beautiful as a burning prison
anarchist black cross berlin // may
2005
.
dark and
forbidding as a prison that is not on fire, society shows itself everyday to
be more and more an accumulation of codes and punishments. thirty years ago,
it was said that “only the existence of prison walls permits those who
find themselves temporarily on the outside to believe that they are ‘free’”
and this is all the more true today.
everywhere governments are pushing new state and private prison construction
projects. everywhere prisons are being used (to different extents depending
on local prisons policy) to provide an extremely low-paid workforce. we are
facing a period in which prisons are becoming increasingly central to the organisation
of the dominion. attacking the prison system is a particularly important struggle
today, and it always has been. we must develop a broad critique of prisons and
the system that produces them.
the phantom of segregation and torture stalks through everybody’s mind:
the fear of prison and its power as a deterrent are an important part of repression,
which, before being physical, is psychological and emotional. people in today’s
society navigate between fear of the punishments and a desire to maintain them.
They have been driven to this. every day they fight with themselves to sedate
the deep instinct to revolt. they point the finger at today’s enemy –
could be the refugee, the thief, the junkie or the one who breaks society’s
rules.
in this society the law has many functions: it rules to maintain itself and
the relations of exploitation on which it is based; it orders social relations
and gives everyone a role to play, conforming to its own interests; it is the
main mediator between individuals, isolating them from each other, and gathering
them through juridical relations. the law applies itself through violence; without
violence, it is a dead letter. confinement and isolation are an important part
of this violence.
prison is one of many structures of social control and it has various goals:
to punish those who break the law, isolating them from the rest of society;
to nominally rehabilitate some elements and deliver them back to a full-of-rules
social life; to stir up the phantom of exclusion to prevent honest citizens,
workers and consumers from contemplating rebellion.
we mustn’t forget that prison has a symbiotic relationship with society,
and they change alongside each other. this is seen in the tendency of society
to mirror the structures of a prison. the machine of control that, inside the
prison, is personified in the constant presence of the prison warder and the
locked door, is reflected on the outside, not only in the police and the militarisation
of urban spaces, but in other ways, sometimes diffuse, invisible and not immediately
recognisable. this process allows for greater social control at lower cost.
electronic tagging turns people’s homes into a wing of the prison; town
planning, satellites and video cameras make a prison out of the city.
prison is everywhere. It is in the eye of the video camera and the ears that
listen to our telephone and data communications, but it is also in the culture
of passive consumption, media bombing, alienation and work. video cameras are
not needed to protect citizen’s security, psychiatrists don’t help
wicked people, prisons do not reintegrate people who have made mistakes.
more and more people are passing through these institutions, which only serve
to protect the interests of those in power, to defend the dirty business of
those who get richer and richer from the blood and toil of others.
what we have to fight against is this bogus, but almost universally accepted
idea that segregation and isolation are a solution to social conflicts. to use
a definition of the prison resistance movement in franco’s spain, all
prisoners are social prisoners. that is to say that they are prisoners because
of society, because of this society.
.
we
aim for a world where prisons are eliminated.
we aim for a world free from capitalist form of social relations.
...and we will struggle for it every day!
abc links:
berlin (german)
-- http://www.abc.tommyhaus.org. >>
brighton (english) -- http://www.brightonabc.org.uk.
>>
international -- http://www.anarchistblackcross.org.
>>