Quote
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 23 Feb 2012 19:09:22 GMT
"America needs fewer laws, not more prisons." -- James Bovard
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No More Cages |
This site is dedicated to eliminating the concept of prison.
Abolishing Prisons
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:26:54 GMT
Jim Davies at Strike the Root - a description of the many horors inflicted on prisoners and some possibilities for justice in a truly free society.
Brutality over prisoners will not be seen in the coming free society. The free-market justice industry will bend itself to the task of restitution, to restoring stolen rights, not to punishment--for punishment is a hopeless, lose-lose proposition that benefits nobody. The only exceptions will be the tiny number who do repeated violence (and who survive defenses by a well-armed series of intended victims) from whom society clearly needs protecting. And even then, the limits on their liberty will be the least and most economical feasible, starting with electronic anklets, moving to house arrest, and then in extreme cases to a closed workshop in which the serial killer can earn his living (and rent). Vengeance, which is the very fabric of today's caricature of justice, will have no place. Nor will fire-prone (or any other) prisons or wrong-sized boots.
The Caging of America
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:49:11 GMT
Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker - concerning the epidemic of incarceration in the United States, and a good guess at what really works to reduce crime. Incarceration does nothing. Reducing opportunity, day by day, does a lot. And incarceration is entirely useless for statutory "crimes" with no victim, unless your goal is to punish people for moral sins. [claire]
And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.
One Anarchist’s Compressed Take On Justice
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:31:29 GMT
Wendy McElroy at The Daily Anarchist - a short essay on one way to handle rights transgressions in a truly free society: restitution.
More than the state is at work here; the prison system is an expression of a specific form of justice that is based on retribution and punishment. In turn, these are usually based on the human desire for revenge and the belief that punishment deters crime. But given how angry and crime-ridden our society has become under this system, it is worthwhile to reconsider the wisdom — if not the morality — of having one in every thirty-one American adults imprisoned or on parole or probation (The Economist, July 22, 2010).
With two changes in the legal system, prisons could be eliminated or hugely reduced while still providing justice to victims. The first is to void all laws that do not involve harm done to individuals or their property. The second is to apply restitution not merely to civil infractions but also to criminal offenses.
Restitution is the system in which a person “makes good” on a harm or wrong done to another individual and does so directly rather than paying a “debt” to the state. If a man steals $100, he must return $100 to the victim along with reasonable damages. Thus, restitution eliminates the need for an aggressor to be processed by any type of law enforcement beyond what is necessary to procure repayment and damages. A thief need not be caged; all he needs to do is pay up.
50 Reasons to Abolish The Cops!
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 27 Sep 2011 23:32:57 GMT
andywright88 at Abolish the Cops! - why the police are a danger, not a benefit, to your life, liberty, and property.
THE PUNISHMENT OF ARREST
Arrest is violence against you and as you will see there is no “innocent until proven guilty”. Lets take a closer look at this punishment. Let’s say you do not comply with a cop’s demands to show your ID. He arrests and charges you with disobeying a lawful order. Without resisting you get physically manhandled, chained and pushed into a cage in the back of a car. If you did this to someone, you would be guilty of kidnapping. You arrive at their building of cages with indented and bruised wrists because they made you sit on your chained hands in their cramped carcage. Then you are fingerprinted photographed and given a permanent criminal record. Once they have finished branding you, you are then put in another cage with other victims and real violent criminals. If they offer you bond but cannot afford their extortion demands or they do not even offer you a fee for your freedom, they again chain you up, take you to a private room where you are humiliated, stripped naked, felt up, and forced to spread your butt cheeks while a gloved cop searches your every orifice (this is considered molestation if not rape in nearly every country in the world). Then they watch you shower, spray you with delousing chemicals and put you in a huge glass cage of smaller cages with hundreds of violent criminals from the streets and career criminals from prisons all over the country where 1 in 20 inmates are raped. This is where you will stay until you can pay their fee to be released. And this is just the local jail. You have not even been found guilty of anything yet. If the charges against you are dropped, which most are, and you are released, nothing is ever done to the bullies with the badges that harassed, abused, kidnapped, caged, molested and forced you to live among rapists and other violent criminals. And, you now have a criminal record that costs a fortune to expunge. If you resist this attack, they will beat or torture you with electrocution; if you defend yourself they will hospitalize you, and if you defend yourself with a gun, they will shoot you down and murder you.
The Police State Abolishes the Trial
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:34:28 GMT
Lew Rockwell at LewRockwell.com - there are still officially trials in federal court cases, but very few cases go to trial, most people being "convinced" to plea bargain, and of those that do, the defendent wins only 1 in 212. Bottom line: if the feds decide to arrest you, you're going to spend some time in a cage, often a lot of time. Even if you hurt nobody.
What this means is that there is no way out for the accused. The prosecutors have all the power. Not even the judge has discretion because lawmakers have mostly taken that liberality away in the name of cracking down on crime. This happened all through the 1980s and 1990s, and the prosecutorial dictatorship has entrenched itself to become the norm since 2001. For the last ten years, the police state has had free rein.
It was not "liberals" or "conservatives" who did this. It was both parties acting with massive support of the American public, as tyrants in the public sector licked their chops. This was a result of security-minded madness, and even now hardly anyone cares.
Today, every single citizen, no matter how free he or she may feel in daily life, is in reality a sitting duck. You can be made to disappear. There is essentially no way you can escape once the feds sweep you into their net. There is no justice. The total states of the past used to pretend to have trial-based convictions. The total state of the present doesn’t even bother. It just puts a sack over your head and takes you away.
Abolish the Police
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 13 Sep 2011 09:33:20 GMT
Anothony Gregory at LewRockwell.com - Mr. Gregory wants to go beyond abolishing prisons. Makes sense to me.
Twenty-six years have passed since the bombing of the MOVE house and if there was any doubt before, it is now beyond question that the local police have become the occupying troops that Malcolm X described. They are the standing army the Founding Fathers warned against. In the United States, they are the most dangerous gang operating and they do so under the color of law.
Anyone who reads Will Grigg should be familiar with this reality. The man who once edited the magazine for the John Birch Society, an organization whose 60’s mantra was "support your local police," has since then focused largely on documenting the daily outrages conducted by these tax parasites. Reading his specific accounts of misconduct and brutality, one comes to the inescapable conclusion that police abuse is not a bug in the system; it is an intrinsic feature.
Profit from Suffering
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 21 Aug 2011 20:41:25 GMT
Jim Davidson at The Libertarian Enterprise - identifying the people responsible for filling America's prisons with non-criminals, and pouring lots and lots of money into the pockets of the people who run those prisons.
"The state and federal prison population increased 722 percent between 1970 and 2009" from Justice Policy Institute. That's seven times as many people in prison because scum like Obama are scum like Nixon. Obama is a tyrant who has authorised the execution of American citizens without trial. Obama hates individual liberty and loves the contributions to his campaigns from the prison industry. Obama lied in 2008 when he promised to end all federal raids on medical marijuana clinics. Obama is an evil mass murderer who is paid by the prison industry to put your neighbours in cages. And what are you going to do about it?
Prisons: Abolish, Don’t Privatize
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 21 Aug 2011 16:10:14 GMT
Brad Spangler at the Center for a Stateless Society - a free society might still have something like prisons, but they would be places where people who had wronged others would voluntarily live, and pay for, with the intention of paying off their debts. Their security would be geared towards protecting the residents from harm, not preventing them from leaving.
To whatever extent there might be something we can compare to prisons, such would actually be high security hotels that cater to people trying to work off their restitution debts.
That is, the residents would seek to go there as a refuge because that’s the best deal they can get — because nobody else wants them around.
Introduction
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 21 Aug 2011 15:37:12 GMT
Welcome to NoMoreCages.org!
This web site is dedicated to eliminating the concept of prison. Prisons have been part of "civilized" countries for longer than any of us have been alive. We hardly ever consider that it could be otherwise. It can. It must. Putting humans in cages is inhuman, it is torture. Stop it. Now.
Oh sure, there are violent people, who use violence to rob from and hurt others. What will we do with them without prison? He who lives by the sword dies by the sword. In a free society, robbers and muggers won't last very long. 'nuff said.
The real kicker for me, though is all the victimless so-called crimes. Any time somebody doesn't like something, they ask for yet another law, backed by the power to arrest, the power to kidnap, the power the state claims to cage anybody, any time, who doesn't follow the so-called rules. This has led to America being the home of the highest prison pollution in the world, per capita, and in absolute numbers. Most there for behavior that harmed nobody but themselves. My body is mine. If I want to fill it full of drugs, that's nobody's business, as long as I don't directly harm anyone else, and as long as I'm not expecting anybody to rescue me.
I, too, have grown up with the idea of prison in my mind. I have called for the imprisonment of cops and congress critters who make and enforce legislation creating so-called "crimes" with no victim. No more. The congress critters have no power absent the cops who enforce their edicts, and the cops have no power if we the people refuse to comply, peacefully when possible, and violently when necessary. Self defense is not a crime. No matter which gang colors the attacker happens to be wearing.
I intend to blog related stories here. I intend to collect essays, and include my own when I have something relevant to say. See the FAQ page for details of using this site. See the blogroll for links to related sites.
And... Don't worry. Be happy.
Copyright © 2011 Bill St. Clair <bill@billstclair.com>
