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   From: DEMI_GOD_@SHAW.CA   
      
   Down with prison   
      
   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.   
      
   Jan   
      
      
   www.worldsocialism.org   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)