[Cerchio] against prisons

Against Prisons
by Catherine Baker

This text is a talk which was given by Catherine Baker at the Abolitionist
Congress in Amsterdam in June, 1985. Catherine Baker has written several
novels and is the author of two books denouncing obligatory schooling:
Insoumission a l'ecole obligatoire (Barrault, 1985), and Les cahiers au feu
(Barrault, 1988). She can be contacted by writing to: Catherine Baker, 25
boul. de Belleville, 75011 Paris, France.)

We are living in a cynical time, when things have become simplified as far
as prisons are concerned. The days when we could imagine that convicts would
"become better" are over. No one dares to adopt this discourse, and even the
stupidest penologists and the journalists who echo such nonsense recognize
that even if the learning forced upon a few very rare prisoners gives them
the means to better express their desires, how much more beneficial it would
be if it was given to the same exceptional cases outside prison.

Today it can be said aloud that dungeons are dungeons cages are cages, and
that nothing can be done about those who are locked in, since the main thing
is not to do them good but that offenders be banished inside the national
borders. They are purely and simply suppressed. This is why short prison
sentences appear inept and totally meaningless.

Long prison sentences, on the contrary, correspond perfectly to a collective
desire to murder. We eliminate bothersome people, like any crook would. If
the death penalty has disappeared in some countries, it was because it was
too exceptional. It was not that death itself seemed indecent, but all the
fuss that was made about it. Even those who call themselves revolutionaries
always calmly imagine death for the enemies of their freedom; from the army
general to the terrorist, through the perpetrator of a hold-up and the
policeman, everyone agrees with the saying "You can't make an omelette
without breaking eggs."

The death of those who prevent us from living has never bothered anyone,
provided people don't make a fuss about it. If the citizens of Philadelphia
expressed their discontent in May 1985, it was not because the police
dropped an incendiary bomb on a house full of people whom the neighbors had
denounced for living too squalidly, but because in doing so, they destroyed
part of the neighborhood.

So prison is the ideal kind of death, because it eliminates en masses those
whom society could only physically kill in very small numbers. It economizes
emotion.

However there is an enormous problem, a fundamental problem that makes this
eliminatory system inadequate for modern society. Apart from those who
commit suicide (who therefore take "the law" into their own hands), the
rest, in most countries, eventually get out of jail.

This is not the place to analyze how we have arrived at this aberration, but
prison only misses its vocation by a hair's breadth: the death it dispenses
only lasts a few years or decades. Prison confinement seldom takes its logic
to its conclusion, if only because society must recognize a scale of prison
sentences that corresponds to its own scale of values. In emotional terms,
crime has a monetary value: cheating on your wife is not punishable by law,
whereas cheating your business partner makes you liable to be brought to
trial; "self-defense" is "legitimate" when policemen confront thieves, but
not the other way around; killing in order to steal is more serious than
killing out of anger; after all, you would be sentenced to a longer term for
stealing twenty million dollars than for stealing one million. These are all
common examples of the commercial value that judges attribute to offenses.

So prisoners get out. Imprisonment will, at the very least, have got them
"riled up". No sensible person could stand the thought of living with people
who have been deliberately driven to anguish and made violent and enraged.
So not only does prison not protect "decent people" from criminals, it daily
releases delinquents who are labeled and provoked as such into unimprisoned
society. It is absolutely mistaken to think that prison make anyone feel
secure. The well-being in a few people's minds that sometimes results from
the existence of prisons does not correspond to a desire for security at
all, but of one for vengeance. What they want is n of prison but punishment,
and this is why they are not at all opposed to prison abolition, as long as
prisons are replaced by "something better".

Public opinion does not exist; it simply hides the pressure groups that the
media echo: thus, little by little, the viewpoint of a few administrators is
taken up in the media to the effect that prison is useless, and above all
that it is out of date: it is not a good investment. During the riots of May
1985 in France, newspapers that were considered the most reactionary and
which the Parisien Libere , for example, placed on the front page in big
print: "It is true that prison is useless, but what should it be replaced
with?"

Thus, prison abolition follows the trend of history. There is no doubt that
questioning the merits of prison has been widespread during the last ten
years, not just among "specialists" (criminologists, sociologists,
educators, and psychologists), but also among their usual outlets
(journalists and politicians).

It is important to be aware that this Congress is modern. We are apparently
slowly reaching a stage where prison will be eliminated in 80% of all cases,
for which alternative measures are being sought. For the remaing 20%
considered dangerous, the eliminatory aspect is strengthened, either by
inventing "non-traumatic" death penalties (death by injection), or by
actually imprisoning delinquents for life, or by classifying them as
mentally ill people who either can or cannot be returned to society cured
and calmed down. The agreement that is being reached regarding the need to
begin the abolition of prisons with that of short prison sentences takes
little notice of this affirmation's immediate corollary, which consists of
imprisoning the remaining 20% (or 30% or 3%; one can imagine the kind of
bargaining the figures will be the subject of) under the heading of
"dangerous". As scapegoats and symbols these people would be the playthings
of a sinister mise en scène that would be even more hate-filled than
today's. One cannot consider freeing minor offenders without implying that
offenders that are considered serious must not be freed.

When there is talk of reducing prison terms, once again it is to "soften the
punishment", to make the prison sentence "more bearable". But we should
question the absurdity of wanting to reduce the suffering that is inflicted
precisely by the justice system.

Reformists, whether they are animated by mere profitability or by so-called
humanitarian reasons, have in common their modern outlook. It is reformism
that allows prisons to endure. Today, making prisons "more livable" means
making them better adapted. Not better adapted to people, however, but
better adapted to our times. Modernization of punishment can only be carried
out because charitable souls and enlightened minds take the time to think of
a modern way of punishing.

Whence the idea that an alternative to imprisonment must be found.

AGAINST JUDGMENT


Others, we hope, will critique the system of fines or "freely accepted"
forced labor.

We shall limit ourselves to observing that such punishments are as old as
the hills, and that their modern aspect is only due to their cynical nature.

Alternative solutions, not to punishment but to judgment, seem more
interesting.

It has been said of "negotiations" between the victims and perpetrators of
misdemeanor offenses that they are to prison what diplomacy is to war.

As abolitionists, we are aware that, if prisons are to be suppressed, there
must be a wish to avoid any judicial apparatus or sanctions. We also
acknowledge that it is as desirable to look for conciliation from the victim
as from the offender.

Nevertheless, we are not sure whether either the offender or the victim will
want a friendly arrangement. Indeed, the non-offender, a priori, does not
expect to begin "conciliation" to find an arrangement that enables him to
accept social rules. Will the offender, who does not accept the whole game,
be willing to come to terms and collaborate with or fraternize with the
enemy? (We are obviously not talking about the victims here, but the whole
social apparatus of support for the victim.)

Therefore we are posing the question of this system and the systemization of
this conciliation. Who would be the conciliators? Reconciliation
professionals? Psychologists? Volunteers? What interests will they defend?

We reject any kind of confinement. The hyper-policed life we are offered, in
which people arrogate the right to understand what caused us to act, bears
too much resemblance to the confinement of social control as it already
exists in certain monstrously over-developed countries. Social workers,
psychologists and doctors who think it is their duty to mend the holes in
the fabric of the community do so not out of a wish to preserve their own
happiness, but for the survival of systems for which they wish to be the
maintenance teams.

On the other hand, we can quite accept and hope that every person might
count on people who would associate with him to help him resolve a conflict
situation, provided this help is punctual, unique and individualized, and
this is why we mistrust all conciliation relationships. For we all
especially suffer from not being able to create relationships that are not
immediately reduced to social machinery.

Conflicts are not handled by those who experience them but through so-called
"objective" legal procedures, which in reality make objects out of all of
us.

We do not need to vent our indignation or judgments on society. Clearly,
some actions or behavior upset and scandalize us, but we do not consider
ourselves "rewarded for our troubles" by the creation of a machine that is
no more interested in what is particular about my opinion than what is
particular about the perpetrator's opinion of his action. Justice is done in
our name, that is, in place of us. But if my place can be taken I no longer
exist. The problem of Justice can never be brought up without looking each
person's uniqueness in the face: murderer, victim, or judge, no one can put
himself in another's place.

The question "What is to be done with criminals?" is the very type of
question that turns "criminals" into abstract beings separated from their
own being; alleged criminals are only a tiny part of themselves: they are
not individuals, that is, "people who cannot be divided without being
destroyed".

The above question, which seems to fascinate crowds so much, must be
completely reconsidered. It is not a matter of knowing what an abstract
social entity can do to another abstract social entity, but to see what each
person (myself, yourself) should do when faced with someone who attacks him
(myself, yourself). The only worthwhile question is knowing how I myself can
be neither a criminal nor a victim.

By far the worst danger lying in wait for us is the total loss of our
uniqueness. As abolitionists, we want to repeat that we are against
imprisonment, against all prison systems, because there is a monstrous fraud
involved. In the name of all and of each one of us, we are judged innocent
or guilty, our actions are swallowed into the social and everything we are
is only taken into account after this digestion, where we are no longer
ourselves but an undefined element of the only possible whole, the "social
body"; each person is sent back to his assigned place as a functional
member: murderer, journalist, woman, bandit, child, etc...

"What is to be done with criminals?" is a criminal question, a question that
perpetuates the trap we want to avoid falling into, the trap that consists
of perpetually negating the individual.

If a terrorist who had just placed a bomb in this room was discovered here
right now, we all might ask ourselves, "What will we do, he and I?" but
already the sentence "What will we do to each other?" would seem shocking.

So how should we act in an emergency to escape death? The one bomber
intended for me, but also the one I would be condemned to by any vision that
would make an interchangeable unit out of me, one that would kill me as an
individual?

We are not saying that this society is poorly fashioned and that after the
revolution things will be better. Thus, revolutionaries who ask themselves
how the problem of delinquency could be approached in a future society
continue to suppose as an unquestionable fact that there must be a system to
regulate relationships, to allow their social machine to function. This
judicial system actually exists today, and putting red, green, or black
judges in the place of white ones can be of not interest to abolitionists.

The idea that an intelligent economy, technical progress could bring about
such satisfaction that no one would want to oppose such a golden age is
outdated. Moreover, it is clear that anarchists can no longer advocate
banishment without being absurdly hypocritical, since no society can imagine
including anti-social people without wanting to socialize them in one way or
another.

To the question, "What is to be done with those whom society will not be
able to recuperate , and whom it therefore considers the lowest kind of
garbage?", we think there is only one solution: to stop wanting to socialize
people. What should torture be replaced with? What should prisons be
replaced with? What should trials be replaced with? With nothing. These
three questions remain interchangeable, because all of them assume that what
does not bend must be broken. We completely refuse to ask ourselves, "How
shall we break people?" The opposite of this, which we make our own,
consists of our asking ourselves, "How shall people not bend?" In this
respect, delinquency concerns us. It interests us in that it expresses
something irrecuperable, not in its forms, which nearly always bear the
imprint of the most appalling normal social relations (sexism, violence,
leader worship, money worship, etc...)

As abolitionists, we have other ambitions than maintaining social systems of
any type. We do not want isolation; this goes without saying, otherwise what
would we be doing here? We want to think with others about ways of living
with others outside pre-existing systems.

It is the community that secretes isolation. In any cogent notion of
community-we must repeat this- each person appears to be no more than an
infinitesimal part of the only complete being: the community. Man, then,
always lacks others instead of freely, in his uniqueness, desiring others.
We believe that each individual constitutes a whole. His desire to meet
other "wholes" just expresses his freedom, not a kind of gregarious
determinism.

The abolitionist movement is not a militant movement; we have no cause to
defend, the prisoners' any more than other ones. We are struggling neither
for them nor even with them, but for ourselves. We are neither humanists nor
leftists; we don't want to work for more humane prisons. Prison is only our
affair -- and even then! -- is just a part of our affair when we are
imprisoned. Some abolitionists are imprisoned today, but each person,
wherever he is, struggles against his confinement and against a social
organization that can only logically lead to punishment and elimination.
>From this it follows that we are not "outside contacts" who for example,
would serve the prisoners by circulating information. Today, prisoners or
not, we simply want our individual freedom. If I were in the prisoners'
place, perhaps I would fight for improved prison conditions, but I am here,
outside jail for the time being, and I speak from the outside. (When I say
"we", then, I know that only abolitionist prisoners and non-prisoners, that
is, a very small number of individuals, recognized themselves in this "we").

We cannot bear being locked up, in prison or elsewhere. We cannot bear being
deprived of freedom. For us on the outside, prison is no ordinary threat: it
is what harms us, not just because it is the symbol of all of our
confinements, but also because it is the real conclusion of an unbearable
logic of normalization.

Individuals are judged not in conformity (guilty) or in conformity
(innocent), but in any case, judged. We say that if we agree to be assessed,
we deprive ourselves of our judgement, our thoughts, our being. The tragic
division between the innocent and the guilty, those in conformity with the
system or not, destroys all of us. Anything that reinforces this gap is
antagonistic to us; this is why we cannot feel concerned by reformist
struggles that aim to make prisons less painful. For us, abolitionists
inside and abolitionists outside, it is the very idea of prison and trials
that suffocates us. We know there are prisoners who are trying to arrange
society in such a way that its punishments are acceptable. They are our
enemies, as are all those who are determined to restrain us in a life that
we cannot make our own.

Prison is an ideal angle from which to attack our own individual
confinement. We recognize ourselves in prisoners' refusal precisely when
they revolt against confinement. Because we are outside we know that we are
imprisoned inside walls of constraint. But we cannot take up on our behalf
any revolt that intends to reproduce social relations in prison that might
still be missing, for, contrary to a widespread idea prison socializes
prisoners as much as it can (respect for hierarchies, authorized kinds of
leisure activity, blackmail at work, privation, and privatization of
inter-individual relationships etc...). Prison is not a disease of our
society at all; there is nothing monstrous about it; it is the height of
society, the height of all societies, of all community organization of
social relations. The media, the police, the justice system, but also
education, morality and culture -- everything aims to maintain the
cohesiveness of the whole by force. Prison punishment is necessary for order
and order is necessary for society. We could never imagine a society without
order, and order without prison punishment. We have all internalized this so
well -- reinforcing the bars and guillotines in our minds to the point of
going mad with anguish because of it -- that the State keeps us under its
thumb quite "naturally," because we are, in reality, "irresponsible". But
the State is only a machine serving something more terrifying than itself:
behind the State there is a will, a human will. Man is there with his laws.
Down with Man.

We are men who are in revolt against Man. That animal is a social animal.
Are we happy about it?

AGAINST LAWS


We want to abolish Justice. Does that mean the abolition of laws and
therefore of any knid of society?

Because laws are undoubtedly essential to life in a society. No one doubts
this: neither do we.

The law guarantees each person's rights. It forbids or permits, but in any
case it is imposed from the outside. To speak of an inner law would be
meaningless.

The members of any society, bourgeois, socialist, communist, anarchist or
some other kind, have common interests to defend; they have to envisage a
common response to anything that can threaten it; they must devote
themselves to considering, in common, the question of external enemies and
war, or internal enemies and delinquency. From a societal or community point
of view, logic requires an organized defense, a judgment shared by the
whole, a punishment. Some think that Justice will not be good Justice as
long as it remains separate from the people; they want a Justice that
emanates from the community. As far as we are concerned, judgment can only
remain individual. Even if the judgment of several individuals on some event
were unanimous, it would not be communal and could not be generalized. On
the contrary, the characteristic feature of a judgment that asserts itself
as being one of the whole community is that it no longer belongs to anyone.

By saying "We have every right", abolitionists abolish laws, for each person
becomes his own sole reference. If there are acts we do not commit it is
because we do not want to commit them. That's all. Forbidding rape is of
interest to no one. On the other hand, each person will no doubt find it of
interest to consider means of being neither a rapist nor a rape victim.
Recognizing that everyone has a right to rape me or hack me to pieces
expresses my awareness that laws can in no way protect me. It is as aberrant
to say, "If killing was permitted everyone would kill" as it is to say,
"Since killing is forbidden I will not be killed". We feel secure with
people we trust and no law in the world will change that. We can only be of
interest to each other if judging people is reduced to a minimum; we need to
rethink things starting from our personal viewpoint.

Life would not be any more barbarous without laws. It is within a society
with laws that people kill and rape; it is particularly in a society with
laws that "decent people" are ready to lynch or flay those they assume are
guilty of a crime that they find disturbing. Moreover, it is from this
viewpoint that advocates of prison abolition are considering creating
refuges for delinquents who refused conciliation. But protecting and
punishing the criminal are two sides of the same thing: it is a matter of
assigning the criminal to a place. He and the victim are locked into roles
that were defined earlier and independently of them. And again we lapse into
this very, very old idea that everyone must stay in his place if we want the
system to function. The perpetuation of this system, of this organized set
of relations, still remains each person's sole aim. But this sole aim is
always outside of oneself.

The definition of law is "A mandatory rule imposed on man from the outside".
It is obviously because they are outside us that we reject all laws,
including, of course, the law of the strongest: we are opposed to force so
long as the force in question seeks to restrain us. So it is useless to
rehash that delinquency, as such, embodies none of our aspirations:
competition, sexism and rackets are laws that we fight, all the more so
because society makes them its own, condemning only what is criminal, as
Thierry Levy has shown very well in his book Le crime en toute humanite ,
because it is not on a par with the crime that society indulges in. It is
true that for its survival, society can only integrate all individual
impulses that pass through its nets by labeling them delinquency and locking
up delinquents; making people believe through the media that what is
dangerous for it is dangerous for everyone enables the systems we are
familiar with to redirect to their own ends what is very often only disgust,
anger or weariness at the outset.

It plugs up the cracks with respect to any behavior that opposes it and
could thus appear deviant or revolutionary. In doing so, its victory
restores a new dynamism to it and allows it to further enlarge its field of
activity. (Our optimism consists in affirming that only what is recuperable
is recuperated. The irrecupable is possible. For individuals cannot totally
identify with society; they know that they realize what is best in
themselves outside of society -- through friendship, love, art, brilliant
thoughts, etc. - and that every individual aspires to what makes him a
unique being.)

So society tries to socialize crime with trials, and then criminals with
prison. It monopolizes every person's acts because there is in effect a
rivalry between owners: myself and the community, to which it is tragically
said that "I belong". As soon as they are carried out our acts escape us: if
they are judged "anti-social" they are punished, and independently, of
course, of ideas we might have about good or evil; the insane, the
rebellious, and alleged criminals are all locked up. Being locked up in a
prison, a camp or a hospital is only the culmination of a confinement apart
from ourselves that all of us suffer.

As abolitionists, we want the individuals in question to reappropriate their
acts, whether or not they are called crimes . Crime does not exist as such.
If there are indeed painful circumstances and horrible acts that are
inflicted on us, we ask nothing more than to try to avoid them by
considering, alone or with a few others, means of protecting ourselves from
any infringement on our mental or physical integrity. We note that progress
is a notion that is absolutely devoid of meaning; we think, therefore, that
we must break free of a way of thinking that has only led us to dead ends.
It is not the Law but freedom that can allow individuals to live in harmony
by forming relationships that start from themselves, not from the social
relationships they are forced into today.

We have been stripped of everything and made strangers to our own lives. We
cannot bear it. The word "revolution" has been confiscated by politicians,
so we will use it sparingly, which is no problem, but we certainly hope that
our ideas are taken for what they are: a concrete change. So when we affirm
that we do not recognize anyone's power to judge us or our acts, we are
really abolishing the infamous social consensus, which is just based on
turning oneself over to the community. Men have never broken with the idea
that they had to give up their singularity for the benefit of the human
species .

On the contrary, not only would we like to consider ourselves specific
individuals, we would like to consider as such every person who wants to be
so. As abolitionists, we behave in such a way that criminals and others can
reappropriate their acts, because we want to live among people who think
about their lives and do not abandon them to social authority. The idea of
society does not go without saying. The abolitionist movement is one sign of
this, among others.
-translated by Doug Imrie and Michael William