No Prison Einleitung

This book is about saying NO to prisons, i.e. to the institutionalised caging of human beings in response to their real or alleged breaches of the social contract. To say NO to the prison system one has to understand that the prison is not what it is often believed to be. It is not part of the solution to the crime problem, but part of the crime problem itself. The Canadian Society of Friends, more widely known as the Quakers, had come to realise this fact as early as 1981, when they voted a motion on prison abolition that contained, among other noteworthy insights, this one: "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."

There is no moral alternative to its abolition, because the cruelty of the prison sentence is an undeniable fact. Another undeniable fact is that you cannot find the truth about prisons in government brochures and magnificent election promises. The truth about prisons is in the lived experiences of those who live in all the prisons all over the world today. There are more than ten million incarcerated people today. What they experience - being herded in cramped spaces with dingy toilets and substandard meals, in conditions breeding nastiness and disease and constant fear - that is the truth about prisons. Before this background of real life experiences, everything else is public relations, propaganda, denial or lack of interest, ingenuity or just pretence. The history of the prisons is also a history of prison reform. Everyone who knows this history will agree that reform has not and will not change the basic nature of the prison - which is to amputate social contacts and to steal time as a punishment for wrongdoing. Everybody also knows that the prison as an institution has become anachronistic, ill, and counterproductive, and that this is why it is already finished in a moral and in a functional sense, which makes it somehow waiting for its own abolition depending on people's courage and consciousness. Therefore, the time has come to speak out against this peculiar institution, and to start working for its abolition - root and branch, worldwide, once and for all, without ifs and buts.

The present volume starts with Massimo Pavarini's foreword for Livio Ferrari's 2015 Italian booklet No Prison. Ovvero il fallimento del carcere. We decided to use it as a foreword for this volume as well, because it provides an insight into the history of this European enlargement of the original Italian No Prison movement, and conveys an authentic idea of how and why this renowned legal scholar and criminologist came to embrace the abolitionist cause. (The untimely death of our revered colleague and friend Massimo in the autumn of 2015 also impeded him from realising his promised foreword for this volume.)

In the first of its three sections, this book presents the original NO PRISON manifesto by Pavarini and Ferrari and in addition three clear-cut statements from other authors and other places that underline and amend the Italian colleagues' message. By way of questions and answers, David Scott and Deborah H. Drake engage in a dialogue that deals with the most common objections facing abolitionists in public debates. Not to avoid popular (and populist) concerns, but to tackle them outright and with complete fairness is a method that could and should be followed more often by all radical reformers ("What about the dangerous people that are currently held in prison? What about the victims? Should we not just lock people up and throw away the key to keep them off our streets?).

Gwenola Ricordeau's manifesto convincingly argues for more cooperation between anti-prison activists on the one hand and relatives and friends of prisoners on the other. Her outspoken critique of the unproductive cultural distance, sometimes even disdain that anti-prison activists often show towards those who care for specific inmates, and whose engagement can also be seen as a kind of resistance against the system, is a very valuable reminder that narrow-mindedness and forgetfulness can also affect abolitionists. As Gwenola justly writes: "We do not climb on the roofs of the prisons. We do not put fire on the visiting rooms. (...) But we resist too. To be 'there', each week, in front of the door of the visiting rooms. To send, each month, a postal order: To prepare, at the end of each year, a parcel. Toting, over and over again, bags of cloths. This is resistance. Because prison exists to destroy the bonds that make a prisoner not only a prisoner." The prison is not just the buildings, it is a whole system of complex and contradictory power relations. Ricordeau reminds us of the fact that prisoners' relations with people on the outside are important, and that the abolitionist movement could and should profit from taking family and friends into consideration. If it is really time to become aware of the weaknesses of the abolitionist movement, then here we have a good example of how they can be spotted and how ways can be discussed of how to overcome them.

Ricardo Genelhú's Brazilian manifesto serves as a stark reminder that most prisons and prisoners are not to be found in Europe, and that the fight against prisons must become as global as the system of imprisonment itself, if it is to succeed. Ricardo Genelhú's Brazilian manifesto to abolish prisons adds a voice from the global south. In many parts of the world, prison issues are characterised by different dimension of overcrowding, intramural violence, and health hazards unimaginable in Western Europe. The fact that in countries like Brazil, "sovereignty" lies in the hands of a militarised and largely corrupt police that often enough shares the power to kill or to incarcerate with organised gangs, also influences who is going to prison and who will live and who will die there. The judicial system, in turn, tends to side with the police instead of holding them accountable for abuses of power, extrajudicial executions, and the like. More than anything else, the prison has become an instrument in the hands of the police. No wonder, that the damned of the earth do not like to indulge in moderation when it comes to speak out against police custody, provincial jails and federal prisons.

The book's second section turns out attention to the many unsolved theoretical questions and quarrels surrounding the abolitionist project. Johannes Feest & Sebastian Scheerer insist that abolitionists need to acknowledge the organisational success story of the prison as manifested by the relentless expansion of the prison system, if they want to find the right starting point for advancing sophisticated counter-arguments against punitive segregationist ideologies. After a look at myths and realities of prisons in rich and poor countries, they admit the need for some quarantine-types of confinement for reasons of public safety, but forcefully plead for the extinction of prison as a means of punishment.

David Scott talks about the usefulness and the risks of what he calls the anti-slavery talk in the abolitionist discourse. Both slavery and the prison were social institutions that consisted in the deprivation of liberty, and the existence of both was guaranteed by state legislation, so the aim of abolitionists was to effect a repeal of this legislation and the emergence of a consensus about the illegitimacy of such practices. As far as slavery was concerned, that did work out. With regard to the prison question, things seem a bit more complicated because of the guilt-and-punishment aspects absent in the slavery question. With its erudite differentiations that demonstrate deep knowledge of both the North-American and the British penal traditions, Scott's plea for caution and human rights when it comes to the roots of abolitionist convictions is a highly useful tool for self-reflection and the elaboration of discursive strategies.

Giuseppe Mosconi, one of the founders of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control, points to the inadequacy of criminal law and policy which make it ever more urgent to direct our attention towards the unsolved questions concerning new ways of dealing with transgressions of the normative order. Here are some of the issues that have to be tackled if we want to overcome the standstill that presently characterises much of the abolitionist movement: how can we deal with the deep-rooted culture of punishment, how combine the radical nature of the ultimate goal of prison abolition with the ethical imperative to improve conditions here and now (thus possibly stabilising the system we want to abolish), and how can we reconcile abolitionism with the need to keep some types of confinement for purposes of justifiable risk-management? And how to protect victim rights in cases where a delinquent is not willing or able to enter non-punitive conflict resolutions? And what about crimes of the powerful?

The search for coherent and convincing answers invariably leads us to questions concerning the very nature of concepts such as "crime", "punishment", and "justice", to name just three of the more prominent objects of legal and social philosophy. And not everybody is an expert in this field. Luckily, Vincenzo Ruggiero has all it takes to lend us a helping hand. Abolitionism, he says, is not only a set of demands to reduce or suppress penal custody, but it is also a perspective, a philosophy, and an approach to seeing the world from a different angle - maybe a manifestation of the general human urge to do away with institutional oppression experienced as unjust, wrong, or unfair. Maybe One of Ruggiero's points is that abolitionists have a different focus and a different concept in mind when they speak about justice - one that looks at social interactions rather than institutions, on precise settings in which people live rather than official norms and extraneous professionals. Abolitionists, it seems, do not follow a transcendental institutionalism (Amartya Sen) that searches for the ideal institutions capable of forging a perfectly just society, but rather a comparative approach led by the search for social arrangements that satisfy people in their concrete collective lives.

Fundamental and strategic challenges of abolitionism are also Simone Santorso's topic. Among other things, he points to the strange strength of the prison to withstand all empirical criticism by force of its normative provisions. While the "prison in the books" is completely dissimilar from the "prison in action", the normative idea of the prison as a beneficial institution aiming at the reentry of prisoners into society seems to be enough to legitimise its existence. This peculiar power of the prison to constantly and successfully reconstruct the ideological conditions for its own existence - what Pat Carlen once called the carceral clawback - is an important barrier that abolitionists have to deal with effectively to score success. Another perennial question is the conflict between an attrition model and a selective model. While the former aims at gradually restraining and reducing the role of prisons in society, the latter wants to start with the abolition of selected categories like, e.g., youth prisons, women's prisons, and so on, before getting to the core. And what about "positive" improvements of prison condtions in the short run and abolition in the long run? Doesn't prison reform contribute to bolstering the permanence of prisons, thus making abolition ever more difficult to achieve? Finally, Santorso proposes to overcome the single-issue character of anti-prison work and pleads for a more conscious and more energetic cooperation with similar movements including those that advocate the abolition of other kinds of confinement. Finally, he reminds us of the necessity to overcome the "carceral attitude" in society by deconstructing the close association between crime, punishment.

Section Three takes a closer look at abolitionist ideas, dilemmas, and activities in their respective national contexts. With Italy in mind, but by no means limited to his country, Stefano Anastasia recapitulates the long history of ideas concerning prison abolition in philosophy, literature, political ideas and practical experiments. As co-author of the NO PRISON manifesto and author of his own NO PRISON book in Italy, Livio Ferrari slams worsening prison conditions in Italy and formulates central political demands - including that of an iindependent and influential national ombudsperson for the prisons. Behind those concrete demands there is the vision of a much more ambitious change that he calls the reformulation of the social contract.

The rise of imprisonment is a worldwide phenomenon that also affected countries like Norway. This country, once blessed with the lowest rates in Scandinavia (and of the lowest in the world), now has a higher rate of imprisonment than any other Scandinavian country. One peculiar feature of that sad development may be that, in Norway, the unholy alliance of treatment ideology and punishment facilitates longer sentences handed out for therapeutic reasons. The way to go, according to Norwegian criminologist Hedda Giertsen, is to try and improve prison conditions without strengthening the prison system as such - thus leaving the door open for the retreat of prisons in favour of alternatives to either prisons or punishment.

Finally, none else but the real Thomas Mathiesen, famous author of "The Politics of Abolition", honours this endeavor with his afterword in which he points to the political and non-mechanical character of imprisonment rates (that evidently rise and fall rather independently of crime rates). He draws an optimistic conclusion from this paradox, stressing the range of possibilities that the voluntaristic nature of prison figures also open up for those who favour abolition. If public policy is full of whims and foibles, then it is also malleable - and the present-day upsurge of interest in the rule of law should be seen as an opportunity to combine forces to attack the extremely dangerous prison system from both a humanist, a socialist, and a libertarian rule of law perspective.