One Day We Will Live Without Fear by Mark Harrison

Author:Mark Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
Published: 2016-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

A life-changing moment

Like the KGB, every police force tries to reduce reoffending. The results do not always impress. In England and Wales, first offenders may be given police cautions for minor violations. Between 2002 and 2013, the police issued more than three million cautions. Proven reoffending in the twelve months after the caution was approximately one in six among adults and one in four among juveniles.12

An innovation in the struggle against petty crime in England and Wales was the Anti-Social Behavior Order. ASBOs were introduced in 2000 and replaced in 2014. An ASBO was issued by a court against a person and was designed to inhibit the sort of behavior that would be recognized as antisocial but would not normally warrant prosecution. Once an ASBO was issued, however, to breach it was a criminal offense. Between 2000 and 2014, more than twenty-four thousand ASBOs were issued. Over the same period, more than half of the ASBOs issued were violated. In cases where an ASBO was breached, it was breached five times on average.13

The KGB strategy of prevention was astonishingly effective by comparison. In eight years from 1967 through 1974, according to KGB figures for the whole Soviet Union, just over 120,000 people were “treated” by profilaktika. Around 70,000 of these were warned for saying or doing things that were “politically damaging,” and another 11,000 for “suspicious contacts with foreigners and nurturing inclinations to treason.” Only 150 of those who received a warning—just over one per thousand—were subsequently prosecuted or punished administratively for an actual offense.14 One per thousand is a reoffending rate that Western justice systems can only dream about. At last—an aspect of Soviet society that actually worked!

It is clear that the preventive discussion could be a moment that changed your life. What made it so effective? Fear was the key. The subject of a preventive discussion with the KGB was made to feel fear—not just everyday anxiety, but a deeper fear that the young person issued with an English police caution or ASBO does not feel. There is no other reasonable explanation for the extraordinary effectiveness of profilaktika.

The presence of fear leaves few traces in documentary records. Perhaps there were varieties of fear. For some of those interviewed, the KGB would have had a terrifying reputation, rooted in its history. Despite the reform of 1954, KGB leaders themselves emphasized continuity with the secret police of Lenin and Stalin. In living memory the KGB’s predecessors had brought about the death of millions and the imprisonment of tens of millions. In the western borderlands, including Lithuania, many young people were likely to know of relatives or family friends of the older generation who had been imprisoned, deported, or caught up in armed conflicts that the KGB’s forerunners had waged ruthlessly, with total commitment, and won.

For others there would have been a more immediate fear. In this most centralized society, the KGB spoke not only for the police functions of the state. If necessary, it could give instruction to your employer, teacher, landlord, doctor, and psychiatrist—and those of your parents and children.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.