A world without incarceration and police may seem a long way off, but there are plenty of things we can change on the way to building a safer world. Amy Hall examines some of them.
1 Stop criminalizing poverty
Poor and marginalized people are the most targeted by legislation around things like homelessness and theft. On the African continent alone, at least 42 countries have laws, often dating back to colonial rule, on ‘petty offences’ such as loitering or being a ‘vagabond’. In England and Wales, a recent survey found that a quarter of the prison population were homeless before entering state custody and over two-thirds were unemployed.
2 Meeting basic needs
Poverty, inequality and exposure to violence are among the major contributing factors to criminal and harmful behaviour. So why not focus resources on meeting people’s needs for safety and decent food, housing, education and healthcare? Abolition is about building a society where prisons and the police are obsolete because we have developed new ways to stop harm and violence happening in the first place.
3 Legalize drugs
It is estimated that 2.5 million people are in prison worldwide for drug offences – over 22 per cent for possession of drugs for personal use. An additional 1.6 million are estimated to have drug related convictions.1 But prison doesn’t stop people using or selling drugs. These people should be released, have their convictions erased and the money that would be spent on their imprisonment and legal cases put towards accessible treatment programmes and provisions that focus on safety and not punishment.
4 Decriminalize sex work
Research across various countries has consistently found that criminalization makes sex workers more vulnerable to violence as they’re seen as ‘easy targets… unlikely to receive help from the police’. Criminalization also means that sex workers are more at risk of harassment and violence from law enforcement officers and less able to organize collectively. Convictions not only wrap them up in the criminal justice system, but also make it harder to find other employment.
5 Shrink prisons
More and bigger prisons are not the answers to overcrowding. Extra prison space is followed by increases in numbers of prisoners. Instead we can get behind campaigns to stop building and expanding prisons – including prisons by other names, like migrant detention centres – and push for them to be shut down, and prisoners released.
6 Defund and reduce police forces
The police act as a gateway into the criminal justice system. An increase in police officers leads to higher prison populations. Police budgets need to be cut and the money redirected into social good. A further step is to abandon legislation that expands the power of law enforcement.
7 Disarm and demilitarize
Weapons boost the police’s ability to maim and kill, to say nothing of quashing dissent. Guns escalate tense situations and even ‘less lethal’ weapons – such as tasers – can lead to devastating consequences and deaths. A start can be made by removing arms from the police in settings such as schools and hospitals. Disarming police would ideally happen alongside disarming wider society, but many other public workers – such as paramedics and firefighters – frequently enter dangerous situations without weapons. In Iceland, where there is a gun for every three people, police do not carry them on regular patrols. Schemes that supply military equipment to police forces could be closed down, as well as military training programmes for cops.
8 Take down the prison-industrial-complex
A vast, multi-million-dollar network of state and corporate interests overlap in the big business of surveillance, policing and prisons. As Corporate Watch have noted: ‘Architects and engineers pore over designs of cells and wings, construction companies build the structures and a range of other businesses create locks, alarm systems and fences.’ In the US alone, it’s been estimated that 4,000 companies profit from mass incarceration. We can campaign for the divestment of money from this web of beneficiaries.
9 Invest in alternatives
Across the globe, people have found their own ways to address and prevent violence and harm in their communities. But often this work lacks the funding and support needed to make it sustainable and scale it up. Community-based initiatives also need the same time and space to make mistakes – and learn from them – that is given to the criminal justice system.
10 Build collective strength
While working for large-scale change we can also practice everyday abolition. This requires a radical shift in mindset when it comes to how we deal with problems in our communities, including how we approach relationships with the people around us – and how we work collectively. We can also work together to fight patriarchy, white supremacy, structural classism and the other roots of much of the harm we face. After all, as abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba has said: ‘Everything worthwhile is done with other people.’
This article is from the March-April 2022 issue of New Internationalist.
Amy Hall
Amy is a co-editor at New Internationalist.
Anthony J. Nocella II, Mark Seis, and Jeff Shantz
Classic Writings in Anarchist Criminology
A Historical Dismantling of Punishment and Domination
Introduction: The Origins and Importance of Classic Anarchist Criminology
Why Criminology and Criminal Justice Studies Need an Anarchist Perspective
How Anarchism Contributes to Criminology and Criminal Justice
Why Have Mainstream Criminology and Criminal Justice Ignored Anarchism?
Part One: William Godwin (1756–1836)
Chapter 1: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice Book VII: Of Crimes And Punishments
CHAPTER I: LIMITATIONS OF THE DOCTRINE OF PUNISHMENT WHICH RESULT FROM THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY
CHAPTER II: GENERAL DISADVANTAGES OF COERCION
CHAPTER III: OF THE PURPOSES OF COERCION
CHAPTER IV: OF THE APPLICATION OF COERCION
Part Two: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865)
Chapter 2: What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Rights and of Government
§ 1.—Property as a Natural Right.
§ 2.—Occupation, as the Title to Property.
§ 3.—Civil Law as the Foundation and Sanction of Property.
Part Three: Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
Chapter 3: The Program of the International Brotherhood
Chapter 4: Ethics: Morality of the State
Part Four: August Spies (1855–1887)
Chapter 5: Address of August Spies
Part Five: Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921)
Chapter 6: Law and Authority: An Anarchist Essay
Chapter 7: Are Prisons Necessary?
Part Six: Michael Schwab And Joseph E. Gary (Schwab: 1853–1898; Gary: 1821–1906)
Chapter 8: A Convicted Anarchist’s Reply to Professor Lombroso
Part Seven: Errico Malatesta (1853–1932)
Chapter 10: Class Struggle or Class Hatred?: “People” and “Proletariat”
Chapter 11: Further Thoughts on the Question of Crime
Part Eight: Voltairine De Cleyre (1866–1912)
Chapter 12: Crime and Punishment
Part Nine: Lucy Parsons (1853–1942)
Chapter 13: The Principles of Anarchism
Part Ten: Alexander Berkman (1870–1936)
Chapter 15: Law and Government
Part Eleven: Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
Chapter 16: The Traffic in Women
Dedication
This book is dedicated to everyone, human and nonhuman, that is locked up, tortured, and confined in every jail, detention, prison, cage, tank, handcuff, cell, padded room, unit, and chain.
Acknowledgements
We, the editors, would like to thank everyone at AK Press for believing in and supporting this book. We could not think of a better press to publish this book with than AK Press. We would also like to thank our academic departments for their support and friendship. Thank you to our human and nonhuman family and friends. Nothing is possible without others. We are all dependent on others; no one is an island. Thank you also to those today and through history who identified as anarchists and fought for the liberation and freedom for all. Finally, we would like to thank Richard J. White, Jason Del Gandio, Luis A. Fernandez, Madelynne Kinoshita, Amber E. George, and Erik Juergensmeyer who wrote reviews of the book prior to publication.
Foreword
Ruth Kinna
One of the exhibits in the Kropotkin House Museum in Dmitrov, near Moscow, is a pencil or charcoal sketch by Kropotkin depicting him in his prison cell. The space is small, dark, and frightening and it perfectly captures the isolation and bleakness of incarceration.
Kropotkin was hardly the only anarchist to gain personal experience of the prison system or to use his reflections on his imprisonment to think more broadly about the operation of the bourgeois justice system and the punishment regimes that are integral to it. As the editors of this pioneering collection argue, anarchist critique draws anarchists magnetically toward its analysis. That is not to say that anarchism is defined by criminology (understood in a narrow sense) but that the anarchist refusal to recognize the justice of our current political arrangements effectively criminalizes the doctrines anarchists espouse and encourages anarchists to place questions of order at the heart of their social theory. Anarchists often wrote about prison because, like Alexander Berkman, they were deeply affected by their experiences. Anarchists analyzed crime, punishment, discipline, and social compliance because of the critiques of power, domination, and authority they advanced.
Looking again at the substantial body of work that anarchists produced on crime and criminology reminds us of the practical force of anarchist critique. The eloquent arguments that anarchists put to their accusers were intended to highlight the translation of legal norms into policy. When the Chicago anarchists explained the tyrannical nature of the property laws enshrined in the constitution and protected by the state, they were not simply making a technical point about justice and injustice. They were explaining the consequences of the power asymmetries that the justice system upheld for millions of dispossessed and exploited peoples. It did not follow, Albert Parsons argued, “that because a man is a judge he is also just.” Leaving questions of individual virtue aside, the American courts were packed: “candidates for judgeships, throughout the United States” were “named by corporation and monopoly influences.” More than one Chief Justice had been appointed to the bench of the US Supreme Court at the behest of “leading railway magnates.” No wonder, then, that justice was systematically denied to the poor and unemployed. Parsons described the streets of Chicago filled with “30,000 men in compulsory idleness; destitution, misery and want upon every hand” facing “the First Regiment out in a street-riot drill … practicing a street-riot drill for the purpose of mowing down these wretches … the working people are to be slaughtered in cold blood, and … men are drilling upon the streets of the cities of America to butcher their fellow men when they demand the right to work and partake of the fruits of their labor.” How far things have changed since 1887 is a moot point. Of course, situations vary across the globe and unemployment is only one of the issues that attracts aggressive policing. But the thrust of Parsons’s analysis is about the institutionalization of injustice, the legality of violent repression and the unreasonable measures deployed to regulate disadvantage.
Revisiting anarchist criminology also draws attention to the alternatives that anarchists propose when they attack the prevailing order. The anarchist critique of bourgeois justice was targeted, not generalized. Indeed, it was predicated on an alternative conception of justness. Those who followed Proudhon described justice as immanent, and understood it as a contingent idea, simultaneously a condition and a practice that emerged from individual reflection or reason and social engagement. Like Nietzsche, anarchists denied the possibility of making absolute, universal moral judgments and the possibility that justice could be externally imposed. Justice emerged as part of a social process. Thus in attacking the unfairness and corruption of bourgeois justice systems, anarchists did not dismiss the possibility that rules could be broken, that norms could be transgressed or that harms could be inflicted. The point that Kropotkin made in “Law and Authority” was that military, clerical, and political elites adopted community rules and customs and gave them a new spin. Law corrupted established social practices and fixed them authoritatively so that they could always be enforced coercively and changed only when it suited the ruling elites.
Two of the pressing questions that this important and unique collection raises, then, are about the persistence of the social relations that historical anarchists decried as partial, tyrannous, and deadening and the conditions of justice that anarchists preferred in order to root alternative just practices.
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