Punishment abolitionism

Many people see me as their reasonable far leftist friend. They might be surprised to learn that I think that prison abolitionism doesn’t go far enough. Let me outline, briefly, my position- that we should work towards the abolition of all punishment. That includes both punishment where the motivation is retributive, and punishment where the motivation is consequentialist.

By punishment, I mean adverse, physically, emotionally or socially painful treatment of a wrongdoer or perceived wrongdoer inflicted for the purposes of retribution, incapacitation, deterrence or rehabilitation. Punishment is, under present conditions, sometimes necessary, and I am under no illusion that some ‘tweak’ or ‘one weird trick’ currently possible could get rid of it. The aim should be to reduce its frequency and above all its intensity as much as possible. Whether the horizon of zero can ever be met is unknown. One should walk in the direction of better, not worrying overmuch about how far one can get. The abolition of punishment is of course a special case of a larger project- the abolition of all involuntary suffering- but it is an important special case. Punishment is a choice by the community that undermines in effect, and usually in intent, someone’s dignity. From that point of view, it is grave even when necessary (1).

On prison abolitionism

I believe I dislike both prisons and punishment far more than some of those who call themselves prison abolitionists. Prison abolitionism arises from noble instincts, but much of what goes under the name is a flawed instrument. It can be gestural, content at the expression of sentiment and proud not to think in specificities. Its proponents often seem oddly comfortable with social punishment (2). Once it became “trendy” a lot of people who had never metabolised the core claim about universal dignity signed up. The most troubling case is the “abolitionist” who cheerfully indicates we should simply kill the residual unmanageables (or even just those past some level of moral squickiness).

I do, of course, ultimately, want to abolish all prisons. In the first instance the trick might be something like what Iain M. Banks called a slap drone. The technology to dispense with prison in all cases doesn’t exist yet; at the moment we don’t have a better solution than imprisoning the guy who won’t stop killing people. But there are options in this area, and they are far less technologically remote than they may appear. I am not proposing that this would be an elimination of punishment. A slap drone is still punishment. However, approached wisely, it is a drastic movement in the direction of less punishment.

Of course, the bulk of imprisonment is a social-political problem not a technological one. Most criminals are not so dangerous that options such as, e.g., house arrest wouldn’t be a sensible improvement over the status quo. It is still punishment, yes, but at reduced intensity. The risk, with any of these measures, from home detention to slap drones is that a reduction in unsightliness becomes an excuse for extension (3). This must be carefully avoided. But in finding the idea that technological means might be necessary ridiculous, mainstream prison abolitionism says a lot about itself. It is, at its face, obvious that even a utopian society would have dangerous people, in either denying or ignoring the engineering problem, seriousness in achieving the objective is abandoned. It is all too often a form of recognition oddly orthogonal to action. Punishment and the management of wrongdoing is one of numerous areas in which any feasible vision of complete liberation must be transhumanist.

More than prison abolitionism, I want to find a safe and liberating way to stop punishing anyone for anything, ever. I want at least the option of genuine moral reintegration for every single person. I’ll offer this proposal though it will generate a lot of heat- and the caution is most warranted here. Technologies of voluntary moral self-modification seem worth considering. It sounds very Clockwork Orange, and indeed the problems of avoiding abuse are gravely important and difficult. As is the question of what someone’s “consent” means when society will hate them if they do not go ahead with it. However, I think the alternative status quo for those who have committed gravely serious crimes may well be worse. The serious wrongdoer faces a kind of permanent internal exile, one might say a living-death of moral personhood. That is far more dystopian than usually admitted.

Victims

Now the critic will say “what of the victims”. And indeed, I too would say “what of the victims”. I needn’t look very far, although I won’t pretend to have had the very worst of it.

I observe that conceptualising the victim as someone who benefits, primarily from the punishment of the wrongdoer never met my needs. Indeed, it never had any apparent interest in meeting my needs. Time, space, help, vindication- these were what I wanted. Vindication was never about reducing another person; it was about affirming something bad had happened to me and taking steps to stop it happening again. To the extent that the participation of the other person was desired, it was their sincere recognition of wrongdoing, something punishment as such was never likely to deliver. Recognition of wrongdoing requires, at least in principle, no pain whatsoever. Even if I did want guilt for guilt’s sake, a punishment apparatus in no way would achieve that.

I never wanted money, but I note with interest the UK spends about 42 times more on punishment (prisons and probation) than victim’s compensation and Florida (prisons and jails) about 700 times more. More than 50% of women who apply to crisis shelters in NSW are turned away (4). Strangely though, the discourse about victims’ rights is always about punishing their perpetrators. I would like to think a victim’s rights are broader than that.

Observe that the framework which imagines the liberation and moral standing of the victim as in a zero-sum game with the position of the wrongdoer has little to offer when wrongdoers are diffuse or the case hard to prove. This isn’t rare; most serious wrongdoing against persons is too diffuse- enacted by too many people- or too difficult to prove. Observe also that this stance has little to offer the victim who still has an emotional attachment to the one who wronged them. This is often pathologized, and certainly such emotional bonds can be dangerous, but often it is simply unavoidable given a person’s projects in the world. The parent who refuses to give up on their adult child who struck them or stole from them is not necessarily just a dupe.

Finally, to me at least, the interesting moral possibility is the abolition of victimisation. You might laugh but look at the history of homicide rates- about a forty-fold reduction since 1300 in Western Europe. Imagine what a society with full technological powers and a genuine will to protect and heal could achieve.

I refuse to be moralised at over this. The trick in these conversations is twofold. Restrict who is allowed to have an opinion to victims and then ventriloquise victims as supporters of punishment as a homogenous bloc. Most insidiously: tell people that they’re not proper victims unless they want punishment- define victimisation in terms of the desire for punishment. In truth, I’d wager there is roughly as much variance on these issues among victims as the general population.

And moralism is the right word. Those distrustful of the instinct to punish (to paraphrase Nietzsche) are moralised at by everyone. Certainly, by the right which is unsurprising. More than ever from the left too. With tedious enthusiasm by centrists. Even EA has largely abandoned the cause or even taken up the opposite, largely, I think, because of homelessness in the Bay Area.

Taking pain and human dignity seriously

My underlying thought here, if you will forgive the sentimentality is that no one deserves to suffer. Everyone deserves to be happy. Deserves is deliberate here. I do not think we should reject the notion of desert; I think we should affirm it and say that it is positive in every case. Why think this? We think that by default humans deserve to be happy simply because of what they are. All else being equal, a person becoming happier makes the world more just. The idea that a person can forfeit that claim is what needs defending.

I’m not a Buddhist but I have recited many times in my life these words from the Bodhisattva vow:

“The unrescued I will rescue

The unliberated I will liberate

The uncomforted I will comfort”

And I damn well mean it. All of them. Because I could not imagine being fully happy living in a world in which part of the human community was morally alienated from the rest of the human community. Likewise, the quote by Eugene Debs everyone loves: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” I advise you to consider, fully, what “criminal element” means, and affirm it regardless.

All of this is seen as quite radical, but it is directly downstream of what we are told is the highest aspiration of ethics, to love others as yourself. Imagine that you saw every single person like a parent regards their child. You would want to abolish all their suffering and indignity. You would not view the matter gesturally; you would instead begin to search for the necessary tools. I suppose the other problem is civilizational despair. The scissors of hope need two blades to cut, desire and imagination. We have spent so long now dismantling our capacity to imagine utopia. The obvious culprit is cold war regimentation, but there are many tributaries to this woeful river.

An aside here. If you’re anything like me you’ve probably had trouble seeing why hope is virtue. The standard account- a sort of vague bias towards thinking good things will happen- is morally neutral at best. But if you think of hope as desire for better things combined with the imagination that seeks to find a way, it’s one of the most important virtues, especially in historical time.

Many have objected to infernalism, the mainstream view in Christian theology that some people will be eternally damned, by arguing that the blessed could not be happy knowing of the suffering of the damned. You, though not blessed, are already in that situation. Even if there were nothing you could do, you should at least see the situation as tragic. That is gestural yes, but if nothing else were possible, you would owe at least the gesture.

To someone from a better world our world would look like hell, just as the Roman Empire now looks to us infernal. We have become all too comfortable with hell; we have let its gates prevail. But things can change. Indeed, things will change, the only question is- “for the better?” If agriculture, democracy, global imperialism, the rights of women, the abolition of slavery- none of these were conceivable form the straight line “flying cars” projections we typically make. The future might be much better.

Footnotes

(1)- Close to no one has ever been dignified or had their moral standing in the community repaired by punishment. The idea crops up from Hegel to Duff, and the intent is good but acquaintanceship with what the lives of the punished look like, either up close or statistically, will disabuse you of that notion. Humans, I believe, are psychologically so constituted as to see punishment as a removal of dignity, as a reason to look down on someone. The “he’s done his time now” intuition does exist, but it is far rarer than the reverse. Duff of course is talking about an idealised form of punishment, and I would not want to accuse him of naivety. However, the changes we would have to make to reverse the effect of punishment might well be just as ambitious as punishment abolition itself. The horrid truth, I suspect, is that we want a class of people to look down on.

(2)- Social punishment at present is rather like prison. It’s sometimes necessary right now but it should never be relished.

(3)- The critical criminology literature has observed, and rightly so, that in all too many cases house arrest is becoming not a reduction in the intensity of incarceration, but an opportunity to roll it out to more people at a cheaper rate. Jail and prison usage remains static or grow while house imprisonment blooms. I therefore mention it as an alternative for genuinely somewhat dangerous individuals under present circumstances with reservation. In a lot of cases, wholly non-carceral sentences work fine. And obviously, the claim is not that house arrest isn’t punishment- that would be absurd. The claim is that the vector of punishment reduction, aiming at zero, goes in the short term through house arrest in some cases.

(4)- Since confusion could arise by proximity, I must clarify that I myself have never needed or been turned away from a crisis shelter.

Postscript: Technology and power

It bears saying, that any technology which can keep people safe or modify people can also keep tyrants safe and modify people to be slavish servants. Several people have made this point in the comments and I probably should have grappled with it in the body of the article.

It’s also obvious that, saving technological collapse, these capabilities will be developed one day. A crude slap drone is arguably in reach right now. Likewise transhuman modification will become possible in the future.

From this it follows that for many technologies for reducing punishment there is an optimal time for their development- after better poltical systems exist. The study of how to influence relative rates of technological progress in different areas, and most importantly, which we should speed up and which we should slow down, is called technological strategy. Pretty clearly, some of the technologies I discuss would be strong candidates for slowing down. I do not mention them because I think we should race to their development. Rather I mention technologies like slap drones to outline some concrete steps that a more perfect society could get much further along the road to abolishing punishment than us.

This technology could solve an important problem, and a utopia would possess it does not mean we should develop this technology right away.