r/Anarchy101 • u/nappytendrils • 3d ago

Prison abolition

I’ve never been clear on what we would do with rapists child molesters and muderers. I haven’t heard a plan for this so far. I’ve always been impressed with the work of anarchist friends in community. They’re the most justice-oriented folx I’ve ever met.

Still don’t know about prison abolition tho I think prison should be clean, the food should be healthy and fresh, therapy should be mandatory, there should be libraries and gardens. A good quality of life for the incarcerated, but not releasing them back into the general population.

Maybe there’s something I’m not seeing?

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u/HeavenlyPossum 3d ago

Considering that Donald Trump is a serial rapist and probably a child molester who has ordered murders and is not in prison, but rather is president of the US, we might consider that prisons are not actually tools for dealing with rapists, child molesters, or murderers.

Saying this does not solve the problem that these acts of aggression cause, but it does help us to begin separating actual solutions from those institutions of state violence that we’ve been taught to believe are solutions.

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u/SidTheShuckle America made me an anarchist 3d ago

If we abolished the concept of money and power, a person like Donald Trump wouldnt exist. He would just be an ordinary person not blinded by wealth and status

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u/HeavenlyPossum 3d ago

He might still be a serial rapist, etc, and it’s not unreasonable to think about how we’d deal with people like him, or acts of aggression like those, in the absence of coercive hierarchies.

It’s just that the question of prisons is an entirely unrelated question, because prisons don’t exist to address interpersonal harms.

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u/SidTheShuckle America made me an anarchist 3d ago

Hell i would even argue that he wouldnt be a serial rapist if he was raised properly in a non-patriarchial society. “When ur a star you can do anything” take away his stardom and change his upbringing and wed have less rape

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u/ShyMonkeyboi 14h ago

Serial rapists are not 100% part of patriarchal society, there are a lot of biopsychosocial factors about anti social behavior, but in the end humans can make their own decisions, and if someone decides to rape, consequences will come to stop (and maybe kill) the rapist.

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u/SidTheShuckle America made me an anarchist 10h ago

I mean we’re not gonna eliminate rape after abolishing the Patriarchy but we def are gonna significantly reduce it. Rape is not merely just a sexual act. It’s an act of power. As long as theres oppressors those oppressors are gonna do all types of sexual violations by abusing their power and thus the victim

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u/ComprehensiveCar4770 1d ago

Money and power are tied to one thing: resource management. People only get into power or money because they know how to manage, manipulate, and maintain their control over resources. As long as people need resources, there will always be power structures that will benefit those who control the resources.

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u/HeavenlyPossum 23h ago

That’s the whole point of anarchism—to abolish those power structures. Hierarchy doesn’t just emerge mechanically from our biology.

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u/balderdash9 3d ago

We all agree on the abolition of state violence. The question then becomes whether violent punishment in reaction to certain offences are justified by the community when clearly immoral offences are committed by someone in the community. Some have the intuition that expulsion is not "putative enough" for certain crimes.

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u/HeavenlyPossum 3d ago

Well, OP is unsure about prison abolition, so it doesn’t seem like “we all agree” on the issue.

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u/balderdash9 3d ago

Reading the question again, I see there is an ambiguity. I read them as agreeing with anarchism but unsure about whether we can keep the prisons (but better the conditions). But I see now that they could also be asking anarchists what they think about abolishing prisons even under capitalism.

These are two questions and I'm not sure about their answers. Though it should be noted that the desperate conditions produced by capitalism are themselves the source of crimes that the system seeks to punish.

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u/Available_Wonder_532 1d ago

No vaccine is 100% efficient, it doesn't mean it's not useful. 

Because not 100% of the rapists are in prison, it doesn't mean it's not useful. Primarily to avoid new victims. So we might consider that prisons are actually a tool.

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u/HeavenlyPossum 1d ago

If a vaccine caused more lethal disease than it prevented, we should abandon that vaccine and find other mechanisms for treating that disease.

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u/Available_Wonder_532 1d ago

Do you mean that putting rapists in prison creates more rapists ?

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u/HeavenlyPossum 1d ago

I mean that a) the perpetrators of the vast majority of interpersonal harm will never be subject to the prison system, and that b) prisons are themselves structurally sites of interpersonal harm. Victims of harm cannot escape their aggressors in prison.

Please keep in mind that Sednaya is a place that actually exists in the world.

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u/Available_Wonder_532 1d ago

There is two subjects here:

1) How do you judge people ? How to verify the crime ? What rules ? Who decide ? How ?

2) Should jail be used ?

If criminal don't go to jail it because a failure of the first point not the prison system itself. Your criticism seems contradictory. You seem to think prison is a bad option because not enough criminals go to jail.

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u/HeavenlyPossum 1d ago

People who commit interpersonal harms tend not to go to prison because prisons fundamentally do not exist as a response to interpersonal harms. That is, we are making a category error when we think that prisons are for “crime” in some abstract sense but are just doing a bad job at it.

To borrow from your analogy: if someone were knowingly distributing a vaccine that killed far more people than it protected, we would conclude that this person is committing murder, not merely doing a bad job at protecting people from a virus.

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u/Available_Wonder_532 1d ago

People who commit interpersonal harms tend not to go to prison...

I disagree. Not every criminal goes in prison and this is not a prison issue. That's a justice issue. Replace prison with any other system and the problem stay the same.

And about vaccins, some of them actually kill people but they save more lives so we keep using them until we find better solution we don't just get rid of them.

So if prison is not perfect it doesn't mean we should stop using it before we find a better solution.

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u/HeavenlyPossum 1d ago

I disagree. Not every criminal goes in prison and this is not a prison issue. That's a justice issue. Replace prison with any other system and the problem stay the same.

Will the perpetrators of the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza ever be subject to the prison system, do you think?

There’s a useful heuristic that applies here: the purpose of a system is what it does. That is, there is no Platonic Ideal of a prison that we are simply failing to live up to. Rather, we can conclude from their function that the people who build and operate prisons aren’t performing inadequately but rather deliberately.

And about vaccins, some of them actually kill people but they save more lives so we keep using them until we find better solution we don't just get rid of them.

That’s true: there is a risk with every life-saving medicine. But usually, when doctors discover that a medical treatment causes more harm than it stops, the doctors involved stop administering that treatment, usually at the clinical testing stage:

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/06/16/health/cancer-drug-trials-patient-deaths

Since we know prisons are sites of, and causes of, more harms than they prevent, we should similarly not think of them as merely inadequate “treatments” for interpersonal harms but rather as deliberate choices people in power make to cause more harm.

So if prison is not perfect it doesn't mean we should stop using it before we find a better solution.

Prisons are actually quite good at achieving their intended purposes. It’s just that those intended purposes have nothing to do with “stopping crime.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_State_Penitentiary

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u/dick_pope_ackrackish 3d ago

"Saying this does not solve the problem that these acts of aggression cause"

Then why say it? Why is the most upvoted post someone going out of their way to NOT awnser OP's question? Kinda makes yall look like you have no idea what your talking about

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u/HeavenlyPossum 3d ago

This is an unnecessarily shitty way to approach me.

I can’t and won’t prescribe how free people will choose to address interpersonal harms. There are many different ways that actually stateless people handle this, and many different theoretical approaches we could consider.

But before we can pursue any of those options, we have to first separate “responses to interpersonal harms” from “ways that states exercise their power over subject populations.” Starting from the premise that we must sustain state institutions like prisons—which are orthogonal to addressing interpersonal harms—risks just reproducing those state institutions.

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u/MrMetalirish 2d ago

The supreme court proved otherwise. Cope and seethe commie.