Against Prisons: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

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).

Obviously, these strategies are not mutually exclusive. They will have to be combined with "Anti-Funktionsarbeit", i.e.  (Mathiesen 1989, 168 ff), i.e. creating a public discourse about the explicit and implicit functions of prisons. And they need to link up with existing movements for restorative justice.

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.