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Against Prisons: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen
→What is to be Done?
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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: | 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 === | |||
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. | 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). | ||
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). | 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 === | |||
This means 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 === | |||
This means completely doing away with 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). | |||