Instead of prisons: a handbook for abolitionists
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- Organized crime
- Criminal law social change
- The myth of protection
- Myth
| Guns
Guns are a time-honored American tradition, as the National Rifle Association continues to remind us. Bloodshed, murder and violent crime are also an integral part of the American heritage. Economic interest, machismo and fear of racial control intermingle to prevent the banning of guns. Our culture of violence" [29] persists and easy access to weapons of death remains intact with over 40 million handguns stashed away in the drawers, closets and glove compartments of America. [30] The appalling statistics of gun-inflicted homicide —over two-thirds of the approximately 20,000 murders committed annually— clearly justify the view, expressed at the hearings by Representative Bingham of New York that "we are literally out of our minds to allow 2.5 million new weapons to be manufactured every year for the sole purpose of killing people. —New York Times editorial. February 24. 1975 In the last decade, America suffered 95,000 gun murders, 100,000 gun suicides, 700,000 gun woundings and 800,000 gun robberies. —Clayton Fritchey. New York Post, October 3, 1974 Last Tuesday was a banner day for violent death in New York City, and guns in private hands contributed substantially to the macabre scorecard. Of the nine victims of murder or murder-suicide incidents that day, four were killed by handguns and two by a shotgun ... Each time there is the faintest threat of effective gun control legislation, the gun lobby redoubles its efforts to spread its shrill message that people rather than guns kill people. Perhaps so, but it is clear from the nationwide gun death toll that it is much easier to shoot someone than to cause human death by almost any other means. —New York Times editorial, July 13, 1975 About 65 percent of all murders in the United States are accomplished by means of guns, 51 percent by handguns... in the United States 10 to 20 times as many people are murdered per 100,000 population as in the United Kingdom and other countries with strict gun controls. —L. Harold Dc Wolf, Crime and Justice in America, p. 201 The National Rifle Association warns us of gun control: "Let them follow their counsels of cowardice if they prefer to surrender the privileges and rights of manhood." In the United States the gun has become a symbol of masculinity, a symbol of aggression, control and dominance: ...The deadly handgun ... is power in interpersonal relationships. This is why seven out of ten murders are among families and friends. This is also win' debates on the abolition of handguns have become debates on castration.... Why should a man's manhood in any way depend on a piece of machinery that propels a drop of metal which hills another human being? [32] Despite polls showing that more than 70 percent of the public supports stricter gun laws, Congress has failed to act, largely because the gun industries wield such tremendous political and economic power. [33] The additional issue of racial control is related to those of machismo and economic power. Some Black leaders opposing gun regulations argue that "gun control is race control." [34] Recently proposed gun regulations by Attorney General Edward Levi are aimed at disarmament of metropolitan populations (largely poor and Third World) coupled with demands that "law enforcers" remain armed. [35] To prevent gun control from becoming another possible means of control over Third World people, the poor and those labeled "dissidents" —and to prevent further escalation of violent crimes against citizen— he long range we advocate total disarmament of law enforcement officials as well as civilians. In the interim, we advocate legislation aimed at phasing out the importation, manufacture, sale and private possession of handguns. Organized crime In considering organized crime we face the difficulty of separating those organized criminal activities carried on by "syndicates" from similar criminal activities carried on by "legitimate" businesses and government agencies. Bribery, extortion and fraud are also practiced by the government and by corporations. Syndicates involving thousands of individuals operate outside the laws and institutions governing the rest of society. They control whole fields of activity in order to amass huge profits thru monopolization, bribery, extortion and fraud. Their profits —estimated at $6 to $7 billion a year— form the power base of professional criminal activity which extends into every facet of America's social, economic and political systems. The media "cops and robbers" image is largely false. Syndicate relationships with legitimate business and government are such that it is often difficult to differentiate "underworld gangsters" from "upperworid" business people and government officials. Evidence developed in the Watergate scandal and its aftermath has shown that they have often been one and the same. Gambling, loan sharking and drugs are still the greatest sources of income for organized crime. With the millions of dollars gained thru these activities, syndicates manipulate the price of shares on the stock market, raise or lower prices of retail merchandise, determine whether entire industries will be union or nonunion, control the success or failure of small business people. The power purchased with syndicate money controls the lives of countless numbers of people and affects the quality of life in entire neighborhoods. By paying off public officials, professional criminals purchase the "right" to murder with impunity, to extort money from business people, to conduct businesses in liquor, food and drugs without regulation or standards. [36] Syndicates "own several state legislators and federal congressmen and other officials in the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government at local, state and federal levels." [37] The syndicate could not exist without the accommodation of certain police and other officials, so that, tho the identities of professional criminals are often widely known, they are rarely dealt with by the criminal (in)justice systems. [28] Drugs After extensive investigation [Isador] Chein concluded that addicts were individuals who had already failed to find alternative solutions to their problems and who had not received any effective help in doing so. [By using drugs, they would be seeking what seemed to them the best available treatment of their distress. American society, Chein notes, takes extraordinary pains to keep heroin from addicts, thus escalating its price, and it then declares that the addicts are social menaces because they engage in so great a volume of crime-to secure the drugs which have been priced beyond their ability to afford them thru noncriminal activity. Similarly, the drug is outlawed because its use is said to be dangerous to the individual's health and well-being. Thousands of addicts thus die thru overdose or contract serious diseases because they are blocked from trustworthy sources of the drug, sterile needles, pure drugs, and distilled water. -John Monahan and Gilbert Geis, "Controlling Dangerous People," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January, 1976, pp. 143-49. Experts in the field of drug abuse agree that "most of the crime, fear and other side effects of narcotics addiction probably would not exist without the laws that make the addict a criminal." [39] Substantial portions of property crime and prostitution are attributable to the need of drug addicts to support their habit. [40] Nevertheless, drug legislation continues to reflect and reinforce myths about drug use. The criminalization of specific substances and the labeling of their users as "dangerous drug addicts" and "criminals" serves several political purposes. It legitimizes the isolation, punishment, involuntary "treatment" and imprisonment of the "addict" and the eradication of the "pusher." [41] Institutionalized racism and social prejudices against the poor, minorities and "hippie" culture insure that the laws themselves and their enforcement are aimed at control of these groups. [42] While substances associated with politically powerless groups are labeled "dangerous narcotics," those used and sanctioned by the dominant culture —nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, tranquilizers, barbiturates, amphetamines— are portrayed as part of the American way of life. [43] With the drug industry as supplier and profiteer and physician as pusher, "soft" drug consumption has skyrocketed in the last three decades, despite physically damaging effects of these drugs. [44] Drug promotion by media advertisers, the drug industry and the medical profession have "contributed to the convincing of large sections of the public that there is a pill for every ill, and that there is-in fact, there must be-a chemical answer to every physical, emotional and sociological discomfort ... " [45] It is not our purpose here to examine the relative dangerousness of chemical substances. We question why substances associated with the middle and upper classes are considered "safe" and "soft" and those associated with the ghetto, barrio and youth culture are labeled "dangerous narcotics." Drug use, abuse and addiction can no longer be viewed as an apolitical moral issue. Drugs have always been used as a political tool to pacify and narcotize segments of the population seen as threats to those with power: The drug traffic is a billion dollar business concern.... whites are not going to give up such a commodity. Or throw away the means of keeping you a slave, a dependent people and at the very bottom of the social level of this entire world. —Arthur J. Davies, "Anguish of a Dead Man," Black Scholar, April/May 1971, pp. 34-41 Junk is so readily available in Harlem that any kid with some curiosity and some small change is bound to try it.... Most devastating of all is the effect heroin has had on our young-the hope of the Black nation. —Congressperson Charles B. Rangel, New York Times, January 4, 1972 The American government tries to narcotize its dissidents with alcohol, tobacco, work, money, and methadone; when these fail, it declares them incurably insane or permanently addicted; and it deals with them accordingly, by incarcerating some in prison, others in mental hospitals, and putting the rest on "methadone maintenance." —Thomas Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry, p. 102 A truly drug dependent culture is promoted by pharmaceutical companies which test and market their products in schools, prisons, mental hospitals and the military, and by agencies of the government which support drug experimentation and use on Third World people, the poor, women, prisoners and those labeled "mentally infirm."
Organized syndicates are the principal importers and wholesalers of narcotics. Our drug laws effectively create a highly profitable Black Market which depends for its existence on law enforcement agencies to hold the available supply down to the level of effective demand. [54] Black Market drug traffic could not exist without being condoned by those in powerful positions. "The laws give a kind of franchise to those who are willing to break ... [it]." [55] The result is massive exploitation by professional, organized syndicates which, thru extortion, bribes and payoffs, are insulated from the effects of law enforcement. [56] In Harlem, the average take from addicts and pushers by one crime-prevention squad was $1,500 a month; "heavy scorers" made as much as $3,000 a month.... In the course of their daily rounds, the police themselves become pushers, doling out daily fixes to their addict informants from their immense stores of confiscated heroin. —Jessica Mitford, Kind and Usual Punishment, pp. 68-69 The forced drugging of prisoners, mental patients, children and the elderly, the use of unwitting subjects as guinea pigs in drug experimentation and the fraudulent promotion of harmful chemical substances are all serious crimes, which often result in permanent disablement or death. Thus, political, economic, racist and sexist forces converge to create a "drug problem" which is largely a problem of exploitation for financial profit or social control of the powerless. Criminal law & social change Traditionally, the stated purpose of criminal law has been to discourage violence and theft or destruction of property. As it has been legislated and enforced, the effect of criminal law has been to maintain control by the dominant class and to enforce their code of morality. The definition of criminal acts changes according to the political, economic and moral interests of those who control any system. The essence of high status is privilege, and the essence of privilege is legitimate exception from the rules which apply to others ... conformers to the law . . . are divided between those who enjoy the law as a system of facilitations, a network of pathways, and those who suffer the law as a system of deprivations, of barriers. Similarly, those outside the law must be divided between persons who can evade it only by violating it (risking punishment) and those who are legitimately exempted from it and risk nothing. Why not obey the law, if it serves your interest? What need to violate it, except if it does not? And why be concerned at all, if you are beyond its authority? Justice is no longer even a lofty ideal: it is a vicious pretext by which the beneficiaries of power preserve their self-esteem while oppressing the twice punished. Stripped of that pretext, it is little more than a naked defense of class interest. [57] Tho some advocate abolishing the criminal law, [58] for the present most abolitionists advocate limiting criminal law to reduce its discriminatory and arbitrary powers and its extended use as a tool of socialization. We view crime as a problem with roots deep in the social structure, not just as a series of problems of individuals. Rather than punishing individual actors, collective response to the root causes is needed. A belief that our culture is criminogenic does not deny the role of individual responsibility and decision making. This belief includes a realization that many individuals will continue to choose illegal options in solving economic and social problems as long as our social structure continues to fail in providing a range of legal options and maintains a value system encouraging competitive individualism, violence, consumption, and monetary success. Any rewriting of our criminal laws and restructuring of our criminal (in)justice systems requires the wisdom and experience of all who are affected by it.
As the present social system, based on privileges of class, race and sex, is gradually altered, principles must be developed to guide us away from the traditional adversarial system with its sanctions of prison, coercion and violence, into a conflict resolution and reconciliatory process. Presently, we recommend that sanctions involve the least restrictive and coercive action:
From the abolitionist perspective, these are some of the interim criteria for gradually transforming the criminal law into a mechanism for justice-an instrument for reconciling the lawbreaker with the community and with the victim. The myth of protection There is in fact no way to eliminate the acknowledged evils of punishment without also eliminating criminalization as an accepted object of legal process ... the time has come to abolish the game of crime and punishment and to substitute a paradigm of restitution and responsibility .... I urge that we assign (reassign actually) to the civil law our societal response to the acts or behaviors we now label and treat as criminal. The goal is the civilization of our treatment of offenders. I use the word "civilization" here in its specific meaning: to bring offenders under the civil, rather than the criminal law; and in its larger meaning: to move in this area of endeavor from barbarism toward greater enlightenment and humanity. —Gilbert M. Cantor, "A Proposal for Ending Crime and Punishment," The Shingle, p. 107 Myth: Prisons protect society from "criminals." Reality: Prisons fail to protect society from "criminals," except for a very small percentage and only temporarily. Prisons "protect" the public only from those few who get caught and convicted, thereby serving the primary function of control over certain segments of society. According to Norman Carlson, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, "The goal of our criminal justice system is to protect law-abiding citizens from crime, particularly crimes of violence, and to make them secure in their lives and property." [59] Despite shifts in "correctional" emphases, restraint or keeping the "criminal" out of circulation continues to be a key purpose of prisons. However, it is questionable how much real protection prisons afford, because only a small percent of all law-breakers end up in prison and most of these few remain in prison for a relatively short period of time. Prisons have pacified the public with the image of "safety," symbolized by walls and cages located in remote areas. But prisons are a massive deception: seeming to "protect," they engender hostility and rage among all who are locked into the system, both prisoner and keeper. Society is victimized by the exploitation of its fear of crime. Indeed, rather than protecting society from the harmful, prisons are in themselves harmful. It is likely that persons who are caged will become locked into a cycle of crime and fear, returning to prison again and again. Prisons are selectively damaging to specific groups in society; namely, Blacks and other minorities. Yüklə 1,92 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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