Benutzer:Woozle/Against Penitentiaries: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

Firstly, what the abolition of prisons does not mean is that there will be no punishment for crimes. There can be and should be punishment for crimes. 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.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.