Benutzer:Woozle/Against Penitentiaries: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

Prisons are no way to deal with crime. They are outdated and they are unnecessarily cruel. So they are illegitimate. And should be illegal. So they have to be abolished. Done away with. Wholly. Once and for all. It is clear that prisons are not the way. - But what exactly does it mean to "abolish prisons”? And what does it not mean?

To abolish prisons means to abolish the possibility for a criminal court to sentence an accused person to the punishment of imprisonment. Wherever and whenever that is achieved, prisons are  just not needed anymore. Just like the abolition of the death penalty means to abolish the possibility for a criminal court to sentence an accused person to death. Wherever and whenever that is achieved, execution chambers are just not needed anymore.

Secondly, what the abolition of prisons does not mean is to keep all those prisoners in prison and only change the name of the institution and its inmates to “hospital/patients”, “treatment center/clients”, or “prevention house/residents”. Fraudulent labelling is a real danger, because it is both seductive (as a kind of subversive resistance open to all those who are part of the system and who are either unable or unwilling to accept a radical de-institutionalization) and sometimes hard to distinguish from a valid label (e.g., a correct risk assessment). It is also a real danger, because today’s prisons are fulfilling a hybrid function of both inflicting pain on inmates because of their past crimes (= deprivation of liberty as a punishment)  and preventing them from committing more crimes in the future (= deprivation of liberty as a preventive measure).

== What is to be done? ==