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Against Prisons: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen
→Security without Prisons
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If the abolition of the prison-as-punishment is not to fail miserably because of public fears of unsolved safety issues, the ethical, legal, and practical questions involving preventive detention will have to be dealt with in a most serious and exhaustive manner. Questions that will have to be answered will include the following: how many of the present-day prison inmates would need continued confinement because of their dangerousness - and for how long? And how can solid criteria of dangerousness be established in the first place? What about the concept of dangerousness when the behavior in question is not the violation of rights of others, but only an abstract concept (as in the case of drug dealing between consenting adults)? How can the rights of dangerous individuals be protected? In the worst case, all those of today's prison inmates that have been defined by the criminal justice system as dangerous and who are serving prison sentences would continue in confinement even after the abolition of the prison-as-punishment. "Remain" is not quite the right term, though, because the cell prisons would be torn down as inhumane and ineffective, so they would move to other locations not built upon the model of the Quakers' penitentiaries, but on the model of residential living. | If the abolition of the prison-as-punishment is not to fail miserably because of public fears of unsolved safety issues, the ethical, legal, and practical questions involving preventive detention will have to be dealt with in a most serious and exhaustive manner. Questions that will have to be answered will include the following: how many of the present-day prison inmates would need continued confinement because of their dangerousness - and for how long? And how can solid criteria of dangerousness be established in the first place? What about the concept of dangerousness when the behavior in question is not the violation of rights of others, but only an abstract concept (as in the case of drug dealing between consenting adults)? How can the rights of dangerous individuals be protected? In the worst case, all those of today's prison inmates that have been defined by the criminal justice system as dangerous and who are serving prison sentences would continue in confinement even after the abolition of the prison-as-punishment. "Remain" is not quite the right term, though, because the cell prisons would be torn down as inhumane and ineffective, so they would move to other locations not built upon the model of the Quakers' penitentiaries, but on the model of residential living. | ||
Scholars and | === How much preventive detention? === | ||
Scholars and practicioners agree that only a minority of the present prison population would need to continue to be locked up for security purposes once prison-as-punishment were to be abolished, with estimates ranging roughly between 30 and 5 or less per cent. A realistic scenario of prison abolition would therefore have to count with a substitution of the prison sentence by a kind of preventive security confinement concerning up to a third of the present-day prison population. Hopefully, of course, a reliable assessment of dangerousness would be able to reduce that percentage, and however large or small the resulting group may be in the end - one thing is certain: that the living conditions of those affected by preventive security confinement would have to be significantly superior to those in today's cell prisons. | |||
To reduce and to improve the quality of sites of confinement would also significantly reduce - if no eliminate - the much lamented function of imprisonment as an involuntary college of crime where both techniques and attitudes are being passed on from generation to generation, and where latent state of war among and between the groups that make up the specific prison constellation results in hardening pathologies and character deficiencies that are heightening the risk of crime in the communities after the prisoners' release. Therefore, the abolition of the prison-as-punishment will most likely result in a safety gain in communities. Live will be better and safer for all. | To reduce and to improve the quality of sites of confinement would also significantly reduce - if no eliminate - the much lamented function of imprisonment as an involuntary college of crime where both techniques and attitudes are being passed on from generation to generation, and where latent state of war among and between the groups that make up the specific prison constellation results in hardening pathologies and character deficiencies that are heightening the risk of crime in the communities after the prisoners' release. Therefore, the abolition of the prison-as-punishment will most likely result in a safety gain in communities. Live will be better and safer for all. | ||
=== Priciples for Preventive Detention === | |||
== Punishment without Prisons == | == Punishment without Prisons == | ||