In Marge Piercy's Women on the Edge of Time, a now unfairly forgotten utopian/dystopian fantasy and an ancestor of cyberpunk, the utopian society has no prisons, but it does execute the incorrigible.
I think talking about whether a future socialist society would have prisons outside the realm of imaginative fiction is the sort of "utopian socialism" that properly made Marx want to throw up. It's not our call and who knows what conditions would be like?
It does seem to me to make sense to discuss whether and to what extent punishment, motivated by retribution or by deterrence, vs. other ways of dealing with wrongdoing, might promote or injure socialist goals.
Btw, I am a retributivist. I think the guilty should be punished for the bad things they do. Probably comes with the territory of being a criminal defense lawyer. A white collar criminal defense lawyer. I defend these rattlesnakes, but it makes me happy to see Madoff or Rod-boy, our recently indicted gov here in IL, in the can with his predecessor, the former gov.
But I'm open to discussion of reconciliation, forgiveness, rehabilitation, etc. Marx probably woukd find that too utopian, but if we are going to talk about these things it seems a more useful level to pitch the discussion than whether prisons per se should be abolished.
More to the point we have a seriously broken criminal injustice system here and now, as Angela Davis knows very well. We vastly over incarcerate even if incarceration is called for, our sentences are too long, the conditions of confinement too harsh, the system itself intolerably racist, and we have this rare but extremely backwards institution of a death penalty that is (a) systematically error prone -- we are up to, what, 108 proven exonerations last I heard in the last 30 years?,(b) frighteningly racist and class-biased, and (c), ironically the thing that may kill it this time around, irrationally expensive. But I precah to thde choir. Nonetheless this, rather than what we we do After The Revo, is tops on the agenda of penological reform. Seem to me.
--- On Sat, 4/4/09, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Abolition of prisons (Was: Angela...)
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Saturday, April 4, 2009, 3:09 PM
> On Apr 4, 2009, at 3:55 PM, Marv Gandall wrote:
>
> > Why would we prempt the right of a future socialist
> democracy to decide
> > whether it wanted to abolish prisons or not? This is
> NOT presently a demand
> > arising organically from the people, least of all poor
> people, for whom the
> > incarceration of criminal offenders is widely seen as
> a necessary means of
> > protecting their personal safety and private and
> public propery.
>
> Ditto the treatment of juveniles - almost no difference
> between b and w:
>
> <http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t248.pdf>.
>
> Leftists often live in a world of their own invention.
>
> Doug
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