive detention?

Scholars and practicioners agree that only a minority of the present prison population would need to continue to be locked up for security purposes once prison-as-punishment were to be abolished, with estimates ranging roughly between 30 and 5 or less per cent. A realistic scenario of prison abolition would therefore have to count with a substitution of the prison sentence by a kind of preventive security confinement concerning up to a third of the present-day prison population. Hopefully, of course, a reliable assessment of dangerousness would be able to reduce that percentage, and however large or small the resulting group may be in the end - one thing is certain: that the living conditions of those affected by preventive security confinement would have to be significantly superior to those in today's cell prisons.

To reduce and to improve the quality of sites of confinement would also significantly reduce - if no eliminate - the much lamented function of imprisonment as an involuntary college of crime where both techniques and attitudes are being passed on from generation to generation, and where latent state of war among and between the groups that make up the specific prison constellation results in hardening pathologies and character deficiencies that are heightening the risk of crime in the communities after the prisoners' release. Therefore, the abolition of the prison-as-punishment will most likely result in a safety gain in communities. Live will be better and safer for all.

Excursus on Priciples for Preventive Detention

Shifting from prison-as-punishment to preventive detention of the dangerous may be dangerous too. It may open a Pandora's box of hitherto unknown reasons for confining people, who have not broken any laws. While criminal law provides some safeguards and guarantees against arbitrary imprisonment, this is not necessarily the case in the field of civil and administrative detentions. It is therefore mandatory to develop a body of restraining principles applicable to coercive preventive endeavour by the state. Here is a good start:

  • "1. In principle, every citizen has the right to be presumed harmless, and this presumption of harmlessness can be rebutted only in exceptional circumstances"....
  • 2. the state's duty to protect people from serious harm may justify depriving a person of liberty if that person has lost the presumption of harmlessness by virtue of committing a serious violent offence and is classified as dangerous.
  • 3. deprivation of liberty should not be considered unless it is the least restrictice appropriate alternative.
  • 4. Any judgement of dangerousness in this context must be approched with strong caution. It should be a judgement of this person as an individual. not simply as a member of a group with certain characteristics and with an overall probability rating. The state should bear the burden of proving that the person presents a significant risk of serious harm to others and the required level of risk should vary according to the seriousness of the predicted harm. Decision-makers should bear in mind the contestability of judgements of dangerousness and the scope for interpretation that they leave and individuals should have rights of challenge and appeal....
  • 9. Any preventive detention going beyond the proportionate sentence should be served in non-punitive conditions with restraints no greater than those required by the imperatives of security. Where possible, detention that is purely preventive and not punitive should take place in a separate facility, not part of the prison system" (Ashworth/Zedner (2014, 167/168).

The authors add an important caveat: "The question remains, however, whether it is possible to articulate principles taht cover all cases of preventive detention in such a way as to mitigate possible abuses of power on ground of public protection. It imposes deprivation of liberty ahead of wrongdoings; grants considerable discretion to criminal justice professionals and to the courts; it is based upon predictions of dubious reliability; and it risks creating arbitrariness in its varied forms and practices (Ibid, 170). Some day, we may have to abolish preventive detention as well.

Punishment without Prisons

Even with the safety of the population guaranteed through a responsible system of preventive detention - both drastically smaller and better than present-day prisons-as-punishment - there might remain a need to see a criminal suffer. An example might help. Imagine a young man of 29 years, diagnosed as physically and mentally healthy, an educator in a kindergarten, who is found to have abused and brutally killed three children over the time of five years. Or a cold-blooded professional killer hired by the mafia or a drug cartel for the necessary eliminations of traitors, enemies, and unfair competitors, who, after a number of years on the job, is finally being arrested. In both cases, public security can be regained by ordering the dangerous individuals to be locked up in preventive detention. For questions of safety, that could be it. Even if we know that such a purely instrumental reaction will be seen as unsatisfactory by victims' families and beyond. In the case of a successful insanity defense such an exemption from criminal responsibilization is a long-standing tradition and the victims' discontent is seen as a sad, but unavoidable fact which the criminal justice system, in those cases, cannot do anything about.

In the case of mentally sane offenders, though, not only victims' families feel a strong need for something more than just instrumental reactions to happen. It is one thing to forego punishment in the case of mentally ill offenders. It is another to do so with the sane and cold-blooded authors of heinous crimes. This becomes clearer when we imagine the case that either the child killer or the mafia killer could be set free after experts confirm a successful psychological treatment and come to the conclusion that the person in question does not pose a risk of continued offending anymore.

Most people would probably not consider it just if the offenders were to walk out of their preventive confinement without having had to "pay" for what they had done. There is a strong and very widespread emotion that those who committed heinous acts should be responded to by the intentional infliction of retributive harm upon them. One might even say that common sense and jurisprudence both believe in a kind of natural law logic that crimes must be responded to with punishment: crime requires punishment. Not only the reduction of risks.

But what exactly is punishment and what are the needs it responds to? First of all, punishment is "the intentional delivery of pain" (Nils Christie), it is a strong affirmation of a negative value judgement concerning the punished person's past violation of an important norm. For the punished person, punishment is - in the words of South African judge Thokozile Masipa uttered at the occasion of the sentencing of Oscar Pistorius in 2016 - "unpleasant, it is inconvenient, it is painful, it is certainly not what you would chose to do.” And that is the very sense of it.

By its emphatic negation of the offender's deed and by making the offender suffer for what he did, the court declares in the name of state and society that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated, and that offenders will have to live with the consequences. Punishment sends a strong symbolic message to the offender and to the public, but also to the victims of crime. It is a symbolic response to an event in the past, and a response of sorts to affirm the continuing validity of the broken norm.

Punishment is a specific reaction because of its expressive symbolism. Its fourfold meaning lies - at last according to Joel Feinberg (1970/1994) - in manifesting an authoritative disavowal of the act in question, a symbolic nonacquiescence to what happened, but it also emphatically reaffirms the law, and last not least it relieves others of suspicion and blame by way of concentrating guilt on those who are found to deserve the punishment. The expressive symbolism of punishment aspires to reach three target groups (Günther 2002: 218): (1) the victims of crime (who are reassured that the community does not regard the event as simply bad luck or fate, but as the result of unjustified and intolerable actions), (2) the offenders (who are told that their actions are seen as responsible for that what happened and that their behaviour is seen as strongly reprehensible), and (3) the general public (who is being told that the negative consequences are being defined not as accidental, but as an injustice that cannot be tolerated and that this injustice is neither to be blamed on the victim nor on the public).

In the course of history, punishment has played a central role ever since the emergence of proto-states, and the function of symbolic reprobation has been associated with certain forms of hard treatment. For a long time, public executions were the most conventional symbols of symbolic reprobation. Later on, the prison assumed this role. There is no natural law that can prevent coming changes. Other forms of hard treatment will become conventional expressions of symbolic reprobation in the future. Even if we suppose punishment to persist for a long time to come, one thing is certain: the prison has not been there forever, and it will not be there forever. It is but one form of punishment - and forms of punishment come and go.

Beyond Prisons and Punishment

We have seen that prisons are only one expression of the larger and more encompassing institution called punishment. In principle, therefore, prison can be substituted by other forms of punishment - some harsher, some milder, some neither this nor that but just different. Given our knowledge of the variety of punishments (corporal punishment, imprisonment, financial sanctions, community work etc.), this is quite obvious, of course. What may be less evident: punishment itself can also be seen as just one expression of a larger and more encompassing institution. If punishment is just one way of "repairing" the harm caused by a crime, there may be other ways, too - some harsher, some milder, some neither this nor that but just different.

The harm caused by crime is often more complex and more widespread than is usually thought. There is physical, psychic, and/or material damage, but there is also something in a crime that affects the community as such and even the normative structure of the social order. If there is to be an alternative to punishment then this alternative would have to take into account this three-dimensional harm. Any alternative would have to be able to respond to the question how it would deal with the challenge of re-instating the victim in his or her full status as a citizen (materially, emotionally, socially), how it would deal with restoring peace and confidence in a shaken collective, and how it would manage to publicly re-affirm the validity of a broken rule in order to prevent normative erosion. Crimes hurt victims, but they also hurt the law's claim to validity. Whereas victim compensation can do a lot to undo the harm inflicted upon the victim, punishment takes care of the crime's symbolic message in that it publicly and forcefully contradicts the impression that it is easy and okay to disobey the law - and that you can get away with it. Punishment is central to the normative order (and very existence) of society because it is an instrument with which to assure that a crime will not derogate the norm that it disobeys. It serves as the authoritative repudiation of the implicity anti-legal message of every crime that occurs. It is a performative (speech and non-discursive) act restoring the claim that the law - even if broken - has not lost its validity. And as we have seen, this anti-message against the message of crime contains not only a consolation for the victim, but also a relevant lesson to the offender, and a vital reassurance towards the affected community that breaches of the law are not being left acquiesced.

In other words: while one way of getting rid of prisons is to ("simply") replace one punishment by another - this is what the discourse about "alternatives" is mostly about - a more ambitious (but also more promising) one is that of moving beyond punishment altogether, and to renounce to punishment, but not to its three-dimensional restorative functions. If we want our societies not only to survive, but improve the living conditions for each and all of their members, then one of our central concerns should be to get rid of punishment without renouncing to its positive and necessary functions. To put it more clearly: how can we - after a serious offense has harmed the victims, affected the offender, and disturbed public peace - manage to fulfill the functions of punishment (i.e. to send a message that empowers the victims, teaches the offender, and restores community spirit) without resorting to punishment? Can we activate the healing elements of punishment without resorting to punishment?

To cut out corporal punishment and to question the necessity and legitimacy of the prison is a risky thing to do. It touches the archtypes of punishment and invariably puts into question the soundness of underlying concepts. Will a criminal justice system without the prison still be a real criminal justice system? Can, what is left over as sanctions, justly be called a punishment? If we can do without prisons - can't we just renounce punishment in general? Is punishment really a social and ethical necessity? Once there, our conventional notions of "crime and punishment" might begin to crumble, leading us to question the very concepts of crime, guilt, and - not to forget - free will and individual responsibility.

As Willem de Haan (2010) suggests, these questions should be taken seriously by everybody who cares about the quality of life in contemporary societies, including academic criminologists. In his words:

"Criminology needs to rid itself of those theories of punishment which assume there are universal qualities in forms of punishment or assume a straightforward connection between crime and punishment. Given the perseverance of this conventional notion of 'punishment' as essentially a 'good' against an 'evil', any effort at changing common-sense notions of 'crime' and 'crime control' requires a reconceptualization of both concepts: 'crime' and 'punishment'."

To discuss prison abolition, one does not have to answer all the fundamental questions, but it cannot hurt to think about a world without punishment for a minute. Evidently, society would not be able to survive for any relevant length of time if reouncing punishment were to imply that rape and murder would henceforth not elicit any collective response anymore. To renounce any actus contrarius to any future crime would give carte blanche to those who delight in domination and exploitation of the less powerful, and it would probably lead to the most gruesome excesses of private vengeance and retaliation. In other words, societies would not stand a laissez-faire attitude towards murder, rape, or theft. They would disintegrate.


This is the expressive symbolism of restorative justice as a means to repair the harm caused by crime to victims, the community, the offender, and the normative order. Restorative justice takes into consideration all three dimensions of harm, but it does so with a different procedure and emphasis. The procedure is not top-down like in a criminal court, and the basic questions are not "which law has been violated, who is the offender, and what punishment does he deserve?", but rather "what harm has been done, what has to be done about this harm, whose responsibility is it to do something about it, and do we go on from here?". The emphasis is on a collective effort to assess the damage and to repair it as good as one can with a view to the peculiarities of the case and the people involved. Whereas the criminal law dramatizes the violation of the state's norm and authority, restorative justice processes dramatize the harm and the need to make amends and restore peace and confidence. Where the criminal court individualizes, putting all the blame and the court-inflicted pain upon the culprit, restorative justice collectivizes in that it focuses on the situation and its resolution, not on one individual.

This is not to say that the offender plays no role. He or she is being called upon, and taken very seriously, but not with the sole aim of accusation and condemnation, but with the aim of creating awareness of the harm done, and of the responsibility that he or she might be able to acknowledge and the tasks he or she might be able to shoulder in the process of healing. The culprit is also seen as a person with virtues and failings, with guilt, responsiblity, but also with a need for healing.

If that sounds like social romanticism, then it be. As a matter of fact, social romanticism has always played an important role in the attempts of mankind to progress on the way of civilization (remember the role of Harriet Beecher-Stowe's rather schmaltzy novel about Uncle Tom's Cabin in the fight against slavery?). But this does not mean that restorative justice is just an idea with no practical value. In some corners of the world (that might seem remote from a Eurocentrist perspective) restorative justice is a consolidated practice with impressive outcomes. In England, an empirical test of restorative procedures as compared to classical criminal procedures has produced astonishing results in favour of the new approach.

From the perspective of restorative justice, criminal cases can be seen as conflicts that have been stolen by professionals from those immediately concerned (Christie). But when victims, offenders, and community members meet under the guidance of an experienced facilitator - not a judge - to decide how to deal with a "problematic situation" (Hulsman) the results can be healing for victims (and offenders), restoring in not only material terms, and even "transformational" in the sense of creating a better situation than that out of which the crime originated (Morris).

In today's world, restorative justice is not being implemented as a wholesale replacement for prisons. In most settings, it is offered - as a healing device - alongside or even after a criminal trial and prison sentence (for an example of post-sentencing restorative justice see the documentary "Beyond Punishment" by Hubertus Siegert (2015). This reminds of the additional, rather than substitutional role of the penitentiary in the age of capital punishment. But just as the prison was increasingly instrumental in abolishing capital punishment in large parts of the world, restorative justice has all the potential of doing likewise with the prison. If and how this could work for the good of the societies that adopt restorative justice depends on the force-field of social interests and influences. No reform is without risk of being kidnapped, transformed, or betrayed (cf. Christie). But to see a door in the prison wall and not go through it because of fear of freedom - who would knowingly advocate that?

For most of human history societies did not know prisons - nor did they know punishment as a standard reaction to crime by the state and its legal authorities - and still they succeeded in the task of re-affirming the validity of the norm broken by the perpetrator. What today is called crime was seen as a rupture of the natural order and/or as a wrong done to another person, but not as a crimen laesae maiestatis, an insubordination to the will of the ruler. This is why the dominant mode of "criminal justice" in earlier ages was one that could do without punishment. Justice was procedural and restorative instead of punitive-retributive. To react to crimes was an art that required communicative skills and a profound knowledge of both the respective customs as well as the concerned individuals and families. Conflict regulation needed patience, and the continuous mobilization of good will on the part of all those who were somehow affected by the event. In the end - if everything went well - peace and security were restored, the boundaries of acceptable behaviour were re-affirmed (or slightly re-drawn), and all expressive functions normally attributed to punishment were fulfilled, but without resort to punishment. It is time to remember this almost forgotten fact and to move on to a form of society that is free at least from both capital and prison punishments, and - hopefully - at last also from punishment as such.

What is to be Done?

Prisons are to be abolished. Especially prisons-for-punishment. But to achieve this goal will be no easy task, given the popularity of prisons among politicians, media and great segments of the population. What is needed is both an abolitionist stance and strategies for concrete abolitions.

An abolitionist stance

The major exponent of such an approach with respect to prisons is Thomas Mathiesen. Mathiesen believes that to look for ready-made alternatives before changing an existing institution is the wrong way. He argues that "the alternative lies in the unfinished, in the sketch, in what is not yet fully existing" (Mathiesen 2015, 47 ff). For him, the most important thing is to nurture an abolitionist stance, a stance of saying "no!", which makes a difference in the long run. This may contribute to what he calls turning points: "The turning points of the past, the abolition of slavery, the abolition of the death penalty at least in some places, the abolition of youth prisons in Massachussetts, the abolition of forced labour or what what have you - should be scrutinized as examples for the future. What fostered them, what caused some of them to return under a different mantle? Turning points probably surface for structural, economic and political reasons. They become 'ripe fruit' to use a Norwegian expression. But people act and channel them as they surface. An abolitionist stance of saying 'no!' was certainly part of past abolitions. It may be so again" (Mathiesen 2009, 62).

Reductionism

This means reducing the capacity of prisons, until there is nothing (or not much) left. It means to demand the destruction of (e.g. older, outmoded, unused) prisons and resist the building of new ones (Rutherford 1984). The theory behind that strategy is that capacity determines imprisonment rates, i.e. overcapacity will eventually be filled. This may be so. But will the lack of prison cells change the sentencing behavior of judges? Waiting lists as an alternative to overcrowding were practiced for quite a while in the Netherlands (before reductionism was swept away by a new prison building boom). Publishing and comparing imprisonment rates can serve as a tool for shaming high-incarceration countries. A modern version of quantitative reductionism is the movement for "justice reinvestment" ( Chris Fox, Kevin Albertson, Kevin Wong 2013). Here the focus is explicitely on re-directing the funds spent on prisons in a more reasonable direction (community alternatives, education). "The question should be 'What can be done to strengthen the capacity of high incarceration neighborhoods to keep their residents out of prison?' not "Where should we send this individual'" (Tucker/Cadora 2003).

Normalization of prison conditions

While quantitative reductionism focusses on imprisonment rates, i.e. frequency and length of imprisonment, here the stress is on the "depth" of imprisonment (Downes), i.e. the prison conditions. If imprisonment is to be nothing more than the deprivation of liberty (European Prison Rules), the situation within prisons should approach "normal" living and working conditions as much as possible. Why should imprisoned citizens not have normal voting right? Why should imprisoned workers not be paid regular salaries? When we demand for prisoners normal rights as citizens and workers, the inner logic of such demands points to a gradual abolition of prisons as we know them (Mitford 1973). Even the deprivation of liberty itself allows for gradation in terms of more or less open prisons. In a similar vein Hedda Giertsen calls for "Tuning down prisons": placing responsibility where it should be, in the ordinary public services, as it is for other citizens" (Giertsen 2015, 292). Obviously, the term "normalization" is not used here in Foucault's sense, but as a normative principle around which some recent prison reformers , including prisoners, are rallying (cf. Feest 1999).

Segmentary abolition

Since prisons have not always existed, a world without prisons is perfectly conceivable. But it is unlikely that such an institution can be abolished in one go. Another strategy is therefore to demand the abolition of specific sectors of the prison system. This was successfully done in Norway and Germany with work houses, in Massachussets with juvenile training schools. It was tried with varying success with respect to short-term imprisonment (Germany), fine-default imprisonment (Denmark, Sweden) and with lifetime imprisonment (Norway, Spain) etc. It has also been advocated for deportation prisons (Graebsch 2008), juvenile prisons (Schumann et al. 1981) or for womens prisons (Carlen 1990). Our own focus on "Strafanstalt", on serving prisons, on prisons-as-punishment, can be seen as a segmentary approach. We advocate abolishing these kinds of prisons, but we are well aware that there are other prisons or prison-like institutions (e.g. pre-trial prisons; security detention; deportation facilities) that may need to be abolished too.

Linking up the strategies

Obviously, these strategies are not mutually exclusive. They will have to be combined with "Anti-Funktionsarbeit" (Mathiesen 1989, 168 ff), i.e. creating a public discourse about the explicit and implicit functions of prisons. And they need to link up with existing movements for restorative justice. This is exactly what Fay Honey Knopp and her co-abolitionists had in mind, with explicit reference to Thomas Mathiesen: "We have structured an attrition model as one example of a long range process for abolition.'Attrition', which means the rubbing away or wearing down by friction, reflects the persistent and continuing strategy necessary to diminish the function and power of prisons in our society.To clarify our terms, the reforms we recommend are "abolishing-type" reforms: those that do not add improvement to or legitimize the prevailing system. We also call for partial abolitions of the system: abolishing certain criminal laws, abolishing bail and pretrial detention and abolishing indeterminate sentences and parole" (Morris 1976, ch.3).

Summing it up

Prison - just like corporal punishment in earlier times - is still being considered as indispensable for the maintenance of public order. But that is an illusion.It is time to think about prisons in a principled, more realistic, and less apologetic way. It is time, in short, to think of something better than prisons so we can tear down the walls and close this chapter in the history of punishments once and for all. Just as our generation is thankful for the earlier ones to have left us a world free of inhuman institutions as the burning of witches and the whipping of slaves, future ones will feel pride in living in a societies that have moved beyond the pains of imprisonment to a much better way of reacting to crime and criminals. We can do without prison, and to make this step will be difficult at first, but rewarding at last, and it will be enjoyed as a major improvement of the quality of life for the good of all of us.

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Leftovers

There is a multitude of functions ascribed to the prison, some latent and others manifest. The most fundamental one, though, is certainly (and almost by definition) that of punishing people for their forbidden actions in the past. The prison sentence is a punishment for crime, and the idea at the root of this punishment is to impose negative consequences ("pain") on the culprit for the sake not only of giving satisfaction to the victims of crime, but also of re-affirming the continuing validity of the norm - in spite of it having been disavowed by the offender. Thus, the normative damage inflicted by the disregard of the legal order is being repaired by the punishment of the offender. This symbolic restoration is expected to impress the law-abiding public, the offender, and last not least anyone who otherwise might succumb to the lure of easy profit or uncontrolled aggression - and to a certain extent it probably does. (At least in the case of extreme social distance and power differences - like between white policemen and black youngsters in the USA - it is reasonable to believe that the presence of a credible threat of imprisonment for those who kill unarmed and defenseless juveniles might significantly reduce the frequency of lethal abuses of power in this area of public administration. Which would speak for the hypothesis that the threat of prison does work at least to a certain extent.)

As a punishment, the prison sentence has three addressees, the first one being the offender (resulting in his stigmatization), the second potential future offenders (as an attempted dissuasion), and the third one law-abiding general public (which is being reassured that criminal activities will not be tolerated). Evidently, this expressive symbolism of punishment is a complex matter in itself.

The three purposes of the prison are to punish, to neutralize, and to educate. First and foremost imprisonment is punishment. The main purpose of the prison is to punish the offender. The prison is the standard response to crime in modern society, just as corporal punishment was the standard response to crime in pre-modern times.

Secondly, imprisonment is an act of incapacitation, i.e. of neutralizing the risk that the individual continues robbing, stealing, raping or murdering, etc.

Thirdly, imprisonment is an attempt at making the individual fit for a future life without criminal activities, i.e. a means of re-socialization and re-integration into a regular and law-abiding everyday life.

Evidently, there is no way of reconciling these three goals in a way that allows a perfect attainment of all three objectives. This well-known conflict has produced a bulk of literature that has been accompanying periodical political trials of strength between conservatives and reformers over the optimal balance between pain infliction, neutralization, and rehabilitation. There is something ritualistic about the critical discourse over the prison's failure to achieve either one of its goals. Conservatives see it as too comfortable and even luxurious ("colour tv") to be considered a real punishment; scandalizations of prison revolts and escapes regularly lead to queries concerning the prison's ability to safely lock up dangerous individuals - and to resignations of prison governors and cabinet members; last but not least there is an infinite amount of research pointing to the prison's inability to fulfill its rehabilitative promise. Given the conflict of objectives with which the prison has to deal, one might well argue, though, that - all things considered - the institution is nevertheless doing a remarkable job at making the best out of a highly difficult situation. Far from perfection, it still does punish, it still does neutralize, and it sill does educate enough offenders intensely enough to minimally satisfy a majority of conservatives and reformers alike. The prison, to them, is bad. But without it, things would be worse. Therefore, in the eyes of the people, the prison is a classical case of a necessary evil. Not great, but indispensable. For now and for an indefinite time to come.

There is little doubt that the prison is harmful to its inmates and that it is being meant that way, simply because it is a punishment. But it would mean twisting the truth to deny that in some cases the prison has also provided the security and the structure for some of its inmates (some political prisoners, e.g., but also some unknown rather dissocial ones whose lack of internal structure could be compensated by the rigid corset of prison discipline) to reagain some control over their lives. To acknowledge that truth is not to say that this cure is good for everyone under all circumstances, though. Rather, the contrary is true. For most people, prison is pain and torture and a lot of harm not easy to ever compensate by either intra- or extra-mural efforts.

Due to its other and partly contradicting objectives, the prison is sometimes criticized for not doing enough to be perceived as a true punishment. Conservatives complain about colour tv sets in prison cells and the resemblance of modern prisons to youth hostels or hotels. Some prison guards in some prisons seem to see things similarly The prison was designed as a multifunctional instrument of social ordering. Not only was it to keep the culprit instead of eliminating her, but also it was to keep society safe for the time of the convict’s punishment. That had a soothing effect on victims and on the general public. As long as they knew the offender locked up they could take deep breaths of relief and entertain the hope that once the inmate’s time was up he would not be a risk to his fellow citizens anymore. Those were the two most important functions of the new invention - and they still are the strongest pillars of its existence today.

To make a long story short: while we recognize the merits and functions of the prison, we have come to the conclusion that whatever these merits and functions, it is time to move on. When corporal punishment revealed itself as too cruel and too ineffective, it had to cede its place as a standard response to crime to the ideal of incapacitation and rehabilitation through imprisonment. Centuries later, the prison has not only been thoroughly demystified, but its legitimation has come under pressure like never before. Today, the questions once directed towards the institution of corporal punishment increasingly turn themselves against its successor. The prison is ineffective. And it is inhumane. Therefore, it has to be abolished. In favour of more effective and more humane punishments. Or, even better: in favour of something better than punishment.

If we start with a look at the shortcomings, we willOn the other hand, of course, there are the shortcomings and the dark sides of prison. They are, e.g., a deception as far as rehabilitation is concerned. While, on the one hand, the ideal of reforming the convicted offender is a logical element of any punishment calculated in the currency of time, the history of the prison has been a history of promises, disappointments, and deceit. This was true for the 16th century London Bridewell (the first "House of Correction"), for the Amsterdam Rasphuis and Spinhuis, the 17th century German Zuchthäuser and the 19th and 20th century penitentiaries and Gefängnisse (von Liszt 1882) - and it is still true today.

There is no way to improve prison conditions without first addressing the prison-industrial complex, the power relations, and the fiscal restraints governing prison policy - not to mention a vengeful public opinion and its exploitation and fomentation by vested interests and mass media.

Positive General Prevention: Are prisons necessary to reassure the general population of the continuing validity of the norm after it had been violated by the delinquent? Criminologists seem to accept this idea to a certain degree. If norm violations remained without negative response the norm itself could suffer erosion. But there is no need to infer from the need for a negative response that it has to take the form of imprisonment. Prison is just one kind of punishment - and all kinds of punishment, whatever their appearance, are only one form of negative reactions. There could also be non-punishing reactions to crimes that would deal with delinquency in a completely different manner and still exert the desired influence of showing the general public that violations of that norm will not be tolerated. In other words, to postualate the necessity of a specific punishment on the grounds that there is a need for some kind of negative sanction does not make sense.

Atonement: But what about exceptionally cruel atrocities? Don't they require a serious atonement on the part of the delinquent? And is not perpetual imprisonment a way to deal with them - lest one considered falling back on the death penalty? ## hannah arendt

All in all, the overall imbalance between costs and benefits of prison speak a clear language. The inexpediency of imprisonment is a well-known fact among criminologists. The general public is being shielded from this knowledge, though, and this veil of ignorance that hangs over the statistical facts of imprisonment is a powerful protective device that keeps the prison from being questioned and challenged and thus maintains the stability of a system whose dysfunctions would otherwise have discredited it and washed it away a long time ago.

In former times, during the 19th and early 20th century, authors welcomed the prison because it was not just retributive, but also rehabilitative, and therefore could be seen to serve a useful purpose beyond the mere affirmation of the sovereign's power. The actual performance of the prison never seemed to be able to meet those high expectations, though. Meta-studies that looked for positive treatment effects fostered the sobering impression that "nothing" that was tried in terms of intramural therapy seemed to have produced convincing results.

The very idea of seeing the prison as a kind of hospital for the treatment of delinquency was increasingly discredited. This decline of the rehabilitative ideal (Allen 1981) contributed to a general demise of the respective efforts and left the prisons with the problem of empty time. The less money and energy was invested in treatment programs the more imprisonment became a question of simple warehousing leaving prisoners to their own devices, their inner demons, and their hope for protection by intramural gangs. Prison conditions returned to a syndrome of of general neglect, abuse, and suffering that had already characterized the institution in the days of John Howard's.

One positive result of this drastically diminished faith in the benefits of imprisonment is the marked shift of emphasis from incarceration to financial penalties. In Germany, e.g., the 20th century started with a ratio of three to one in favor of imprisonment over financial sanctions, and ended with a ratio of four to one in favor of financial sanctions over prison sentences. In the course of one century, the prison sentence moved from being a standard response to being a comparatively rare and exceptional response to crime. Of all those sentenced, less than 20 per cent received a prison sentence at the end of the 20th century - the large majority of prison sentences being suspended ones accompanied by probation orders. On some 5% of all convicts are being sentenced to immediate imprisonment. This percentage could, theoretically, be reduced even further - maybe to 4, 3, 2 or even 1 or zero per cent? To that end, judges would just have to refrain to an ever higher degree from handing out prison sentences, and if they did hand out prison sentences, they just would have to decide to grant probation to an ever increasing part of the culprits. At the same time, probation services could and should be substantially improved so that there would be ever less revocations of the suspended sentences. Decades ago, such a scenario of the fading out of the prison sentence had been envisaged as a possible course of action to be completed by the year 2000 (cf. Schumann 1988: 17). The fact that this date has passed by now does not mean that the prison has to exist from now to all eternity. It is still possible and still necessary to overcome this obsolete system of pain infliction.

How many condemnations have I seen more criminal than the crime? Montaigne, in: Baker 11

It is possible to imagine a society flushed with such a sense of power that it could afford to let its offenders go unpunished. Friedrich Nietzsche

Child beating is particularly cowardly because it is a way for adults to vent their hatred, frustration, and sadism on those who are unable to defend themselves. Such cruelty is, of course, always rationalised with excuse like "it hurts me more than it does you," etc., or explained in moral terms, like "I don't want my boy to be soft" or "I want him to prepare him for a harsh world" or "I spank my children because my parents spanked me, and it did me a hell of a lot of good." But despite such rationalisations, the fact remains that punishment is always an act of hate. Alexander S. Neill

It wants to prevent the offender from re-offending, it wants to heal wounds of the victims as good as it can, and it wants to calm public anxiety that may have been fuelled by disturbing crimes. All these are (secondary) purposes of punishing offenders, but they are not what lies at the root of normative theories of punishment. If it was different, i.e. if the basic justification of punishment were only to lie in the prevention of recidivism, then "security measures" with no punitive element were to prefer over "punishment". And in those cases in which there was no recidivism to be feared, and in which, additionally, the victim had forgiven the offender and did not want to see him punished, there would be no need and no justification for punishment anymore. But still, there often are strong feelings in a community that the to restore peace and order, there was a need to respond to the crime in question by an authoritative actus contrarius.

Think of the Roman Polanski case: the film director's rape victim, then 13, and now in her 40s, had filed a statement in court asking for dismissal. An editorial of the Los Angeles Times stated the reasons why the court procedure should still go on, even against the victim's explicit will, saying:

"The case against Polanski was not brought to satisfy her (the victim's) desire for justice or her need for closure. It was brought by the state of California on behalf of the people of California. (...) Crimes are committed not just against individuals but againt the community. ... People accused of serious crimes must be apprehended and tried and, if convicted, must face their sentence" (Diamond 2012: 110).

As long as those kinds of offenders are still dangerous in the sense of constituting a tangible risk of backsliding into their criminal activities the answer to this question of all questions seems enticingly easy: As long as they are dangerous they cannot be let free. There is an overriding and real reason to keep them locked up for the safety of others. And as long as the risk is real this is completely legitimate. We already stated above that to abolish prison as a punishment does not automatically include the abolition of all kinds of involuntary confinement - from quarantine to preventive detention. Preventive detention is a security measure, not (necessarily) a punishment, and it does not even require the offender to be sane and criminally liable.

The problem with serial killers is often that they are deemed (and proven) to be highly likely to proceed with their habit if not held in confinement. To keep them in custody - even if that custody were in a luxurious mansion with a large yard and garden - would be a merely preventive measure and would not necessarily have to comprise torturous elements of extra pain delivery. Still it would imply a symbolic reprehension. It would tell the victim that one cares, it would tell the offender that he is seen as a danger, and it would tell the community that this kind of behaviour is not and will not be tolerated. The function of punishment would be fulfilled without really using punishment.

In a spectacular criminal case in the USA, the repeated rape of an 18-month-old girl under the most gruesome circumstances earned former Coast Guard Eric Devin Masters a prison sentence of up to 200 years in April 2016. Even though Judge Trusock declared "You are truly an evil individual and we need to make sure that you are never allowed in society", the massive prison sentence did not satisfy all members of the public, many of whom believed he had deserved the death penalty for the heinous acts he had committed. The case gives evidence that the current conventional expressions of deepest moral indignation are the request for capital punishment and for lifelong confinement in prison. This does not mean, though, that things could not - and should not - change towards less radical punishments. Here, as in the case of serial killers, the need for public disapproval could be expressed in intensive supervision within the community. Extramural alternatives would provide the convict with a reasonable chance of survival (doubtful in prison), would have to provide the victims with a live surveillance technology and the certainty of constant police watch over the delinquent, and it would provide the community with the possibility of finding peace of mind, knowing that the convict is under control and inserted in a productive activity for the community.

A similar scheme would be applicable to the roaming rapist. But would it also serve the need for expressive symbolism in the case of the genocidal general? There is no question that there is a strong and legitimate desire for justice on the part of victims of large-scale crimes of the powerful. In some cases, victims' family members struggle for years or decades on end to find culprits and bring them to justice. In the case of Chilean folk-singer Victor Jara, tortured then shot in the head in September 1973 in a locker room at Santiago’s Chile Stadium, where thousands of perceived subversives, activists and communists were rounded up and detained by General Augusto Pinochet’s forces that had just toppled the elected government of Salvador Allende (Jara’s mutilated body was later found dumped outside the stadium with 44 bullet wounds), his widow Joan Turner Jara and their two daughters fought the fight for justice for the murder of their husband and dad for more than 40 years. When the day of the opening of the trial came in a Florida court in 2016, not only was it an "emotional and almost overpowering moment" for the family, but also "a powerful moment for all those who have been seeking justice and truth about what happened during the Pinochet coup,” according to Dixon Osburn, executive director of the California-based Center for Justice and Accountability that had been instrumental in bringing the legal action against the presumptive assassin (Luscombe 2016).

At the occasion of the Jerusalem trial over Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt was critical of the legal arguments, but not of the result of the trial (Eichmann was executed in 1962). Instead of trying to press things into the categories of criminal law, Arendt argued, the court should have dared to offer a reasoning that would reach out for long-forgotten categories of natural law. Her judgement (Arendt 1977: 279) reads:

"You admitted that the crime committed against the Jewish people during the war was the greatest crime in recorded history, and you admitted your role in it.... We are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of your inner life and of your motives…. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations… we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang."

The problem with this is, of course, the precedent. There are many crimes that defy all notions of humanity. From genocides to serial killers to the rape of toddlers. For each one of the offenders, when you look closely at the deed and do not want to believe what you see or read, the monstrosity of the deed alone can be seen as "the reason, and the only reason", the offender "must hang".

After the Second World War, when German occupation of surrounding countries had ended, the day of reckoning had arried for collaborators. Norway hanged 25 of the most prominent collaborators and sentenced 47 prison guards to imprisonment who were convicted of maltreatment and/or killings of prisoners. A young graduate by the name of Nils Christie, later a world famous criminologist, who had interviewed many of the Norwegian camp guards, was not convinced that punishment was necessary or even only useful. Instead of hanging or imprisoning them (and thereby reinforcing the stereotypes that had been instrumental in their crimes in the first place), he argued, it would have been much more productive to have a long and fair trial that would establish the facts (and the responsibilities) - and thus to have come to a guilty verdict, and then let those shamed individuals go their ways. Could one imagine a more sovereign, a more devastating moral reprehension than this act of letting them walk out of the courtroom into a society that knows, and despises, what they had done?

There are advantages in Christie's way over our traditional way of reacting. The problem with eliminatory sentences is the slippery slope. Why should any member of the human race be expected to want to share the earth with any of those whose unspeakable cruelty that freezes the blood in your veins? The idea that some people are simply not worth living is neither new nor a rare thought in human history. Whoever orders or organizes a genocide is just one case in point. But can anybody be expected to share the earth with sadistic mass murderers and serial killers, child rapists and torturers, with terrorists and the hitmen and king pins of drug cartels? And what about corrupt officials who impoverish or endanger whole populations while amassing millions and literally billions of dollars on their tax haven bank accounts? In China, many of the more than 40 criminal offences that carry the death penalty are non-violent and economic in nature.

The prison question cannot be disconnected from more profound questions (and decisions) of an ethical and political nature. Whoever opts for the state's right to the death penalty will be likely to grant it also the right to keep criminal offenders locked up like animals in a cage. Whoever takes a more critical view of the state's rights over the individual and a more emphatic one concerning every human being's right to right to life and liberty will tend to reject the death penalty as a transgression of the state's rights over it's subjects and to be open to alternatives to imprisonment when it comes to questions of social control.

As far as non-violent crimes are concerned, the state's right to incarcerate could be questioned for reasons of disproportionality. Why respond to non-violence with the violence act of imprisonment? Why not adopt civil law measures and make the offender pay punitive damages that amount to three, four, five or ten times the value of his illicit gains? Why not invent some serious supervised community work for offenders who cannot repay the damage they inflicted?

Others might oppose the closing of all prisons because of the drug market. How, we hear them say, can we expect to deter traffickers, pushers, and dealers of dangerous drugs if we cannot even threaten them with long prison sentences? Without the threat of prison, people on the drug market would probably continue doing what they have been doing all along - but with more ease, and with a lower rate of staff turnover. As today, what happens in this market would be determined not by criminal justice interventions but by the basic forces of demand and supply. Things would not by themselves undergo dramatic changes without the prison threat, but there would probably be less violence overall, and a certain détente could occur that might give way to a more sober analysis of the role of criminal justice in the whole field of health risks through the supply and use of recreational drugs.

Even more people might oppose the closing of all prisons because of their concern over sex fiends. Sex fiends do exist and some of them defy the therapeutic capabilities of contemporary science and psychology, making them continuously dangerous to others and eligible for long-stay institutions that take care of dangerous individuals by locking them up for preventive reasons. As for the rest of sexual offenders - and probably and happily they will be the large majority - there is no question that a well-supported and well-supervised everyday life in liberty would be a welcome alternative to imprisonment. In their own interest as well as in the interest of a society that has understood that confinement, especially for this special clientele, breeds both violence and monsters, but that circles of support and accountability of the Canadian kind (COSA) are an effective and humane way of dealing with this complicated group of persons in a community setting.