[lbo-talk] Need for Prisons [was A Note on the Middle 75%]

123hop at comcast.net 123hop at comcast.net
Fri Nov 18 23:19:36 PST 2011


You're mixing stuff up here. So far as I know, punishments varied with class and with social context. Royalty/aristos were killed, exiled, or imprisoned. All that of course, implies a state and something more at stake than morality. Within tribes, punishment was settled by clans through some form of reparation in kind or service. Of course, in tribal societies, exile was the worst punishment because without the support of the community, exile = death or slavery.

So far as I'm concerned, death is death. I see nothing more civilized about electrocution or lethal injection as opposed to being thrown off a cliff. We comfort ourselves with the thought that the latest science excuses the fundamental sin of murder. It doesn't.

Modern day prisons are very much a form of torture, especially because they subject almost everyone to extended periods of solitary confinement which, as Donne put it, is a torment not threatened in Hell itself.

I don't want to mince words. I have felt all my life a visceral hatred and horror of prisons. When I see a prison, I don't feel safer. I feel that two different modes of imprisonment are born as the prison walls go up: one for those inside; and another for those outside.

Moreover the fact that the state appropriates to itself the right to kill, maim, torture, and rape through imprisonment, war, and legal execution gives the lie to any claim of morality.

Joanna

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What specific systems of law and punishment do you have in mind here? Ancient Athens sentenced people to be stoned to death, thrown off cliffs, and bound on stakes until dead, in addition of course to compulsory suicide. Violent punishments were always the flip side in pre-modern societies of more civilized measures like exile, confiscation of property, and ostracism. Did any pre-capitalist societies not make use of either confinement or violent punishment? Or is it that modern-day prisons are worse than torture and execution? ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk



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