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 In the course of history, punishment has played a central role ever since the emergence of proto-states, and the function of symbolic reprobation has been associated with certain forms of hard treatment. For a long time, public executions were the most conventional symbols of symbolic reprobation. Later on, the prison assumed this role. There is no natural law that can prevent coming changes. Other forms of social reaction to harmful behavior will become conventional expressions of symbolic reprobation in the future. Even if we suppose punishment to persist for a long time to come, one thing is certain: the prison has not been there forever, and it will not be there forever. It is but one form of punishment - and forms of punishment come and go.
-== Punishment without Prisons ==
-Even with the safety of the population guaranteed through a responsible system of preventive detention - both drastically smaller and better than present-day prisons-as-punishment - there might remain a need to see a criminal suffer. An example might help. Imagine a young man of 29 years, diagnosed as physically and mentally healthy, an educator in a kindergarten, who is found to have abused and brutally killed three children over the time of five years. Or a cold-blooded professional killer hired by the mafia or a drug cartel for the necessary eliminations of traitors, enemies, and unfair competitors, who, after a number of years on the job, is finally being arrested. In both cases, public security can be regained by ordering the dangerous individuals to be locked up in preventive detention. For questions of safety, that could be it. Even if we know that such a purely instrumental reaction will be seen as unsatisfactory by victims' families and beyond. In the case of a successful insanity defense such an exemption from criminal responsibilization is a long-standing tradition and the victims' discontent is seen as a sad, but unavoidable fact which  the criminal justice system, in those cases, cannot do anything about.
-In the case of mentally sane offenders, though, not only victims' families feel a strong need for something more than just instrumental reactions to happen. It is one thing to forego punishment in the case of mentally ill offenders. It is another to do so with the sane and cold-blooded authors of heinous crimes. This becomes clearer when we imagine the case that either the child killer or the mafia killer could be set free after experts confirm a successful psychological treatment and come to the conclusion that the person in question does not pose a risk of continued offending anymore.
-Most people would probably not consider it just if the offenders were to walk out of their preventive confinement without having had to "pay" for what they had done. There is a strong and very widespread emotion that those who committed heinous acts should be responded to by the intentional infliction of retributive harm upon them. One might even say that common sense and jurisprudence both believe in a kind of natural law logic that crimes must be responded to with punishment: crime requires punishment. Not only the reduction of risks.
-But what exactly is punishment and what are the needs it responds to? First of all, punishment is "the intentional delivery of pain" (Nils Christie), it is a strong affirmation of a negative value judgement concerning the punished person's past violation of an important norm. For the punished person, punishment is - in the words of South African judge Thokozile Masipa uttered at the occasion of the sentencing of Oscar Pistorius in 2016 - "unpleasant, it is inconvenient, it is painful, it is certainly not what you would chose to do.” And that is the very sense of it.
-By its emphatic negation of the offender's deed and by making the offender suffer for what he did, the court declares in the name of state and society that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated, and that offenders will have to live with the consequences. Punishment sends a strong symbolic message to the offender and to the public, but also to the victims of crime. It is a symbolic response to an event in the past, and a response of sorts to affirm the continuing validity of the broken norm.
-Punishment is a specific reaction because of its expressive symbolism. Its fourfold meaning lies - at last according to Joel Feinberg (1970/1994) - in manifesting an authoritative disavowal of the act in question, a symbolic nonacquiescence to what happened, but it also emphatically reaffirms the law, and last not least it relieves others of suspicion and blame by way of concentrating guilt on those who are found to deserve the punishment. The expressive symbolism of punishment aspires to reach three target groups (Günther 2002: 218):  (1) the victims of crime (who are reassured that the community does not regard the event as simply bad luck or fate, but as the result of unjustified and intolerable actions), (2) the offenders (who are told that their actions are seen as responsible for that what happened and that their behaviour is seen as strongly reprehensible), and (3) the general public (who is being told that the negative consequences are being defined not as accidental, but as an injustice that cannot be tolerated and that this injustice is neither to be blamed on the victim nor on the public).
-In the course of history, punishment has played a central role ever since the emergence of proto-states, and the function of symbolic reprobation has been associated with certain forms of hard treatment. For a long time, public executions were the most conventional symbols of symbolic reprobation. Later on, the prison assumed this role. There is no natural law that can prevent coming changes. Other forms of social reaction to harmful behavior will become conventional expressions of symbolic reprobation in the future. Even if we suppose punishment to persist for a long time to come, one thing is certain: the prison has not been there forever, and it will not be there forever. It is but one form of punishment - and forms of punishment come and go.
-=== Security without Prisons ===
-Even if we can get rid of prison-as punishment, by finding other forms of social reactions to crime, there would still remain a big question pertaining to the - maybe few - very dangerous criminals. Even if one raised the minimum age of criminal responsibility, found alternatives to prison for women offenders, and de-criminalized large parts of non-violent property offenses there would still be a number of crimes and criminals that would challenge any abolitionist imagination. Supposing the availability of non-custodial alternatives for most or all non-violent delinquents, there would still remain the question of how to deal with cases of extreme horror and/or dangerousness. Similarly to the well-known shanty song with its insistent repetition of the question "What shall we do with the drunken sailor", any abolitionist proposal will invariably be confronted with the same question pertaining to the dangerous few, and that would raise questions like these: What shall we do with the serial killer? What shall we do with the child molester? What shall we do with the roaming rapist? What shall we do wit the genocidical general? What shall we do with the ex-dictators? The question that is puzzling all participants in criminal justice reform discussions is therefore completely legitimate: Would societies be less safe without prisons?
-The answer is: Not necessarily - and there is a real chance that they would become even safer, if they learn to distinguish between punishment and security and if they act accordingly. Today, punishment by imprisonment is by and large expected to take care of both the retributive aspect (looking back at the offender's crime in the past) and the preventive one (which envisages risks from the offender's future behavior). For all practical purposes, "punishment by imprisonment" is thought to automatically include the answer to the community's security needs as far as risks from the (now imprisoned) delinquents are concerned. Once the serving prisons are not around any more, the security question has to be treated independently of punishment, as a matter in its own right. For some of the most definitely dangerous individuals - the archetype of whom is the serial killer - the absence of the prison-as-punishment option will invariably revive calls for capital punishment (or extrajudicial elimination). Alternatively it is conceivable (and from our point of view also preferable) to resort to decreeing the arrest and involuntary confinement of such individuals on the grounds of preventive detention, regardless of criminal liability and the question of punishment. Whereas this aspect can hide behind the question of punishment as long as there is the prison-as-punishment, the removal of this specific sanction forces the highly delicate matter of preventive detention out in the open.
-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.
 ==== How much preventive detention? ====
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 The authors add an important caveat:
 "The question remains, however, whether it is possible to articulate principles taht cover all cases of preventive detention in such a way as to mitigate possible abuses of power on ground of public protection. It imposes deprivation of liberty ahead of wrongdoings; grants considerable discretion to criminal justice professionals and to the courts; it is based upon predictions of dubious reliability; and it risks creating arbitrariness in its varied forms and practices (Ibid, 170). Some day, we may have to abolish preventive detention as well.
+=== Beyond Punishment ===
+In other words: while one way of getting rid of prisons is to ("simply") replace one punishment by another - this is what the discourse about "alternatives" is mostly about - a more ambitious (but also more promising) one is that of moving beyond punishment altogether, and to renounce to punishment, but not to its three-dimensional restorative functions. If we want our societies not only to survive, but improve the living conditions for each and all of their members, then one of our central concerns should be to get rid of punishment without renouncing to its positive and necessary functions. To put it more clearly: how can we - after a serious offense has harmed the victims, affected the offender, and disturbed public peace - manage to fulfill the functions of punishment (i.e. to send a message that empowers the victims, teaches the offender, and restores community spirit) without resorting to punishment? Can we activate the healing elements of punishment without resorting to punishment?
+To cut out corporal punishment and to question the necessity and legitimacy of the prison is a risky thing to do. It touches the archtypes of punishment and invariably puts into question the soundness of underlying concepts. Will a criminal justice system without the prison still be a real criminal justice system? Can, what is left over as sanctions, justly be called a punishment? If we can do without prisons - can't we just renounce punishment in general? Is punishment really a social and ethical necessity? Once there, our conventional notions of "crime and punishment" might begin to crumble, leading us to question the very concepts of crime, guilt, and - not to forget - free will and individual responsibility.
+As Willem de Haan (2010) suggests, these questions should be taken seriously by everybody who cares about the quality of life in contemporary societies, including academic criminologists. In his words:
+:"Criminology needs to rid itself of those theories of punishment which assume there are universal qualities in forms of punishment or assume a straightforward connection between crime and punishment. Given the perseverance of this conventional notion of 'punishment' as essentially a 'good' against an 'evil', any effort at changing common-sense notions of 'crime' and 'crime control' requires a reconceptualization of both concepts: 'crime' and 'punishment'."
+To discuss prison abolition, one does not have to answer all the fundamental questions, but it cannot hurt to think about a world without punishment for a minute. Evidently, society would not be able to survive for any relevant length of time if reouncing punishment were to imply that rape and murder would henceforth not elicit any collective response anymore. To renounce ''any actus contrarius'' to any future crime would give carte blanche to those who delight in domination and exploitation of the less powerful, and it would probably lead to the most gruesome excesses of private vengeance and retaliation. In other words, societies would not stand a laissez-faire attitude towards murder, rape, or theft. They would disintegrate.
+This is the expressive symbolism of restorative justice as a means to repair the harm caused by crime to victims, the community, the offender, and the normative order. Restorative justice takes into consideration all three dimensions of harm, but it does so with a different procedure and emphasis. The procedure is not top-down like in a criminal court, and the basic questions are not "which law has been violated, who is the offender, and what punishment does he deserve?", but rather "what harm has been done, what has to be done about this harm, whose responsibility is it to do something about it, and do we go on from here?". The emphasis is on a collective effort to assess the damage and to repair it as good as one can with a view to the peculiarities of the case and the people involved. Whereas the criminal law dramatizes the violation of the state's norm and authority, restorative justice processes dramatize the harm and the need to make amends and restore peace and confidence. Where the criminal court individualizes, putting all the blame and the court-inflicted pain upon the culprit, restorative justice collectivizes in that it focuses on the situation and its resolution, not on one individual.
+This is not to say that the offender plays no role. He or she is being called upon, and taken very seriously, but not with the sole aim of accusation and condemnation, but with the aim of creating awareness of the harm done, and of the responsibility that he or she might be able to acknowledge and the tasks he or she might be able to shoulder in the process of healing. The culprit is also seen as a person with virtues and failings, with guilt, responsiblity, but also with a need for healing.
+If that sounds like social romanticism, then it be. As a matter of fact, social romanticism has always played an important role in the attempts of mankind to progress on the way of civilization (remember the role of Harriet Beecher-Stowe's rather schmaltzy novel about Uncle Tom's Cabin in the fight against slavery?). But this does not mean that restorative justice is just an idea with no practical value. In some corners of the world (that might seem remote from a Eurocentrist perspective) restorative justice is a consolidated practice with impressive outcomes. In England, an empirical test of restorative procedures as compared to classical criminal procedures has produced astonishing results in favour of the new approach.
+From the perspective of restorative justice, criminal cases can be seen as conflicts that have been stolen by professionals from those immediately concerned (Christie). But when victims, offenders, and community members meet under the guidance of an experienced facilitator - not a judge - to decide how to deal with a "problematic situation" (Hulsman) the results can be healing for victims (and offenders), restoring in not only material terms, and even "transformational" in the sense of creating a better situation than that out of which the crime originated (Morris).
+In today's world, restorative justice is not being implemented as a wholesale replacement for prisons. In most settings, it is offered - as a healing device - alongside or even after a criminal trial and prison sentence (for an example of post-sentencing restorative justice see the documentary "Beyond Punishment" by Hubertus Siegert (2015). This reminds of the additional, rather than substitutional role of the penitentiary in the age of capital punishment. But just as the prison was increasingly instrumental in abolishing capital punishment in large parts of the world, restorative justice has all the potential of doing likewise with the prison. If and how this could work for the good of the societies that adopt restorative justice depends on the force-field of social interests and influences. No reform is without risk of being kidnapped, transformed, or betrayed (cf. Christie). But to see a door in the prison wall and not go through it because of fear of freedom - who would knowingly advocate that?
+For most of human history societies did not know prisons - nor did they know punishment as a standard reaction to crime by the state and its legal authorities - and still they succeeded in the task of re-affirming the validity of the norm broken by the perpetrator. What today is called crime was seen as a rupture of the natural order and/or as a wrong done to another person, but not as a crimen laesae maiestatis, an insubordination to the will of the ruler. This is why the dominant mode of "criminal justice" in earlier ages was one that could do without punishment. Justice was procedural and restorative instead of punitive-retributive. To react to crimes was an art that required communicative skills and a profound knowledge of both the respective customs as well as the concerned individuals and families. Conflict regulation needed patience, and the continuous mobilization of good will on the part of all those who were somehow affected by the event. In the end - if everything went well - peace and security were restored, the boundaries of acceptable behaviour were re-affirmed (or slightly re-drawn), and all expressive functions normally attributed to punishment were fulfilled, but without resort to punishment. It is time to remember this almost forgotten fact and to move on to a form of society that is free at least from both capital and prison punishments, and - hopefully - at last also from punishment as such.
 == Summing it up ==