There will be situations in which force or enforcement would be necessary for social order. i’m not idealistically opposed to prisons or confinement as a concept, i am opposed to the existing institution of the Prison, with its own experts and episteme in the “West”. i think it’s impossible to avoid a social situation where there would never be a need for force to restore order. All traces of the currently existing institution would have to be carefully and scientifically excised before that new structure is built. i think that’s the core of prison abolition: this is a capitalist industry and also the boot tramping down on all outsiders and disposables in society. For many of the most marginalized in the Imperial Core, the bleeding edge of systemic violence is the carceral state. For many queer theorists (that is, not Marxists), this level of violence grants prison abolition a central role in struggle. i believe land back and prison abolition movements are non-Marxists who have nevertheless developed a theory and practice during the Western Left’s post-91 wilderness days. i think basically all queer advocates would be best served by forming a group or a faction within the structure and platform of a worker’s party. Nevertheless, we should make some effort to understand their terms and developments.

To directly answer your question, confinement of a struggling threat to the community might involve a prison, but it shouldn’t involve any ‘Prison’. i’m not trying to be arbitrary or capricious about that. The current standards are violently inhumane. For acceptable treatments of ‘inmates’, for the relationship between ‘inmates’, between ‘inmates’ and ‘guards’, and between ‘inmates’ and the people detaining them. It would be impossible for me to articulate exactly what developments would be made in constructing a New (Soviet) Social Worker, but i see it as an area where there’s a lot to be done. Current methods of agriculture are monstrously wasteful and climate destructive, and a new industry would need to be formed from the ground up, between the reality of communities on the ground and the people designing state policy. Similarly, medical workers, education workers, and local government workers would need to form a new system of keeping public order. In a state where, say, fixed costs for the average person are very low, the current US system of fines for municipal violations would be less effective. Does that mean increasing the fines, or finding a new method of punishment? It’s easier to do the former, because the policy and enforcement mechanism already exists.

The use of secret police and distant prisons in the USSR is worthy of careful study in the West. While arguments from reactionaries impose a sort of forced defensive mentality vis a vis the purges, it’s worth noting that in a number of ways the Soviets faced an uncomfortable and unfamiliar problem, and responded by reproducing the institutions that the previous state had used. i am not going to argue that NKVD was worse than or as a bad as the Okhrana, but states are institutions with a certain viewpoint and inertia. Of course it would be cheaper and more efficient to convert prisons in the USA and Europe into holding pens for reactionaries, even temporarily. If you do that though, you are implicitly keeping solitary confinement and execution chambers. i think giving into that temptation, and trying to mold tools designed to bring out the worst of humanity to some other end, is a mistake. The Stanford Prison Experiment has been retracted because the lead psychologist basically told the participants to act out stereotypically. While it’s not a study of untainted human society, it’s still noticeable that the lead researcher expected certain results, and all the participants knew what stereotypes he meant.

USAmerican culture is utterly, top to bottom obsessed with the criminal and the outlaw. Every channel on TV has a cop drama, people say the names of the FBI Most Wanted like celebrities, every local newspaper runs a blotter reporting every crime, the news tracks every car chase obsessively, and so on and so forth. Cultural notions about the ubiquity of violent crime and how people ought to be punished for it will need to be erased and replaced. If you ask any USAmerican, no matter how much of a commie, to imagine a prison, they are going to think of guard towers, barbed wire, bad food, and the looming threat of sexual assault. There is a world of difference between needing to deal with interpersonal violence and needing a complex kick back system of private prison labor teams and the election campaigns for the judges and attorneys that fill them. Are prisons in Cuba inherently wrong or dangerous? i would say no, but Cuba spent decades intentionally reckoning with the cultural legacy of colonialism. That examination and removal of the biases and practices we consider ‘ordinary’ needs to happen or else we will merely reproduce the institutions of bourgeois society.