The common belief that prisons are full of dangerously anti-social people
from whom the rest of us must be protected is a lie. It is a lie so
popular that even to question it is deemed to be an act of the wildest
utopianism. We are taught to regard the imprisonment of the few as some
kind of guarantee of the security of the many. But the many feel far from
secure. And the imprisoned are mainly harmless, or harmful only to the
extent that they are treated as they are.
As a child I remember a cop coming to the school-cum-prison in which I was
being educated-cum-indoctrinated-cum-incarcerated to tell us all about
what would happen if we broke the law. He carried the authority of a man
born only a little too late for a career in the Gestapo and he terrorised
little children with fears of the dire consequences of their wrongdoing.
Boys with stolen sweets in their sticky pockets almost wet themselves. The
cop painted images of dark dungeons presided over by men with the
tolerance of Old Testament gods. We all agreed that this was no place to
end up in. Next time our class went shoplifting the look-out arrangements
were especially vigilant.
Years of being conditioned to fear the awfulness of prison hardships and
indignities has done much to strengthen the unhealthy respect for property
which so pervades the working class. Most people are afraid to take any of
what they themselves produce, not because they believe it really ‘should’
belong to the property-owning minority (the real thieves) but because they
dare not break the thieves' laws. They are scared. The prospect of prison
is supposed to make us scared.
As a means of teaching people to respect private property prisons are
remarkably unsuccessful. Most inmates come out with more knowledge about
how to get away with breaking the law than they had when they entered.
There is no evidence at all that prisons do anything very much except
scare people who are not in them and brutalise those who are.
The tragedy is that most of those in there have been quite well enough
brutalised by the deprivations and degradation of being propertyless in a
property society without needing a prison regime to roughen their edges.
The vast majority of the prison population is locked away for one reason:
they have violated the sanctity of property — taken what does not belong
to them. Why have they done this?
Aside from the odd cases (not infrequently fictitious) of millionaires'
wives roaming around department stores and stealing for attention, the
main reason for stealing, whether from shops or cars or houses or
workplaces is lack of money and lack of the hope of making a mark in
society without gaining things which cost more than can be paid for.
Stealing is a consequence of poverty and of powerlessness. Take away these
factors and who need steal? (Take away money and property and who ‘could’
steal?)
Millions of prisoners are incarcerated across the world simply for
disagreeing with the government. From the tortured wretches in the
hell-holes of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran (apparent international
enemies, but all at one when it comes to the Dictatorship of Property) to
those in Britain who refused to become conscripted killers in time of war
(the "crime" which sent so many socialists to prison) or pay their poll
tax, what are these but prisoners of conscience?
It doesn't pay to stand by your principles under capitalism. In China
there are approximately ten million political prisoners locked away in
camps. Don't hold your breath waiting for the trade boycott.
And yes, there are the few — a small minority even within the minority of
the prison population — who are so damaged, so ruined by their upbringing
and circumstances, and so driven to brutality that they have murdered,
raped and committed unspeakable acts of cruelty and inhumanity. Is the
humane response to brutalise them further by locking them in cells and
punishing them for what society has made them?
It has become a commonplace of mean-minded conservative sneering to deride
those of us who counsel compassion and understanding for those whose deeds
the tabloid press choose to call evil. (Their evil-spotting becomes
remarkably myopic when it comes to nuclear buttons and bombs dropped from
legalised terrorists in the name of international order.)
Well, call me a "do-gooder" (which is preferable to being a do-badder) or
a softy, but the truth is that only spite can justify taking an inadequate
person and making them less adequate by throwing them into the hopeless
despair of imprisonment. These places are an affront to a society which
declares itself with haughty arrogance to be civilised.
They are monuments to the barbarity of a system which cannot afford
compassion and support for the damaged and so buries itself in the futile
and spiteful torments of punishment.
Jt
www.worldsocialism.org
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