Sunday 28 August 2016

Prison Essays (10). As Barbaric Institutions

 
Image result for abolish prison
 


“The law is an ass”, Charles Dickens once said, and quite correctly too. There are two sorts of laws that exist in the world at large: state law and natural law. I would like, very briefly to discuss these two terms. State law is the set of laws we are coerced into abiding by. These, of course, are man-made laws, and many are rather obscene, but must not be challenged no matter how wild and backward they may appear. Refusal to abide by these “laws” and break them could end in quite catastrophic circumstances for the individual concerned. They, will, depending on the “crime” almost certainly be convicted and given a criminal record and even sent to prison. They will be affected with this torturous affair for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, natural law is rather different. For such things as murder, rape, assault, armed robbery and so forth we all know to be wrong and unacceptable so some form of detainment may be even justified to prevent the individual or individuals from repeating those acts. For the argument is that we do not need the state to inform us that murdering, assaulting and raping people is wrong.

“Every law is a crime”, wrote the libertarian thinker, Marquis de Sade. Whether that statement is true or not it does not matter a great deal for the people currently residing in these insipid prisons. The frightening scenario is that prisons of various kinds exist in almost every country in the world. Every state, which is a criminal state of a certain variety, keeps these prisons and locks people up for lengthy periods of time. They lock up these people like a savage locks up his slaves. This institution is cut off from the outside world and all this from progressive, liberal states. “The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons”, wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky. That is quite true. What do we have in these Kafkaesque monstrosities? Officers in uniform, jangling their keys, dark, sombre, black corridors, mouldy cells and this is our “humanity”, “progress”, “enlightenment”, “decency”. These places are justified by the criminal class by saying we are protecting our well-behaved citizens by locking all the criminals up. But that makes little sense, for if all criminals were locked up there would be a shortage of military personnel, the police, members of Parliament, journalists, doctors, journalists, social workers, probation officers, church Ministers, company executives, because they would be filling the prisons up.

This talk about locking up the bad people is complete nonsense, in fact it is a complete fabrication. There are a group of people in these prisons, and only this group of people ought to be removed from society, not indefinitely, but for an amount of time until they pose no danger once again. Punishment ought to have no role in a progressive society and people who pose such arguments, and there are many of them, are driven by ideology. That is the minority of people who are in favour of regressive practices. The majority are often well-intentioned but they lament their protestations under high-level indoctrination. Why torture and murder people when a more beneficial tool is brainwashing then under media freedom? It is rather unusual for a great many people to believe in punishment of this this kind in a single other country in Europe. The framework of the prison system has already been set in the human psyche. The media and statesmen alike must never deviate from this. The argument is never “prisons ought to exist”, instead it varies on “tougher sentences”, “making prisons tougher”, and other lunacies are also expressed, which happen under a free state under brainwashing lunacies.

The very existence of a single functioning prison bears the hallmark of a rogue society; a criminal state. But it must be emphasised that Britain is not a criminal state, that is totally false. Britain is not a criminal state, it is an elite criminal state. When an elite criminal state lives and breathes do not be too surprised in finding this same state committing crimes every day of week. The very idea of prison is a very Kafkaesque notion. That is of the “dehumanised” individual. A “nightmare” existence. But this Kafkaesque existence has become more and more terrifying in modern Britain. This, to many, sounds preposterous; it is not. The Hobbesian dystopia extends beyond the prison gates. In reality the real prison sentence takes place when the prisoner, so we are told, is a free man or woman, as the case may be.

Yet this is not a nightmare; it is reality. For these people, or rather unpeople, as Orwell would have it, liberty and freedom are unattainable goals in the most loathsome prison of all, Britain. It is a nightmare society that has been created and it has been created by almost everyone because they are classed as “criminals”, for Britain is a prison state and police state rolled into one, with the limited, necessary freedoms, for without such freedoms, even the greatest brainwashing state would fail to convince its people in calling it a “free state”. It is still a very disturbing and unceremonious thing that prisons exist at all in the 21st century, but the most shocking aspect of this is that people appear to accept it. But it has been tolerated because we belong to the most debased society imaginable. It is, in essence, a nightmare existence. The more free a people become the more the autocratic a government becomes. This has been shown in many societies and the vicious battle is still being fought.

Yet why are these inhumane institutions still open? That is not such a difficult question to answer. Part of that question, has, in part, been answered already. That is, of the rampant indoctrinating mechanisms and the marginalisation of dissident debate about the issue. The other reason is the role of state capitalism, or rather, a variation of it. It amounts to class warfare; aristocrats dressed up as democrats, waging a class war on its biggest enemies of all, the electorate. There are no privileged classes in prisons, these people are far too busy committing major crimes in their chosen profession, with maximum protection from the government. Now this same state, of consecutive oppressive governments has succeeded in putting barriers between different kinds of prisoners, so prisoners are waging a war against each other. The poor are waging war against themselves, against poor refugees, benefit claimants, the disabled, it is a war being waged against all of us by all of us.

3rd-4th February, 2014