Prisons and their moral influence on prisoners - P. Kropotkin

The prison does not prevent the occurrence of antisocial acts. Multiply your number. No improvement to passing behind its walls. As much to reform, prisons will always remain places of repression, artificial means, such as monasteries, that the prisoner will become less fit to live in community. Not achieve their ends.


Degrade society. Should disappear. Survival of barbarism are mixed with Jesuit philanthropy.


The first duty of a revolutionary is to abolish prisons: those monuments of human hypocrisy and cowardice. No need to fear antisocial acts in a world of equals, among free people, with a sound education and habit of mutual aid. Most of these acts would no longer have reason to be. The remaining would be suffocated in origin.


As for those individuals with bad trends that we bequeath the society after the revolution, will be our task to prevent such exercise trends. This will be achieved very effectively and through the solidarity of all members of the community against such offenders. Otherwise we could succeed in all cases, the only practical corrective treatment would remain fraternal and moral support.


Is this not a utopia. Has already been made with isolated individuals and become general practice. And the media will be much more powerful to protect society from antisocial acts that the current system of punishment that is a constant source of new crimes.

Las cárceles y su influencia moral sobre los presos – P. Kropotkin