89
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
89 points (96.8% liked)
chat
8645 readers
246 users here now
Chat is a text only community for casual conversation, please keep shitposting to the absolute minimum. This is intended to be a separate space from c/chapotraphouse or the daily megathread. Chat does this by being a long-form community where topics will remain from day to day unlike the megathread, and it is distinct from c/chapotraphouse in that we ask you to engage in this community in a genuine way. Please keep shitposting, bits, and irony to a minimum.
As with all communities posts need to abide by the code of conduct, additionally moderators will remove any posts or comments deemed to be inappropriate.
Thank you and happy chatting!
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I think what the person you are replying to is saying that people who are currently imprisoned in the capitalist system should not be imprisoned but that there are still swarms of fascists and committed reactionaries of all kinds who will need to be repressed by the state until the development of society makes those reactionary ideologies obsolete. Even those people should be getting help and be in humane conditions imo but they should not be allowed to freely walk the streets and spread bourgeois ideologies. It unfortunately takes a long time to heal a society from mass and widespread mental illness and there will be plenty of people who would rather kill us than allow us to be liberated
i do not want reactionary trans women to be V-coded in place of poor ones. i do not want conservative South African migrants stripped from their families at the border in place of Hispanic ones. i do not want black capitalists kept in former cotton plantations in place of poor ones. If you want to advocate for re-education camps, i’m right behind you. The word ‘prison’ in the United States of America implies a specific institution with a specific history, inseparable from the most depraved aspects of the country.
History shows that revolution will need to be defended from reaction and counter-attack, from without and within. That is not an excuse to take the tools of the old regime and whip them around. A hypothetical Turtle Island Liberation Army would inevitably come across stores of depleted uranium and white phosphorus. The responsible thing to do would be to safely dispose of the toxins, not hurl them into more soil and more children because the reactionaries live there. i see the carceral state, with its generational legacy of processing migrants, queers, the unhoused, and the mentally ill, as the social policy equivalent of white phosphorus.
I think you are making a lot of assumptions and what people are saying out of a valid place of care and a desire to see a harmful system being ended. I just don't think anyone here is even slightly advocating for the things you are worried about. Even the other person who is essentially saying prisons should exist for people who refuse to exist in society without harming others isn't saying anything like what you are worried about.
It depends. A lot of crimes are prosecuted everywhere, including AES states, and would be addressed in some serious fashion under almost any imaginable society. Think of the guy who won't stop drunk driving and has caused a fatal wreck, people who do multiple robberies, shootings, home burglaries, sex crimes, etc. Not everyone currently in prison in the U.S. is a weed dealer or got stuck with an unjustly long sentence.
This isn't an endorsement of any other part of our current legal system. I'm saying that there are plenty of people out there who are fine with hurting others as long as they get what they want, and who will do exactly that if they can get away with it. I think committing to never, ever putting someone like that in any sort of prison for any length of time is a bad idea.
Sure but their mental illness is a symptom of capitalism and even most of those people can be helped if that was what resources were being spent on. As a person who has a lot of experience working in community with killers, pimps, drug dealers, addicts, etc. I really know most people are not beyond reach and that we have the technology and resources to reintegrate them into society. Look at the Chinese approach to salafism, mostly it was education and job training to get the majority of people back into society. USians are an extreme case and need a lot of therapy and support but there is no reason to think that 95% of "criminals" aren't in that position because of capitalist indoctrination and can't be helped . The types of truly sociopathic people you are talking about are very few compared to most people in prisons
So you mean a guy that doesn't have access to public transportation and people who are poor? All of these things could be eliminated with basic socialist planning. These are not traits inherent to the people who do them, but consequences of material conditions
I agree that a lot of people commit crimes in the U.S. because their basic human needs (including mental health resources) go unaddressed. The best way to reduce crime is making sure everyone has housing, education, employment, healthcare -- all the stuff any socialist state would do its best to guarantee.
But people without acute mental health issues also commit crimes, and not everyone who has an acute mental health issue will voluntarily engage in treatment. And even if a revolution won total victory tomorrow, society won't change overnight. I'm reading Justice in Moscow, by George Feifer. It was published in 1964 and written based on observations from Soviet courtrooms around that time. There were still "real crimes" committed there, as there are in China today.
I generally agree but even still most people will choose rehabilitation if it is genuinely an option and for those who really won't I think their isolation from society should be infinitely more humane than what is being offered in the US or China, with the option always available and effort put into helping them anyway