Against Prisons: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

There is no punishment of offenders that does not - by way of collateral damage - also affects their families and friends, their children, wives, larger families, colleagues and friends. This is especially true of imprisonment. It does not only impede a normal sexual, but also a regular social life with family and friends. All such relations ae being radically reduced to rare and highly regulated and supervised letters, phone conversations, and visits. In a time of ever increasing mobility, inmates are not only suffering an ever more painful relative deprivation by being kept in cages that not even a modern zoo would subject its animals to, but they are also being kept away from the internet in a world where social life is ever less imaginable without the resources of the social media. 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 this, one of the saddest affairs in the world of the prisons is the much-neglected phenomenon that can be termed the co-punishment of children. There is no doubt that the imprisonment of parents has negative outcomes for the children. To make prisons "family-friendly" is an understandable, but fruitless endeavour.  

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 instead of brutish guards. 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 beyond this stage of evolution in criminal justice.