Against Prisons: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

Seen in a global perspective, what characterizes prisons all over the world is the use and abuse of the power to punish - with violent abuse being more the rule than the exception. Exemples range from corruption over bullying and mobbing, maltreatment and sexual harassement all the way to torture and unnatural deaths in prison. As a matter of fact, prisons are systems at risk of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. One would like to think of the multitude of news about individual scandals as representing nothing more than a collection of unrelated and isolated events that have nothing to do with the structural characteristics of the prison system as such. But they are all but that. Documentation can be found for such diverse countries like Albania (??), Brazil (??) or China (Liao Yiwu 2013), but equally in prisons run by the USA (in Guantanamo, Abu Graib and elsewhere). Cases like that are part and parcel of the prison system as it really is - worldwide. They are a consequence of great power differences, helped by the prospect of impunity. Lack of ressources is not the only - and not the main - cause for the scandalous nature of the prison. As both prison scandals in rich countries and empirical research by renowned scholars such as Philip Zimbardo have shown, the most relevant factor for violence to occur is to be found in the systemic disparities of power themselves. In a normal prison, the guards are the ones who really know what is going on, and it is the guards who try and determine who deserves what. With little administrative oversight, guards tend to become rather autonomous from the boss' surveillance. This gives them the experience of exercising more control than bein submitted to controls. Such a "control surplus" that goes unchecked by superiors turns every functionary into a small king. This situation is conducive to abuses of power - and, accordingly, Charles Tittle's Control Balance Theory (1995) predicts the emergence of exploitative and humiliating behaviour on the side of prison guards for all those cases in which the guards can act in an uncontrolled way and with no fear to be reprimanded.