Mickey Z

Cool Observer

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Wednesday, December 28, 2005

"You can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution"

(Above quote: thanks to Huey P. Newton)

A good friend of mine recently started a dialogue with me on the general topics of police and prison in a hypothetical “free society.”

In particular, he asked me what I thought prisons might look like if far more progressive forces eventually gained control in the U.S. My first answer was honest and accurate: “I don’t know.” After some thought, however, I added something like this: The decision-makers in such a future society would have grown up with a vastly different set of stimuli than us and thus would probably (I hope) be able to conceive of solutions and concepts well beyond our current myopic reach.

Albert Einstein sez:
“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were in when we created them.”

Angela Davis sez:
“This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and their families. The prison is considered so natural and so normal that it is extremely hard to imagine life without them ... Prison is considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives.”
Full article here: http://tinyurl.com/9j3uw

Albert Camus sez:
“To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.”

From a post at Infoshop:
“Because crime has a social origin, once the society is rebuilt and the intrinsic causes for violence and disorder eliminated, as reflections of the present conditions, crime will disappear as well. Without exploitation, without the State, in a libertarian society, the majority of motives for crimes will vanish. If we create a society in which mutual aid, solidarity and cooperation are developed, all institutional forms of constraint will be rendered superfluous.”
Full article: http://tinyurl.com/93kdg