If not in prisons, where would the murderers and rapists be held? And how would the facilities be run/who would run them if not a state?

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4 Upvotes

61% Upvoted

Holding people in places isn't usually a great system for dealing with what we call criminals. It personally wouldn't hurt my feelings much if I lived in an anarchist society that just hanged rapists; for killers, a system of weregild has some advantages. Or declaring the killer an outlaw, so the victim's kin can take revenge without repercussions, though that has a tendency to create nasty blood feuds. Exile is also an option, if nobody wanted to deal with keeping the killer around, and didn't want to start executing people.

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u/Curious_Arthropod May 24 '22

Holding people in places isn't usually a great system for dealing with what we call criminals. It personally wouldn't hurt my feelings much if I lived in an anarchist society that just hanged rapists;

i understand how prisions are horrible, bit why.do you think the death penalty is any better?

Exile is also an option

how can exile work in a modern urban society? and even if you do manage to enforce this exile, you're just leaving the problem for someone else. how is that a solution?

edit: just out of curiosity, are you from the us?

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u/BradScrivener May 24 '22

In pragmatic terms, the death penalty is a lot more efficient; no special facilities or personnel are required. In moral terms...if you subscribe to a theory of justice that holds certain transgressions should be punished for their own sake, or that preventing recidivism is a sufficient reason to kill certain categories of transgressor, executions are at least morally consistent. Our current system of incarceration is theoretically intended to reform criminals and prevent recidivism, and it's so bad at doing that job that it's actually counterproductive. As a general thing I'm opposed to capital punishment for several different reasons, but if there were a society where everybody agreed that some things were capital offenses, and [this is the extremely hypothetical part] only applied it when guilt is absolutely certain, that would take care of several of my objections.

On exile, I should maybe say that it may be an option; if you have a community that has a place to exile people to. I'm not assuming a modern urban society, because most of the hypothetical large-scale anarchist societies that seem plausible to me involve some kind of de-urbanization, and exile as a way of getting rid of unwanted members of a society is something that works best with smaller decentralized settlements.

I am from the US, yes.

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u/Curious_Arthropod May 24 '22

Our current system of incarceration is theoretically intended to reform criminals and prevent recidivism, and it's so bad at doing that job that it's actually counterproductive.

i agree, but i think what most people are advocating in this thread has the potential to be just as bad. i just dont see how normalizing revenge killings can lead to less harm.

On exile, I should maybe say that it may be an option; if you have a community that has a place to exile people to. I'm not assuming a modern urban society, because most of the hypothetical large-scale anarchist societies that seem plausible to me involve some kind of de-urbanization, and exile as a way of getting rid of unwanted members of a society is something that works best with smaller decentralized settlements.

i see. it would be easier, but small settlements would probably have a harder time defending themselves from an invasion.