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Against Prisons: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen
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== What is to be Done? == | == What is to be Done? == | ||
Instead of investing in the continuation of a century-old reform movement that tries to meliorate conditions inch by inch, we should rather look and move ahead. While those who bet on piecemeal reforms are being frustrated by the stubbornness of the system time has been moving on and has been making prisons obsolete without them noticing. In the digital age, control does not depend on bricks and fences anymore. Time is moving on and prisons are just waiting to be torn down in order to be replaced by something better. If cruelty and the lack of efficiency was the battlecry of those 18th century reformers who advocated the replacement of corporal punishments by the penitentary, the time has come for the prison to confront the very same arguments: too inhumane, too inefficient. Too expensive. Too biased. Too unfair. Too torturous. | Instead of investing in the continuation of a century-old reform movement that tries to meliorate conditions inch by inch, we should rather look and move ahead. While those who bet on piecemeal reforms are being frustrated by the stubbornness of the system time has been moving on and has been making prisons obsolete without them noticing. In the digital age, control does not depend on bricks and fences anymore. Time is moving on and prisons are just waiting to be torn down in order to be replaced by something better. If cruelty and the lack of efficiency was the battlecry of those 18th century reformers who advocated the replacement of corporal punishments by the penitentary, the time has come for the prison to confront the very same arguments: too inhumane, too inefficient. Too expensive. Too biased. Too unfair. Too torturous. | ||
But how are we to proceed? How can we abolish these penal fortresses, these "gigantic errors turned into stone", these "bricks of shame" (Oscar Wilde). Several strategies have been already tried out or at least discussed: | |||
* Radical reductionism: 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 reductionism is the movement for "justice reinvestment" (first: Tucker/Cadora 2003; 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). | |||
* Radical de-totalization: gradually reducing the total character of carceral institutions. While reductionism usually focusses on imprisonment rates, i.e. the quantitative side of imprisonment, de-totalizing focusses 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. 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. | |||
* Segmentary abolition: completely doing away with some sectors of the prison system. This was successfully done in Norway and Germany with work houses, in Massachussets with training schools . It was tried with varying success with short-term imprisonment (Germany), for fine-default imprisonment (Denmark, Sweden) and for lifetime imprisonment (Norway, Spain) etc. It has also been advocated for juvenile prisons (Schumann et al. 1981) or for womens prisons (Carlen 1990). | |||
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 such 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. Prison - just like corporal punishment in earlier times - is still being considered by man as indispensable for the maintenance of public order. But that is an illusion. 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. | 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 such 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. Prison - just like corporal punishment in earlier times - is still being considered by man as indispensable for the maintenance of public order. But that is an illusion. 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. | ||
== Bibliography == | == Bibliography == | ||