Classic Writings in Anarchist Criminology by Anthony J. Nocella II

Classic Writings in Anarchist Criminology by Anthony J. Nocella II

Author:Anthony J. Nocella II
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2020-05-05T16:00:00+00:00


Chapter 7: Are Prisons Necessary?

Peter Kropotkin

If we take into consideration all the influences indicated in the above rapid sketch, we are bound to recognize that all of them, separately and combined together, act in the direction of rendering men who have been detained for several years in prisons less and less adapted for life in society; and that none of them, not a single one, acts in the direction of raising the intellectual and moral faculties, of lifting man to a higher conception of life and its duties, of rendering him a better, a more human creature than he was.

Prisons do not moralize their inmates; they do not deter them from crime. And the question arises: What shall we do with those who break, not only the written law—that sad growth of a sad past—but also those very principles of morality which every man feels his own heart? That is the question which now preoccupies the best minds of our century.

There was a time when Medicine consisted in administering some empirically-discovered drugs. The patients who fell into the hands of the doctor might be killed by his drugs, or they might rise up notwithstanding them, the doctor had the excuse of doing what all his fellows did; he could not outgrow his contemporaries.

But our century which has boldly taken up so many questions, but faintly forecast by its predecessors, has taken up this question too, and approached it from the other end. Instead of merely curing diseases, medicine tries now to prevent them; and we all know the immense progress achieved, thanks to the modern view of disease. Hygiene is the best of medicines.

The same has to be done with the great social phenomenon which has been called Crime until now, but will be called Social Disease by our children. Prevention of the disease is the best of cures: such is the watchword of a whole younger school of writers which grew up of late, especially in Italy, represented by Poletti,38 Ferri,39 Colajanni,40 and, to some limited extent, by Lombroso; of the great school of psychologists represented by Griesinger,41 Krafft-Ebing,42 Despine43 on the Continent, and Maudsley44 in this country; of the sociologists like Quételet and his unhappily too scanty followers; and finally, in the modern school of Psychology with regard to the individual, and of the social reformers with regard to society. In their works we have already the elements of a new position to be taken with regard to those unhappy people whom we have hanged, or decapitated, or sent to jail until now.

Three great causes are at work to produce what is called crime: the social causes, the anthropological, and, to use Ferri’s expression, the cosmical.

The influence of these last is but insufficiently known, and yet it cannot be denied. We know from the Postmaster-General’s Reports that the number of letters containing money which are thrown into the pillar-boxes without any address is very much the same from year to year. If so capricious an element in our



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