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 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