In Russian and French Prisons

"My first choice is Peter Kropotkin’s In Russian and French Prisons , published in 1887. This could be regarded as the first book-length defense of prison abolition, though no doubt there’s some out there I’ve missed. Kropotkin was a revolutionary and an anarchist theoretician. One reason I chose this book was to highlight the anarchist strand of abolitionist thought, which opposes all forms of government. Also with Kropotkin, this is a person who spent two years in a Russian prison, and three years in a French prison. He’s drawing on that experience in addition to his broader theoretical point of view as a communist and a person who supports decentralized communities. This is a good point you raise here. He is a kind of communist, one that favors fairly small communities of workers sharing the work and sharing the product of that work in an equitable way, consciously attending to each other’s needs. It’s not a community of strangers. It’s not mass society. So it’s a particular way of thinking about what it means for us to live with one another in a way that’s just and humane. Obviously, if you expand out to the kind of societies we now mostly occupy, which are large, multimillion and multiethnic political communities, they don’t really have that kind of structure. And you can see why prison might arise as a way to respond to this circumstance. Kropotkin also has—most abolitionists do—a theory of crime. He thinks crime is partly a matter of environmental factors or climate factors, and it’s partly a matter of untreated illness, both physical and mental, that needs to be attended to. But probably most important in terms of his critique of prisons, he believes that the big cause is the way society itself is organized. Having a mass capitalist society is very impersonal and anomic. It’s not surprising that you’re going to have these kinds of problems and then develop this instrument, the prison system, to deal with it. I think that’s right. What I find most interesting about this book is the way he talks about what the prison does to people. He thinks of the prison as an instrument that deforms the will of prisoners, making them less able to resist temptation and antisocial impulses. That’s partly because of the authority that prison officials have over people and the way they abuse that power over those in their care. But it also has to do with the way prisoners live in the environment of the prison, where they don’t have opportunities to practice resistance to the temptations of social life, to learn how to develop their sense of autonomy as rational agents, to hold those baser impulses in check. Kropotkin believes the structure of prison actually makes people worse, and I think that’s an interesting line of argument. Yes, that’s his position."