Voices of Abolition: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

There ought to be no jails; and if it were not for the fact that the people on the outside are so grasping and heartless in their dealings with the people on the inside, there would be no such institutions as jails .... The only way in the world to abolish crime and criminals is to abolish the big ones and the little ones together. Make fair conditions of life. Give men a chance to live .... Nobody would steal if he could get something of his own some easier way. Nobody will commit burglary when he has a house full. The only way to cure these conditions is by equality. There should be no jails. They do not accomplish what they pretend to accomplish. If you would wipe them out there would be no more criminals than now. They terrorize nobody. They are a blot upon any civilization, and a jail is an evidence of the lack of charity of the people on the outside who make the jails and fill them with the victims of their greed.

The proposal toward which the book points... is...nothing less than that penal imprisonment for crime be abolished.... The author can hardly escape the apprehension that the mass of the public will dismiss this as preposterous and impossible. And yet nothing is more certain in my opinion than that penal imprisonment for crime must cease, and if it be not abolished by statute, it will be by force.

We must destroy the prison, root and branch. That will not solve our problem, but it will be a good beginning.... Let us substitute something. Almost anything will be an improvement. It cannot be worse. It cannot be more brutal and more useless.

The American prison system makes no sense. Prisons have failed as deterrents to crime. They have failed as rehabilitative institutions. What then shall we do? Let us face it! Prisons should be abolished.

The prison cannot be reformed. It rests upon false premises. Nothing can improve it. It will never be anything but a graveyard of good intentions. Prison is not just the enemy of the prisoner. It is the enemy of society.

After a single night at the Nevada State Prison, for example, 23 judges from all over the U.S. emerged "appalled at the homosexuality," shaken by the inmates' "soul-shattering bitterness" and upset by "men raving, screaming and pounding on the walls." Kansas Judge E. Newton Vickers summed up, "I felt like an animal in a cage. Ten years in there must be like 100 or maybe 200." Vickers urged Nevada to "send two bulldozers out there and tear the damn thing to the ground."

—Emanuel Margolis, senior editor, Connecticut Bar Journal, Vol. 46,3(1972)

We need to create an atmosphere in which abolition can take place. It will require a firm alliance between those groups, individuals and organizations which understand that this will not happen overnight. Just as the slavery abolitionist movement extended over decades, we must be prepared to struggle at length. But we must start, we must fuel the fires, we must make the alliance that will gain us victory.

For years, I have condemned the prisons of America. I have always said that the prison system as it exists in America today, should be abolished. As I have grown older, I have seen no reason to change that view.

In response to an unprecedented wave of prison/jail construction across the country,[8] the prestigious National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) issued a policy statement in April 1972, calling for a halt to construction of all prisons, jails, juvenile training schools and detention homes, pending maximum utilization of non-institutional alternatives to incarceration.[9]

In January 1973, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals [10] recommended a ten-year moratorium on prison construction "unless an analysis of the total criminal justice and adult corrections systems produces a clear finding that no alternative is possible." They also recommend the phasing out of mega-institutions at the earliest possible time.

William Nagel, Director of the American Foundation and a former prison administrator, has repeatedly called for a moratorium on building new prisons, jails and training schools. [11]

In the eyes of some, we are already bound together. They have dismissed us as "dreamers, crackpots and sentimentalists." [12] But we have learned that the real "dreamers" are criminal (in)justice planners who place poor and powerless people inside exorbitantly expensive cages for arbitrary periods of time, expecting this cruel process to "rehabilitate" individuals and reduce crime.

Persons in daily touch with society's victims, have more clarity about injustice in our society than they do a vision of what a just system might entail. Most of our energies and responses have been directed toward bringing occasional relief to the victimized—issue by issue, cruelty by cruelty—on both sides of the wall. We cannot profess an innocence of the root causes that give rise to collective injustices of racism, poverty, sexism, ageism and repression which flourish in our society while, at the same time, we continue to relieve individual sufferings. Unequal distribution of power and wealth does not occur in a vacuum. It results from a series of economic, social and cultural arrangements which benefit only a few. [14]

For the abolitionist, justice is not simply a collection of principles or criteria, but the active process of preventing or repairing injustice. [16]

The focus on power is the major issue. The only meaningful way to change the prevailing American system of liberty for the free, justice for some, and inequality for all, is thru shifts in the distribution of power. [18] Any ghetto dweller can link powerlessness to poverty—it is caused by lack of money. They are poor because they have first, insufficient income—and second, no access to methods of increasing that income-that is, no power.[19]

True community requires the exercise of power as a condition for self-esteem and full humanity. The need for potency, which is another way of phrasing the struggle for self-esteem, is common to all of us. "We see its positive form in the rebellion at Attica, where the leader of the revolting prison inmates proclaimed: 'We don't want to be treated any longer as statistics, as numbers .... We want to be treated as human beings, we will be treated as human beings.' "[22]

At Attica the response by those in power to requests for humane treatment was raw force—resulting in a massacre. At the time of the 1971 rebellion, Black and Spanish-speaking prisoners made up 70 percent of the prison population; 50 percent of the prison population received 25 cents a day for their labors; all were fed on a daily budget of 65 cents each in an atmosphere of daily degradation and humiliation charged with racism. And little has changed since 1971. [24]

Abolitionists define victims as all those who have suffered either by collective or individual acts of violence. Victims usually feel powerless to alter their situations since few avenues for relief are available. [25]

Without relief or opportunities for constructive action, feelings of powerlessness can easily turn to rage and violence. [26] Thus, out of frustration, victims often become victimizers themselves, setting off new cycles of punishment and violence. The need to "get even" is satisfied by engaging in vengeful behavior toward the oppressor or a symbol of the oppressor. If no other remedies are apparent, victims of collective social and economic oppression strike back at society and its members. Victims of individual criminal acts strike back by demanding long prison terms or sometimes death for the lawbreaker. In order to break this cycle of violence and vengeance, as well as bring needed relief, all victims must have access to services, resources and redress of grievances.

The voices of victims of violent and repressive societal structures and practices can be heard thru prisoners' perceptions of themselves as "victims of a society which never gave them a chance; victims of a criminal justice system which selects a few to be incarcerated; and victims of a prison system which breeds a bitterness and self-contempt. It is understandable, then," they say, "when a public cries out 'What about the victim?' that the man or woman in the prison cell responds with, 'I am a victim. What about me?' "[27]

Victims of individual criminal behavior are forgotten people, seldom collectively identified as a group with immediate and crucial needs. Rarely are they at the center of public policy, [28] even tho protection of the society is a responsibility of the state. Ironically, most victims of violent crimes are from economically deprived or minority groups; thus, they are twice victimized.

In almost all cases, damage done to the victim is regarded as a private matter, to be dealt with by the victim alone. Draining the lawbreakers' financial resources thru legal expenses and fines or removing them from the community thru incarceration, prevents them from making direct restitution to the victims. Thus one important remedial option for victims and wrongdoers is eliminated. In lieu of restitution to victims, the development of state victim compensation plans is crucial to the victims' well-being, especially that majority who are poor. [29]

The availability of remedies for victims of crime is central to reducing the victims' need for vengeance and retribution, which grows hand in hand with frustration in failing to find relief.[30]

Abolishing the punishment of prison is a fundamental step in abolishing the present punitive criminal (in)justice systems. [32] Helping both wrongdoer and wronged to resolve their differences thru mediation, restitution and other reconciliatory practices, are alternatives we can build into the new system of justice.

Restitution offers the broadest range of possibilities on which to base a new system of justice. Restitution as we define it requires the wrongdoer to restore the victim to his/her situation before the criminal act occurred. But what is referred to as "creative restitution" can go far beyond that temporary response. It is described as a life-long voluntary task that requires "a situation be left better than before the offense was committed ... beyond what any law or court requires, beyond what friends and family expect, beyond what a victim asks, beyond what conscience or super-ego demands . . . only a 'second mile' is restitution in its broadest meaning of a complete restoration of good will and harmony." [33]

The abolitionist's task is clear—to prevent the system from masking its true nature. The system dresses itself up: we undress the system. [36] We strip it down to the reality: the cage and the key. We demystify. We ask the simple but central political question: "Who decides?" We raise the moral issue: "By what right?" We challenge the old configurations of power. We begin to change the old, begin to create the new.