Since the population is expanding and more migrants are let into the country who are not authorised to work here, and the closure of old prisons then it stands to reason that there is a requirement for more prisons.

"More prisons, however, do lead to more prisoners."

So, are you suggesting that if there were no prisons, there would be no prisoners, no criminals and no crime?

....all the 'No prisons' rhetoric this should still be a worrying concept for everyone. The PFI scheme's have privatised more public property than Thatcher but even she never went as far as the prisons (or air for that matter, unlike Mr Blair.) For anything to be built with public money and then sold off lowest bidder stylie is fucking abysmal but when people's incarceration is put into private hands there are much fewer checks and much less accountability for a state who are increasingly locking people up for more and more pedantic reasons. They are quite literally making the taxpayer pay to wipe their slate clean after the spate of prison problems the country has suffered over the last couple of years, everything from overcrowding, appalling upkeep of prisons and allegations of abuse from both prisoners and guards (not that I give a flying fuck about the latter.) Whilst I personally hold the abolition of all prisons as something that needed to happen yesterday, it makes no difference because PFI screws us one and all, leaving only large business owners and their shareholders as the winners once again. As activism gets more and more clamped down upon (raise your hands all off you with section 14 convictions) we all face the very real possibility that regardless of your tactic you may well be spending some time in one of these sooner or later and it'll be to late to resist then.........

i re-posted this as i feel it might sit well here, its a response to someone who said we always need prisons and that there is no alternative to crime management:

The Romans loved locking people away for 'crime'. ah, actually, we better sort 'crime' out first.
right, 'crime' is when a person,or institution or group, 'engages in an action or situation whereby the property of a person or group, or the physical body of someone, is interfered with by someone/something else without desire or consent, leaving hurt, pain, misery, anger and resentment and loss in its path'. Therefore, 'crime' is neither good or bad, it just is, according to the above definition.

would that be fair to say 'crime' fits this explanation, for arguments sake?

And also for arguments sake, 'punishment' defined as when: a person or a group response to a 'crime' is aimed at reducing the probability of the crime happening again or to defend the community from ill health or violence.

Right, lets carry on.

The Romans, who loved punishment, designed some of the earliest prisons. These cells would often be built in to the homes of roman 'citizens', with most homes having a 'cell' for prisoners. Roman prisoners could be enslaved by their 'victims', often carrying out their sentence in their victims home, which was to live in the 'cell' of the victim until the 'crime' had been dealt with and the 'criminal' had spent enough time reflecting on their 'wrong' and serving their punishment without trouble. They often became the 'victims' slave for the duration.

So basically, in Roman times, you could be sent to live in the cell of the person who's car stereo you had nicked. You could also be forced to pay a fee for your 'crime' or you cold be banished, or, of course, fed to the lions,stabbed or poisoned.

So prisons, the idea of locking humans away for 'crime', is 'ancient'. It has served no beneficial service to humanity, although as a short term solution, it has grown in popularity so much that every state in the known universe has prisons for punishing 'crime'.

I know that was brief, but lets move on.
what we learned, prisons have been around ages and have been messing peoples lives up ever since.

Now, anarchism.

The very nature of an anarchist community would mean that lots of 'crime' becomes 'meaningless' as anarchists tend not to want to destroy/harm/take that which does not belong to them or does not effect their health or safety. Ie. you'd be hard pressed to find a 'proper' anarchist willing to commit 'crime' against his or her fellow anarchists.

that is the first point, as it rapidly reduces the amount of 'crimes' that an anarchist could commit.
For example, nearly all anarchists live according to the principle of 'dont attack unless you're defending' and by living in this manner, they immediately don't have to deal with nearly all violent 'crime'.
So if you hit an anarchist, in a small anarchist commune, say, with a thousand people living on it, he or she will likely hit you back and defend themselves. There is no crime being done in defence of the body.

As for theft, anarchists often live by the principle of not oppressing or infringing on some one's 'right' to be left the fuck alone and have their 'shit' not fucked with, stolen or damaged. If that does happen, then the anarchist doing the 'crime' will be swiftly confronted. They will have a choice, and that is not considering what the 'victim' wants to do, whether to leave the community or stay and deal with the fall out of their actions. If they stay, they submit to the consensus of the community on what should happen to them. So if i hit someone, then the community decides I should leave, then I leave. If the community decides I should shovel shit for a week, then I shovel shit. But what the community of anarchists will not do, 9 times out of ten, is commit another crime to punish me. If I cant deal with my 'punishment' then I can leave. I can also repay my debt if I have stolen something, or work until it has been paid for. The essential idea to 'crime' 'management' is that you need crime in the first place to manage.Well, it is my opinion that 'crime' would be almost none-existent in a small to medium sized community of anarchists, to begin with, so the question becomes a case of, well, what do we do when a 'crime' happens?
How do we 'police' it?

So we come to the big questions now, the meaty stuff.

What do we do with a violent type, someone who doesn't want to go quickly and quietly, or someone that actively does crime to get money or to hurt people. Well, more often than not, the 'criminal' would not be following anarchist principles, so there would not really be these people around, but for arguments sake, lets say that they are a violent type and they dont want to leave the community and they are asserting their right to live there, even though they stole my stereo and slapped my face.
What to do?
If we bare in mind the 'dont punish crime, by creating crime', then the only thing left is to boot the person out of the community, banish them and enforce that banishment physically if needs be, because the action then becomes in defense of the community, a principle that anarchists live by.

The people may decide in a consensus building moment that they want to get rid of the person for good, bump them off for the crime of rape or murder. That, again, is an issue for the community, not a state or a judge or someone not even involved in the community, like external police.
The community may well call in the 'outside' police, and then they will be submitting to 'external' law, the law of the land and then whatever happens to them is out of the anarchists hands. Knowing anarchist the way I do, I doubt many would want to hand someone over to the pigs to be dealt with in this manner. Although for rape and murder, it is understandable, if regretable, that anarchists would do this.
But let us imagine the dreadful crime of rape HAS been committed against a woman by a man. What do we do then?
Hand him over? Or kill him? Rape him?
Again, it is for the community to decide and 'police'.

Remember that the principle of not doing a crime to punish a crime does not have to be law, it is a generally accepted 'principle' and can be fluid and change as the community moves and progresses.
Baring that in mind,it is safe to postulate that a rapist or a murderer would likely be killed or banished from an anarchist community, not withstanding the fact that they wouldn't just be handed over to the 'outside police' by people to stop them from being lynched.The important thing to remember is that each community will have its own manner with which it deals with 'crime'. When it comes to rape and other 'serious' crimes, the community may decide to lynch the person or kill them or banish them or turn them over to 'real police', the police of our enemies. That is for the community to decide. However, baring in mind the principle of not committing a crime to punish one, more criminals will likely become apparent if they kill or injure the 'criminal'. Again, this is for those in the community to 'sort out', particularly when punishment is designed to ..."protect and defend from ill health or violence" as well as "reduce the probability" of it happening again. Using this principle of punishment, it is possible to kill a rapist in defence of the community, for example.

Ultimately, what I have tried to touch on in a very quick, and admittedly not very academic way, is that;

- we should attempt to NOT punish crime with crime, with the definition of crime being: an action or situation whereby the 'property' of a person or group/collective, or the physical body of someone, is interfered with by someone/something else without desire or consent, leaving hurt, pain, misery, anger and resentment or loss in its path' and punishment being: aimed at reducing the probability of the crime happening again or to defend the community from ill health or violence.

- 'crime' would be nearly none existent in a 'proper' anarchist community.

- 'crime' can be 'punished' in a way the community consensus decides, which in turn could potentially lead to more 'crime', this would be something for the community to deal with.

- 'crime' should be dealt with by the direct community it effects, not an external 'force' or 'law'.

- 'serious' crimes can be dealt with by the community or dealt with by external forces. Those that choose to punish a rapist, say, by hurting them, will on the one hand punish but on the other create another crime...which in turn could lead to them being punished, etc. It is for the community/victims, working together, to decide.

- its a complex problem, and only real discussion, and attempts at finding avenues to go down that will lead to success, will help us out when it comes to the question of 'crime and punishment' in an anarchist community.

NOTE TO ALL TROLLS: please dont comment immediately with reactionary ideas and comments. please for the sake of the future of all our communities, can you offer some ideas and opinions that wont just shoot me down, and may lead to more ideas and discussions on this subject. All I have tried to do is offer answers to someones questions. Im not saying my way is the right way, its JUST A WAY out of the many hundreds of ideas that are out there.

Discussing this seriously is needed, not pissing about with reactionary comments and trolling.

ALL TROLL COMMENTS WILL BE IGNORED.

PS. the main point is that we should be discussing this topic, not just trolling it to death.

is obviously woefully ignorant of the facts. The prison population has not expanded in line with the expanding population:

Year Prison Population per 100,000
England & Wales of population
1992 44,719 88
1995 50,962 99
1998 65,298 126
2001 66,301 127
2004 74,657 141
2007 80,216 148
2009 [Nov] 84,647 154

[see:  http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb_country.php?country=169]

Since New Labour got their grubby little mitts on power in 1997 the prison population in England and Wales has increased by 42% whilst the imprisonment rate, having gone up from 125 per 100,000 to 156 per 100,000, has increased by 25%.

To bring the 'spectre' of foreign national prisoners into the argument is spurious too. People found to be working without the correct documentation and who are non-British and non-EEA citizens will be placed in detention and deported, not imprisoned.

Yes, the rate of increase in so-called 'foreign national' prisoners (FNPs) is apparently 4 times that of the 'non-foreign national' prisoner population in the past 10 years but very few of those are people imprisoned for working with legal entitlement. The automatic deportation of FNPs has only been an issue since 2007 and the introduction of the 2007 UK Borders Act as a means of pandering to the racists in society and allowing for the deportation of non-British and non-EEA citizens who had been sentence to 12 months or more. There is no right of appeal against this deportation, though it is possible in certain circumstances to argue that ones human rights would be breached by deportation.

The 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act reinforced this situation by creating a 'special immigration status' for FNPs who cannot be deported because to do so would breach their human rights. To quote the Institute of Race Relations website: "Any non-British and non-EEA citizen who has committed a criminal offence and has been sentenced to two years' imprisonment or more, or who has been convicted of an offence specified by statutory instrument as 'particularly serious' (which includes offences of petty theft and criminal damage) and was sent to prison for any length of time, can be 'designated' by the Secretary of State. So can any member of his or her family. Designation means being stripped of immigration status, with all the accompanying rights - which, if the person was settled in the UK, can include the right to work, to social security benefits, to social housing, to grants and loans for education, to social services and full health care, and in the case of Commonwealth citizens, to vote. All these rights will be in jeopardy for those 'designated' by the Home Secretary when the provisions are brought into force. A designated person can be told where to live and may be subjected to a curfew restricting their movements, can be restricted or prohibited from working, may be required to report to the police, the Home Office or immigration officers, may be required to wear a tag and be subjected to electronic monitoring, and may be sent to prison for up to 51 weeks for breach of any of these conditions. They can be provided with support similar to NASS support, but not with cash support." [ http://www.irr.org.uk/2008/september/ha000007.html]

Oh, and for your information, since 1997 there have been 2 prison closures with a loss of 540 prison places. Hardly a significant loss, especially as during that time 10 new prisons have been opened in England and Wales.

Your thinking is very similar to mine... in fact almost identical. Although, I don't think it is only Anarchists that are thinking along these lines. At least, many people who are thinking along these lines, do not identify themselves as Anarchists... I didn't at first.

Only after reading a few Anarchist articles did I realise that I was thinking along Anarchist lines. Here I would also like to say that I really feel that it is important that we don't get bogged down with Anarchist 'dogma' so to speak. We need to maintain a sense of flexibility in our thinking. This is where many other ideas that at first seemed promising were compromised. The only constant is change.

Ultimately, each community should be completely autonomous and all centralised governments dismantled... along with central banks and corporations. Human beings are quite capable of organising and running their own lives. Any large projects can be achieved through community co-operation, with a small administration established to manage each project.

What you were saying about not committing a crime to punish a crime and working according to group concensus, sound a lot like the old common law. I would only add that I think it a good idea for there to be a cooling down period before punishment is decided upon and carried out, especially for serious crimes like rape where people are likely to become emotional and not take all factors into consideration. Innocent people have often been accused of serious crimes. In this case we might need holding cells.

Unfortunately the table included above did not come out properly, so I have attached a jpeg of it here.

joe,

thanks for the info. Yes you are right to question my statements
I can only say it seems that crime is on the increase and prisons are are breaking point
Hence we need more of them, or an alternative form of punishment to deal with them


fran,
thankyou too for the post
I fully realise you can't go into fine details so I will not nitpick details
However, I would like to point out:

Most of the UK population wouldn't abide by anarchists rules. Society is one big compromise so it is likely you will always get one group annoyed and recentful about what another group are getting. This would feed criminal tendencies.

Im not sure what you mean by anarchists communities and the laws within. It seems the laws would be made by the community - isn't that what happens now (just our community is much larger)?

Thirdly, prisons serve two purposes, one of which people always forget about
They are there to protect the public from the criminals. A con-artist who goes around fiddling old ladies out of their savings is not going to be able to repeatedly offend if he is in prison. There is no denying that prisons are an extremely effective way of keeping criminals off the streets and out of the community. The needs of the law abiding public (community) outweight the needs of the criminal (The criminal wont agree with that, but he is one, and everyone is many so tough)

You talk of banishing someone. Where to? Isn't this just passing the problem onto another community? Afterall, that person needs to eat, so he or she may still continue to thieve.

Also, if people are banished then the danger is they will band together and form a power faction to do raids on people's belongings and resources. 10 criminals working together are much more of a threat than 10 criminals on their own. Think of the Wild West.

Who would police a criminal who moves from community to community performing opportunist raids, knowing full well that if he stays outside the communities juridstiction then he will remain safe?

Isn't it just better to banish them to prison? At least you can keep an eye on them and know they are not going to commit further crimes to your community or any other?

I think prisons have evolved because they work (to a degree). If a better solution was available then that would have evolved instead. The best solution is obvious execution since that is the cheapest to the community and the most effective at protecting the community. But there may be moral objections on this because people couldn't stomach it.

Crime may seem to be on the increase but that largely seems to be because, since 1997, Nu Labour have introduced 3,600 new criminal offences, of which something like 1472 were imprisonable, on to the statute book. On top of more imprisonable offences, people are getting longer sentences (the average crown court custodial sentence has gone from 22.4 to 25.2 months), many 'life' sentences are being transformed into Indeterminate Public Protection (IPP) sentences and the increased rate of prisoners released on life licenses after having served their tariffs being returned to prison (often for incredibly petty reason such as being late for a meeting with their probation officer or 'having an inappropriate attitude') has further pushed up the prison population. Plus the number of people serving indeterminate sentences has more than trebled since 1997.

Other factors currently keeping the prisons bursting at the seams include the year-on-year cuts that have seen the number of IPP prisoners being held beyond their tariff expiry date rise to more than 2,200, mostly because the prison service cannot afford to provide enough of the 'offender behaviour' courses that IPP prisoners must take before they can be considered for parole. And of course the cuts have affected the parole system as well, causing massive backlogs. All this add to the burgeoning prison population, a prison population that has risen by 41% since the advent of Nu Labour whilst the total population has increased by only 7%.

What is on the increase however, and this is down to the desire of politicians to secure themselves a nice cushy (and very lucrative) lifestyle, is the fear of crime. Not crime itself. All the indicators (as far as they can be trusted, which admittedly is not very far) point to there being historically less 'real' crime, not more. So it would seem that you, like most of the population, are victims - 'collateral damage' - in the 'arms race' between politicians seeking to further their careers by offering more and more drastic solutions to a (perceived) problem that is largely of their own creation.

Just alittle something about SERCO for the debate - it'll make ya think!
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj_I9P14Tqs