chat

I'm a half-measures sort of prison abolitionist so this is going to be the bias in my reply upfront, so make of that what you will.

Some materialists will absolutely see the eradication of the causes of material deprivation and the establishment of a genuinely rehabilitative and restorative justice system, not to be conflated with the current carceral system, will lead to the eradication of crime.

Some take a long view, withering-away-of-the-~~state~~criminogenic conditions perspective, believing that we need a transitional phase to eradicate the current material conditions that drive criminality and that there's probably going to be a lag-time between addressing those material conditions and people's behaviour to adjust and for culture to change. Likely that the old guard who were raised under criminogenic conditions will need to die off first (old habits die hard) and potentially even longer than that. This position often leads to people aiming for full abolition but while maintaining a provisional rehabilitation system until such a time that these criminogenic conditions are eradicated.

Others believe that the carceral system is either completely broken or it's working exactly as its designed to work however they would posit that a materialist analysis includes the fact that humans have a predisposition towards committing so-called crimes of "passion", crimes of opportunity, and crimes of exploitation, and that this has existed long before they was even a concept of crime and that they will continue to exist for as long as humanity does, regardless of the advances that a post-revolution society makes; road rage will still exist as will child abuse and people acting violently in the heat of the moment or stealing/destroying things because the opportunity presented itself. The people who believe this would tend to advocate for true rehabilitation but they are the ones who see a role for rehabilitative institutions in society existing essentially forever, albeit in ways that are radically different to the ones we see today (which are better understood as factories of recidivism rather than as rehabilitation facilities).

For me, I want to see rehabilitation facilities. I believe that some people have abnormalities in their brain that cause them to either be unable to or unwilling to prevent themselves from acting criminally. I'm talking like brain injuries and people who have narcissistic personality disorder coupled with a proven tendency to be violent and so on. (Caveat here to say that most people who have a brain injury or narcissistic personality disorder are not prone to violence, so I'm not arguing for rounding them all up or anything like that.)

I believe this number to be very low, but I believe it exists and will continue to. I don't believe in punishing these people for a retributive sense of "justice". But I believe that we need to mitigate the risks to the community and we need to provide supports to the people who fit this category. In my mind, a model that is more akin to a group home or low security prison is the right answer here, with some Scandinavian approaches to be ideal. For things like day release in the community for people who are violent and unable/unwilling to moderate these urges, I think it's still possible to participate in the community in a limited and especially a supervised way.

If that means assigning one or more rehab workers to the individual when they are on day release for employment or engaging with the community and using an ankle bracelet and setting a strict curfew and monitoring their access to the internet etc. then so be it.

The counterargument here might be that a gilded cage is a prison made to look pretty. That's not untrue. But I still think we need to balance the safety of the community against the rights of people who commit crimes and that erring too far on the rights of people who commit crimes can, in some circumstances, risk causing serious harm to the community. From my perspective, ultimately part of the picture of criminogenesis is that sometimes those who commit crimes are ones who have been pushed to do so by being victims of crime.

I'm not saying that every victim of crime or every abuse victim will then go on to become a criminal or an abuser but there is a link and while I recognise that there are structural factors at play which account for the majority of crime we see today, there are other factors like biological, psychological, and cultural ones that we can't necessarily fix even with the material conditions being addressed and this needs to be considered as part of a broad materialist analysis of crime and how we should go about addressing it.