Police and prisons are institutions of state power and thus must be kept in the transition towards communism.
However, once communism is achieved, do you think police and prisons could go away?
If so, what would replace them, if any.
Police and prisons are institutions of state power and thus must be kept in the transition towards communism.
Not necessarily, especially not at their current scale.
Police have no reason to be involved in most small-scale situations and could be largely replaced by “neighbourhood watch” groups – whether they’re called “police” or something else, the main point is that they’d live in the area and would actually have to be accountable to the people there (which would also mean that the people would be able to collectively remove them from their position).
Prisons should be “abolished” in the sense that the goal of imprisonment should be rehabilitation rather than punishment (and slave labour, in Amerika’s case).
This can all happen during socialism, although the implementations obviously wouldn’t be ideal as long as a foreign imperialist threat remains
One way of thinking about this that I’ve recently come to appreciate:
In your average bourgeois state, almost all criminals are walking free. The UK has ~80K prisoners, and currently has a conviction rate of ~5% on rape claims, for instance (there are lots of ways to calculate this; here I mean guilty verdicts as a percentage of complaints made to police. Probably an under-estimate as many go unreported). So almost all rapists are not imprisoned and are not inconvenienced by the police. Similar for other violent crime, property crime, etc.
The argument that prisons keep us safe from these crimes is a nonsense when almost none of the people doing this are imprisoned.
The idea that police could keep us safe from these crimes is ridiculous when almost none of the people doing this are caught by the police.
The “deterrent effect” argument is ridiculously underpowered when this is the actual state of affairs.
So where does that leave alternatives? With a very low bar to clear, that’s where.
http://ggcpp.nuff.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Resource-Allocation-Processes-in-Policing-in-Great-Britain-–-Project-report..pdf is interesting in this context, especially the introduction and appendix 4.
A friend informs me that https://www.versobooks.com/books/3906-the-end-of-policing is currently free.
I mean, books are usually free in general, but officially free.
Have downloaded it, but not read it yet. It may have some interesting things to say on the topic though.
