Are There Anarchist Alternatives to Policing and Prisons?

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[This essay is incomplete]

Nope.

  1. Understanding "Crime"

  2. Killing the Cop In Your Head

Understanding "Crime"

As soon as you create formal systems for dealing with "crime", you've become a cop. The point of anarchy is to negate systems of authority so they can't continue to grow and do ingrained, structural harm - not to reform them into being (supposedly) friendlier forms of authority.

Giving the police less-lethal weapons or empathy-training or sparkly new red uniforms doesn't stop the police from being a violent authority that only exists to maintain the domination of the privileged classes. It doesn't stop the police from being an institution that was originally created to catch escaped slaves and bring them back to their masters.

Hiring more women cops or black cops or gay cops only makes it easier for the state to whitewash the atrocities cops commit on a daily basis, by presenting the police force as 'diverse', 'progressive', 'inclusive' and 'modernized'. Painting a rainbow on a jackboot doesn't make it any less of a jackboot.

Obfuscating what a cop is will only serve to hasten the spread of the police state by making policing seem more palatable to the communities most damaged by it. There is no reforming a force of structural violence designed to maintain inequality, and anyone from a marginalized group who is absorbed into the police force will be quickly corrupted by it. Humans will say and do anything to justify clinging to their authority over others when given it, and there's no getting around the fact that oppressed people who join an oppressor group will then oppress people. It's just the basic nature of authority.

These guardians of the monopoly on violence have been proven again and again to be incapable of restraint or of holding themselves accountable. They have absolute authority in their hands, and pretending that their power can be softened when all the evidence shows us otherwise makes zero logical sense. We've seen countless cops get away with murder and that doesn't change when you give them new uniforms and new titles like "the people's police", "the community watch" or "the peace keepers".

So what do I suggest anarchists replace the police with? In a word:

Nothing.

If someone does something fucked up, kill them dead, or don't. It's up to you. Just don't try to create laws and institutions telling us how to handle our problems, because then you're replicating a state and have become a hundred times more dangerous than whatever harmful activity you're trying to thwart.

Killing the Cop In Your Head

If a person does harm to you or someone you care about, then you may feel the need to enact some kind of retribution against them. So go ahead and do so, without waiting for permission from "the committee" or "the community". You don't need anyone else's permission to defend yourself or your loved ones, and no body of people can ever be equipped to tell you what your lived experience is, to measure the grievous harm that has been done to you, and decide what retribution you need to see done to feel whole again. You were the person who suffered harm, and only you can decide what the response to your harm should be.

No one but you is qualified to judge how to respond to harm done to you. No "impartial" person or council of persons should be granted the authority to decide what qualifies as an offense and who should be deprived of freedom or of life for committing that offense.

Only you can decide what your needs are and what retribution, if any, you're willing to live with after someone does harm to you.

Whatever retribution you or your loved ones carry out can't be backed by any institutional or structural force, because that would present a much bigger danger to the world than the person who wronged you. A singular actor doing harm is far less dangerous than a collective legitimized force of institutional violence declaring it has the right to enact justice on all who violate its decrees.

If you insist on creating formal legitimized communal policies on responding to harm, you've effectively officiated the harm as crime, you've sanctified the response to the crime as law, and appointed those who actualize the response to the crime as the police force. You've replicated the state 1:1, but probably used more flowery language like "rehabilitative justice", "community based re-education camps" and "democratic law enforcement" to hide the true nature of your police force and prisons.

I'm really bothered by anarchists who feel the need to officiate everything they do. I think anarchists who assemble a democratic council to judge how retribution should be carried out against people who break rules or do harm to others are just replicating the state form in everything but name.

I think if what the offender did was really worthy of retribution, then you and whoever else is affected by the offender's actions should just go ahead and do the retribution without needing to request permission from an authority or stage grueling debates with people who are completely unaffected by harm but still feel the need to insert themselves into the situation and pass down judgement on all involved.

Something that comes up a lot when anarchists talk about alternatives to prisons is the idea of exile - Forcing a person to leave a community because they broke whatever social contract. It should honestly go without saying, but exiling people just outsources your problems to other communities. Deal with it yourself instead of making the person someone else's problem.

The simple truth of anarchy is you can take direct action against someone, but can't expect an authority to protect you when you do it. You're on equal footing with everyone else, and they can just as easily do violence to you as you can do violence to them. This serves as a healthy disincentive for anyone looking to do violence to others.

With states, the police can kill people without consequence because they have their officiated monopoly on violence. In anarchy if you want to kill someone, you'd better think long and hard about the consequences first, because there's nothing protecting you from retaliation, and no way to outsource the work of killing to strangers in uniforms. This is a feature, not a bug.

States have long afforded abusive people protection from retaliation. Someone can attack, exploit, torture, maim and kill others and (sometimes) be tried by a court for it. The sentence the court decides on then may or may not prove satisfactory to the victim. But if the victim rejects the court's authority and tries to get justice themselves, they'll be tried for it and will certainly be punished harshly. The state doesn't permit anyone to make their own justice or override the court's authority. To do so would threaten the state's monopoly on violence, and without that, the state would inevitable collapse, unable to coerce the public into submitting to its authority.

When you do anarchy, you don't have a monopoly on violence, law and order, crime and punishment, a judge and jury, prisons and death penalties, all you have is anarchy.

You don't get to ask a court to kill for you. A court handing out executions, prison sentences, community service or 'rehabilitation' requires the backing of a state and a monopoly on violence to function. Otherwise there's nothing to uphold their claim to legitimacy and whatever decrees they issue can't be enforced.

Here's a question I was asked by someone recently while discussing this topic:

"Well, what if i was disabled and a group of people raped me, and i was unable to defend myself, then what? If i can't go to the community and ask for retribution to be carried out on my behalf, then it disadvantages disabled people, or people that don't have support structures, or anyone who is weaker than the person who is enacting the harm."

The only structure anarchy needs is friendship. If a friend isn't willing to kill for you, then tough shit. You don't get to build a court and a police force to get your retaliation.

It's honestly disturbing as fuck that these conversations about alternatives to the justice system always, always descend into "but what if a disabled person gets raped?" It's the red version of "who will think of the children??" You give up certain "protections" the state affords you to do anarchy, starting with a state's monopoly on violence.

And let's not pretend that the current justice system protects people from being attacked or gives them justice after the fact. In a lot of cases, the system actively enables the attack. For example, it's an often-repeated fact that 40% of all police men admit to abusing their wives. They also abuse and kill the people they're tasked with protecting. And they face no consequences for any of it from the system.

So to pretend that courts and police can ever protect people from harm when they have been shown to do the direct opposite in every country under every ideological system is deeply toxic.

"What you're proposing is darwinist, benefiting the strongest, or the groups that could amass larger numbers."

No, that would be a state. This is the polar opposite of that - deliberately not affording anyone the opportunity to amass larger numbers (authority). You're proposing officiating a communal death squad, I'm saying don't do that.


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