165. JUSTICE FOR VICTIMS - Why I Wouldn't Want My Killer Jailed
Occasionally I give talks at schools - usually about anarchism. These talks are always followed by a Q&A. I don’t want to just go around places and force my ideas on people - I want to hear their objections and arguments against me. I want to be challenged and see if my views survive scrutiny.
I was doing one of these talks last week, on the eve of attending the Anarchist Bookfair in London, and, after talking to a crowd of students, teachers and parents about why I believe anarchism to be the only ethically justifiable system of political organisation (and what I believe anarchism to be), it came time for questions. As usual, several of those questions centred around the issue of what happens to ‘bad’ people and ‘bad’ behaviour in a world with no authority. How do we police with no police? And, as usual, I explained my beliefs about prison abolition and how the vast majority of current crimes were caused by the unjust structures and ways of life which anarchism would hopefully dismantle. Essentially there would be very little reason for people to cause the harms that they currently do because so many of the motivating factors which lead to those acts would be eliminated. Negative acts would never be eliminated entirely in a world with no coercion, but they are not eliminated now, in a world full of coercive laws. And at least in a world evolved out of prisons and inhumane carceral solutions to these problems we would not be constantly perpetuating more harm on those already harmed by their life circumstances by torturing them in jails.
A key part of my argument was the idea that we need to rethink the knee-jerk assumption that a negative or harmful act requires punitive sanction as a response. Rethink the idea that punishment is necessary or deserved. The new book I am currently working on is looking at how our ideas of the necessity of punishment stem from childhoods conditioned by punishment as a learned response to behaviours which we do not have the capacity to rationally counter. Where we cannot explain the reasons for compliance in a way that convinces individuals to give willing consent, we simply punish those who don’t comply. And as many of our social norms and systems are illegitimate, we are left without convincing arguments, and rely on regimes of punishment and sanction to avoid the deeper questions we cannot answer about why a child, or young person, ought to behave in a particular way or do a particular thing. Given lengthy childhoods conditioned in this way - by repeatedly seeing that rule-breaking requires punishment, rather than compassion, help, listening to and solving problems, taking the causes seriously, etc., I argue: is it any wonder our first thought when someone breaks a law is that they ‘deserve’ to be punished? And that this conditioned instinct should be rejected.
One student was obviously unconvinced, and remained incredulous that I was advocating a world without punishment. The last question of the night saw them ask: “what would you want to happen then if someone right now, god forbid, ran to the stage and shot you dead? What would you want to happen to them?”
“Certainly not prison” was my response, to some disbelief in the room.
I explained my reasons further.
“If someone did that then they would either be severely mentally ill, and not really in control of their actions, or they would perhaps be deeply misinformed about something and believe something terrible of me the same way we have seen people around the world get sucked into weird online conspiracy theories and decide someone innocent is some sort of monster. Either way, they are not fully in control of their actions or ideas. They have been manipulated, misinformed, or are suffering some sort of delusion. How would locking them away in a cell and isolating them from their friends, families, and other networks of care help them? It certainly wouldn’t help anyone else. I wouldn’t bring me back to life. I’d be dead. And being dead it wouldn’t give me any satisfaction either to see them suffer for causing suffering to me and my family. Would it help my family’s suffering having them locked away in jail for killing me? Only some sort of base, knee-jerk instinct for vengeance which they’ve had drilled into them from the world. But if you ask them away from their grief and shock if they think someone should have their freedoms taken from them and be treated poorly in a prison cell, isolated from society and robbed of their humanity, I would hope their answer would be ‘no’, and that they could see that if their answer now, with all that grief and shock, was ‘yes’ that it is only due to the grief and shock. It is not what they really want. It is lashing out in anger, to be regretted later.
“I’d hope that the person who shot me was helped. That we could find out what was going on in their mind and help them not feel that way anymore and not cause harm to other people. I certainly don’t think putting them in jail will protect other people because we already have people running onto stages and trying to harm people they don’t like in the world today, with all its laws and prisons. A guy attacked Salmon Rushdie recently. Tried to kill him. Blinded him and almost did. He was arrested for it, but do we feel any more safer? Is anything stopping someone else trying to kill someone else at an event in the future because that guy is now in jail? Did it bring Rushdie back his eyesight?”
To be honest, I hadn’t ever considered the question of punishment in the light of a tragedy occurring to myself, and I was surprised (happily so) to see as I worked out my thoughts on the unexpected question that I really did feel that way. That any anger, sadness, frustration and fury I felt at the thought of being murdered did not lead me to the idea that more anger, sadness, frustration and fury ought to be caused as a response. That I would want another human being to suffer just because they had brought suffering on me.
Justice is an interesting word, and philosophers have questioned its meaning since, at least, the time of Plato. But discussions like this remind me that we still have so far to go before we really get a grasp of what this concept is. All I know is that a justice which involves the intentional harm and suffering of others, through deprivation, violence, and isolation, is no justice I wish to be part of. For someone to be put in jail as supposed justice for murdering me would only make me roll in my grave.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
My new book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere now on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. And if you want to buy it from me personally I shall be selling it at the Peterborough Radical Bookfair Saturday October 14th, and the Manchester and Salford Anarchist Bookfair Saturday November 4th.
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