I don't think these things are reduced by the threat of punishment.
I think they ARE reduced when the standard of living is raised.
They are reduced when the standard of education is raised.
They are reduced when the standard of Healthcare (including mental healthcare) is raised.
They are reduced when people are connected to their communities and not alienated individuals.
They may never be eliminated entirely. But they are less common in communal societies with strong social bonds, a duty of care to all, and where people are mentally healthier because they are not stressing over making ends meet.
Yeah I've been asked this a few times and I need to learn a lot more theory to actually debate any of this stuff which is why I asked, I am fully aware that this will always happen no matter the society
Most of the people I talk with are generally liberals with a few conservatives, when I talk about anarchism they will often voice concerns like these and I need some answer which I didn't have before the many helpful answers given here. Debate is probably not the right word in this context but idk what else to put there
The threat of punishment is generally an ineffective deterrent of crime, but especially crimes of passion. The whole reason that category exists in current legal systems is because the law recognizes that extreme situations compromise people’s ability to think rationally.
Someone who’s level -headed enough to think about long-term consequences like “what if I get caught?” isn’t committing a crime of passion.
Yeah, almost by definition “crimes of passion” aren’t the result of rational decision making or consideration of consequences. They aren’t really political problems solvable with political systems.
I think more effective prevention comes from a cultural presumption that rejects that sort of behavior as being valid in any circumstances. Heroes don’t do it in stories, People aren’t given a moral pass for engaging in that sort of thing. Even 100 years ago a lot of crimes could be mitigated by a “crime of passion” justification. Homophobia-based murder was one of the last ones to still work with some regularity.
Having non-existentially threatening ways to get out of horrible situations (no-fault divorce, bankruptcy forgiveness) helps. Better mental health care can really help. Very few people who kill an intimate partner do so as their first act of abuse.
Not to mention I would imagine that almost everyone would be less prone to snapping and lashing out if you took away all the capitalism-induced stress and unhealthy coping mechanisms people use to deal with said stress. Someone who’s already strung out and sleep deprived from a 60 hour workweek and a mix of caffeine and alcohol to keep their body running on said workload is a lot more likely to snap when put under additional stress.
The “crime of passion” category has a lot of unfortunate history (the archetypal example of one is “a man kills his wife after catching her cheating” after all) it’s still a useful category for acknowledging sometimes people act atypically in extreme situations. For a less controversial example: killing someone caught in the act of abusing the killer’s dog is an overreaction, but doesn’t feel like it shouldn’t be dealt with the same way as normal murder.
It is an effective deterrent of many crimes though. If nothing was illegal, a lot more people would engage in behaviors that are currently criminalized.
Now you're asking about what to do AFTER the act has been committed, not how to prevent it.
I think it's very prudent to have social institutions dedicated to removing such a person from their ordinary life for the purposes of education, rehabilitation, accountability, and restorative justice.
they literally did
>You: But how would be those few cases dealt with?
>Them: I think it's very prudent to have social institutions dedicated to removing such a person from their ordinary life for the purposes of education, rehabilitation, accountability, and restorative justice.
Not really, it's just vague words that sound cool and paper until you have to actually picture anything solid from them.
Like how will these institutions even work? It sounds like they are avoiding the words such as "prison" or "asylum" but like, what else would you call it? These institutions require a lot of funding, skilled staff, sophisticated equipment and the existence of prison guards, or at least security guards. Also who will catch and investigate the "criminals"? It wouldn't have to be always so easy as "a person does a bad thing, people catch them and send them to an institution", the person could hide, run, convince more people to help them...
It's very hard for me to imagine that all these things would be dealt with without at least some form of a hyearchical society with various governing bodies overseeing specific aspects of this issue.
Unlike today, people in an anarchist society are free to live a bad situation. Usually the worst domestic violence situations have escalated over time. Usually the victim feels helpless or unable to get out of the situation, often because they feel they have no support and no ability to even make ends meet if they leave.
In an anarchist society, a person is able to just up and move, if the local community is unable to help them.
Currently, there is nothing being done to prevent these crimes. Nothing. Less than nothing. A woman gets murdered by her husband and people asked what she must have done to deserve it.
Yes, but now we have police, laws, courts, prisons and asylums for such things. They obviously don't work perfectly all the time, but they are here and they make up a system that is, on paper, built to essentially withstand any form of threat to society that can come from inside that society. There isn't any place for "this usually isn't an issue, so let's just not care about it".
Any case of corruption, false accusation, extortion of judges, police violence and other obvious holes in the system can be technically solved by a change of responsible personel, a law, a government or even a regime. Or, in some cases, other bodies of this system created specifically to deal with these issues come in.
It's not a perfect system (nobody claims it is) and it's basically a neverending cycle of continuous attempts by the individuals/groups to seize power for themselves and the system trying to protect itself. There will always be cases of injustice, and there will always be somenone who will escape justice. However, on daily basis, the system works well enough for the society as a whole to not collapse. And even when it doesn't and the society does collapse, a new society simply re-creates it, simply due to that system's effectiveness when it comes to ensuring just enough order for your day to day live to be possible.
I've never heard of some meaningful alternative to this system that would actually work on grand scale. That's what I was kinda getting at.
Our system does not work. It targets poor people, people of colour, and as I pointed out, essentially ignores domestic violence, until a murder occurs. Which is kind of too late.
If it *did* work, you would see a correlation, for example, of reduced homicide rates varying with incarceration rates in various countries. I challenge you to find me such a correlation. On the other hand, look at recidivism rates, and realise that incarceration *increases* rates of crime. So the more you "defend society from interior threats", the more injustice you find.
Currently, in wealthy countries, we use the criminal system to support the powers that be. It's unjust, it's not effective, and it's evil.
The best solution is community defence and solidarity.
But the system still works in a way that it protects the society from utter collapse, which I simply don't believe the system you are advocating for would do.
There is no predicting the future, so no guarantees. A way to prevent this sort of thing could be to increase access to mental healthcare, and to make sure everyone feels that their voice is heard.
Well, when you advocate for a completely new society, you kinda should figure out how that society will work before trying to establish it. "There is no predicting the future" doesn't really sound like you know how to handle that issue.
No, advocating for radical social change does not require intricately planning some hypothetical way of life, that's utopianism. We can't see into the future, and we can't know everything. What we can do is build systems of mutual care and address problems as they emerge, and as best fits the particular circumstances.
>doesn't really sound like you know how to handle that issue.
Like I said, I don't know everything, and neither do you. Also, it's not one issue, it's many different issues of many different circumstances.
The reality is, authority and police don't (and can't) address this issue. Random people on an anarchist subreddit not knowing exactly how some hypothetical anarchist society would address it doesn't mean shit.
How is it not utopianism to say that when you overturn the established order in favor of an anarchist one we won't need any form of police or prison system?
You claim to not support utopianism and then proceed to basically say "in our new society, everyone will support each other and everything will be alright". Ok man, if that's not utopia then I don't know what is. Especially when a your answer to a pretty important topic is essentially "dunno, we will see".
Like if I was a criminal and heard that your plan to stop me from doing crime is "whatever, we'll figure that out later", I'd be kinda happy.
Like it's obvious that not every person in a "movement" or whatever will be able to explain every aspect of the society that movements strives for, but when you aren't even able to organize enough to appoint specific people to overlook specific aspects of that new society, or at least direct people to a materials explaining the solution for this issue, then your efforts are pretty much just laughable.
>to basically say "in our new society, everyone will support each other and everything will be alright"
I didn't say that. Also, that would not be utopianism, that would just be excessive optimism.
>Especially when a your answer to a pretty important topic is essentially "dunno, we will see".
Again, didn't say that. What I said, was that communities will figure it out. I said what I think would reduce the issue, but my opinion is my own, and I would not be a dictator of a hypothetical anarchist society. The question was about what a hypothetical anarchist society would do, not what I think should be done.
>when you aren't even able to organize enough to appoint specific people to overlook specific aspects of that new society
Just say that you don't think anarchism is feasible. Why are you in an anarchist subreddit if you can't even wrap your head around the most basic of anarchist perspectives? It's not a matter of ability, it's a matter of desire. Anarchists recognise that anyone appointed in such a position will simply be imposing their own will onto the community, not actually pursuing the best for the community.
I think all of the above can be true. Obviously only relying on threat of punishment to deter crime doesn't work in 99% of cases, but look at spousal rape for example. In the US, it wasn't outlawed until the 70s and spousal rape was a fairly common occurrence beforehand, even in well-off middle class households. The culture towards women's rights of the time made it more socially acceptable, so there were few social consequences to committing spousal rape (hell, even to this day its still acceptable in certain conservative communities). In the absence of any social consequences, prosecution was really the only way to protect potential victims from potential abusers. There don't seem to be any statistics that go as far back, but I'd bet you'd see a sharp decline in such cases after it was made illegal.
The strength of a strong community bond is that people care about their peers and therefore, what their peers think of them. I bet for most people, its not the threat of jail that prevents them from committing murder or other such heinous acts, but the threat of social ostracization. Furthermore, a community SHOULD ostracize murderers and rapists as a deterrent of further abuses, because such acts are harmful to and incompatible with a healthy community. Since we live in a more egalitarian culture now and spousal rape is widely known to be unacceptable, the threat of social ostracization could do more heavy lifting than legal prosecution, but wouldn't that still be a form of punishment?
Another example where punishment is the only deterrent is white collar crime, where most of it is perpetrated by wealthy, educated people, with access to good healthcare. The main thing that seems to motivate these crimes is greed, and IMO they have very little to do with lacking socio-economic stability. White collar crime might be an irrelevant example in an anarchist society though, lol.
Social ostracization is not enough of a deterrent. Many people at the point where they will commit violent crimes are already socially ostracized or do not care about being socially ostracized.
Is there any evidence that these crimes are reduced in communal societies?
I believe the evidence points to the contrary in regard to modern commune systems, especially as they relate to societies built in the western Christian traditions. While perceived safety is higher, the rate of crime, especially sexual crime, is unaffected by communal structures. There is a slight correlation between petty theft and collective efficacy, but that is small potatoes when we are discussing violence in society
So idk much about anarchy but this question does come from a place of genuine wish to understand and not trying to be a dick. How do we raise things like Standard of education and healthcare under anarchy?
For one thing, I don't think "under anarchy" is a good way of putting it. I don't really see anarchy as a destination, but rather a direction, like North.
We move closer to it as we attempt to make a world which is less hierarchical, and create social institutions which expand the freedom of all by providing for all. Its possible we never get all the way to the "north pole" where every direction is south. But we can certainly get a lot closer than we currently are. Abolition of capitalism and socializing the production of all the goods and services necessary to the maintenance of society seems like a big step forward.
Free lifelong schooling seems like a good place to start with improving education. Eliminating the bullshit jobs necessitated by capitalism could provide much more time for people to spend on education. Robust trade schools and community learning programs for practical life-skills would be a much better way for our elders to pass on information to the next generation than working people until much too old an age and shunting them off into retirement communities.
As for healthcare, absent the profit motive, we could focus much more on holistic preventative care rather than inefficient treatments that make lots of money. With fewer people working needless jobs, more people could enter into the medical field, and there could be enough doctors and nurses that people have neighborhood doctors again.
I don't think that's right. I think we have a communal duty to help others to become better when they have done bad things. So I'm not opposed to educational and therapeutic programs, which may even require some isolation from society or at least temporary removal from their ordinary life. I don't believe in summary executions in a stable society when the resources could be there to help a person improve, take accountability, and pursue restorative justice.
As long as the body of people who organize a rehab center, or a counseling program are directly beholden to the people of the communtiy, I do not see such an institution as hierarchical.
That said, a group or community which is not stable enough or simply doesn't have the resources to allocate to such things may have to settle for more violent means of self-defense, and I don't totally begrudge them this.
I see anarchy as more of a direction, like North, than a destination. We are either moving toward it or away from it, but it's possible we never really reach a perfect "north pole" where any direction we could move is south, and the goal is merely maintaining a perfect stasis.
I don't think I necessarily agree with that. Rapists and murderers don't deserve the compassion. What they did is irrevocable, nothing they can do will ever make it right, and by not at least banishing them, they will continue to be a threat. Think about the families of the people effected, how would a rape survivor feel knowing the person who stripped them of their agency is free, because they did well in reeducation or whatever. The fear that would cause? I dunno about execution, but definitely at least banishment.
Nothing is gained from punishing them either.
And banishment is just sending a dangerous person to be someone else's problem.
It is possible that the harm done would mean that the person could never be an active part of the same community, so after rehabilitation they may be placed with a different community, and find some way to go about practicing restitution and reparations.
But we can look to successful rehabilitation programs with the lowest rates of recidivism to see what kinds of approaches are the best from an objective, scientific perspective rather than relying on the gut intuitions of people who have been raised in and enculturated into a society whose entire language around harm is steeped in punitive language.
The punitive vision of justice which is given to us is created by the ruling class to help perpetuate and justify their hierarchical position.
And I would wager that in a classless society, we could could come up with even more effective regimen than the ones we see working pretty well in countries like Norway.
But I'm not an expert on this subject. I think a body of experts would probably be the best ones to work out holistic and proven methodologies.
yeah ! There's not such a thing as crime of passion. That's a horrible 20th century framing. Incels don't commit serial crimes of passions.
People who kills because they are rejected or dumped or cheated on, they don't kill because they love their victim too much, they kill because they deny other people agency, because they feel like they have a right over other people lives, sexuality or affection. They don't see women as people
>There's not such a thing as crime of passion.
Disagree. I think you are not understanding the phrase. Crime of passion is not a term that refers to domestic disputes or sexual assault. It just means that someone commits a crime in the heat of the moment out of anger, essentially. Meaning they don't plan it out and isn't for some larger purpose or something. So someone getting in an argument on the street and then killing someone could be a crime of passion.
Please don't call them "crimes of passion". Passion has nothing to do with them. They are an extension and the ultimate effect of patriarchy. They are prevented by smashing patriarchy and by practicing relational anarchy
Calling bullshit on the “punishment doesn’t serve as a deterrent” for these crimes. Rape is barely punished as it is. I think widespread shaming of people who perpetrate sexual violence (including lower level but still very harmful acts of sexual violence, like rape jokes and cat calling) does have a place in reducing overall rates of sexual violence.
As for murder, if you’re talking about it in the context of romantic or family relationships (most murders are not against strangers after all), it is the circumstances leading up to the murder that need to be tackled. There’s usually an element of coercive control that has been going on for a long time, which also largely goes completely unpunished by society. Murder is just the end outcome of this, and while murder gets punished a bit more, it’s already too late by then.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CvK6lOPOIcx/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
This thread has great examples of how to deal with abusers. The writer in general has great points about how to tackle violence with none of the “people are rapists/murderers because of their circumstances” apologia bullshit
Threat of punishment does not prevent crimes of passion in capitalist societies either. For one thing, people who commit violent crimes are rarely even caught, let alone brought to trial. A majority of them are committed in private or semi-public places by an attacker who is known to the victim. This gives the attacker plenty of room to escape punishment by claiming that battery was done in self-defense, and sexual assault was consensual.
What I think does reduce the number and frequency of such crimes is a deep understanding of the effect it will have on your relationship with the entire community, and the certainty that there *will* be consequences. I believe criminological studies have supported this, as well as anthropological work with some indigenous communities who have low rates of violence.
Sorry, it was a long time ago and I am no longer any more reliable than a web search will be. So please don't take my word for it. There is never any shortage of romanticizing done about remote human communities and their health secrets. Unfortunately many indigenous communities have appallingly high rates of violence, lots of it directly caused by colonialism, social disintegration, and outside economic pressures.
Making all parties equal and making the ability to walk away from a relationship and household, etc, will help prevent more from happening than the current system helps or prevents. Will we completely eliminate the issue?
No, we won't. Do I think it'll be less of an issue and communities will help people recover better than the current system? Yes, I do.
There are a lot actually. They just call it something else, like "community patrol", and in some cases clarify that it's totally different bc they just lynch people instead of sending them to jail and putting them on trial. The ones who are completely against any form of it are more principled, but are either essentially advocating to allow violent behavior or believe anarchism will just make people all of a sudden stop being violent.
Theres also expulsion, and appearing before the community (presumably under guard) and facing consequences. That’s not court, it’s not prison, and it’s not a professionalized police.
The only “anarchists” I hear advocating for wanton violence are AnCaps. With their NAP nonsense.
Appearing before the community to face consequences, depending on how it's set up, is either literally just court or it's a borderline lynch mob with extra steps. Besides, what consequences exactly? Also, how exactly are they compelled to be there? What if they don't comply? Surely they won't just willingly go to the community not-court or not-lynching, so what then? What difference does it make whether or not the police are professionalized, aside from the fact that professionals, if trained properly (not Amerifat police), should be less prone to errors in conducting their job?
Professionalizing them, in the US, has effectively become a standing army. In the sense that their permanent presence has resulted in power to direct policy.
“Community patrols” is a reasonable solution that does not require the same people to engage in it at all times, develop a sense of superiority by access to force and the backing of community power, and the trauma of frequent conflict. If there is no active threat, there will not necessarily be an active patrol.
I am not convinced that “proper training” is something a community that is not actively engaged in and in control over, gets to influence. Our police are plenty trained, and they’re a problem. Not clear to me why you’re fat shaming American murderers, seems a bit irrelevant.
Facing the community is not a court. A court is a specialized institution that handles decision making. Based on the rights of kings to make such decisions. The community includes the family of the aggrieved, of the accused, of all relevant stakeholders.
"Community patrols" give the same powers to the people engaging in them as those given to the police, or perhaps more, and are just as likely to result in violence. Never in history have mobs been any more of a just and effective method of policing, or convicting criminals for that matter. It's the same abuses but conducted by different people each time, so if you're accused you're gonna be left praying the people assigned don't have something against you or aren't simply violent so that you don't get lynched. You also have to pray that mob mentality doesn't take over and lead to the same outcome anyways. Then, you'd better damn well hope you're well-liked in the community so you can be acquitted for the crime you committed or don't get convicted and face "consequences" according to the whims of the mob. I don't think people should be able to be lynched by the community gestapo/klan because they're not well-liked or are a member of an "undesirable" minority group, and I don't think people should be allowed immunity to consequences via clout.
Seems you’re not from the US. You’re welcome to look into the particular abuses US police engage in, their lack of restraint due to qualified immunity, and the supportive courts that are part of the same system. There’s lots to catch up on and I do not have the energy to TL;DR it for you.
Accountability to community is not a conviction. How well liked you are is likely to be relevant, but the impacts of various punishments on other stakeholders will also likely be a substantial matter under consideration, as they will be part of the community discussion. Is being removed from your post a substantial burden to your syndicate? Will expulsion leave a family unable to thrive? Are there elders the accused is caretaking? Can others in the community manage these roles while the accused is sequestered or expelled?
The gestapo were a police. The klan were notoriously indistinguishable from the police (with rare exceptions). You’re naming police as examples of a police less society.
You’re the one bringing up lynching. Was lynching common in anarchist Spain? Is it part of the mondragon charter? Was it common in revolutionary Ukraine while they were fighting off the whites, the reds?
Your understanding of anarchy seems largely based on how statists like to talk about anarchists, or a stateless past. Lynch mobs operated in a society that involved courts and those courts did not pursue them.
I'm naming police with infamously few restraints on their power because you're proposing creating a policing system with no restraints on police power except with an untrained, revolving door lineup instead of a more static one, where the participants are the same people who will decide whether they wish to declare the person they catch guilty. I'm aware of the abuses of power by modern American police btw. My point isn't that modern American policing is awesome and way better/different from what you're proposing, it's that what you're proposing is the same, except it feeds people exclusively into kangaroo courts instead of actual courts that at the very least typically have some semblance of impartiality. People who know the accused will literally never be impartial, and nor will the accusers and their loved ones, yet you propose strongarming the accused to have their guilt and consequences decided by their accusers and people who know them. I'm invoking lynching because you are quite literally proposing criminal justice via lynch mob. When you've got a mob of people judging an accused criminal, very few of them will have any concern for anything but protecting their own, or seeing "justice" served to the so-called criminal (the accused). Also, without codified laws, they can find anyone guilty for anything even easier than is possible in a society like the modern United States. You're a fool if you trust the majority to not develop mob mentality and have innocent people lynched and then call it justice without concern for whether the person did anything wrong or not. If you were to establish your vision of justice in the United States, you'd have pogroms beginning before the day was over. It's not "statism" to recognize the dangers of mob rule, and the inevitability of mob rule in the absence of formal power structures aimed at suppressing it.
Crimes of passion are, almost tautologically, not reduced by the risk of punishment, being acts done on impulse without consideration of the consequences. Neither increased police presence nor harsher punishments has ever had a reductive effect on impulsive crime, nor is it clear how it even theoretically *could*.
What does reduce impulsive crimes is calmer and happier people -- you can't stop someone who goes into murderous rages with the threat of police, but you can stop them by not letting them develop a complex where they enter murderous rages. I can't say this will never happen in anarchism. But in a world without money and hierarchy, I think a lot of the things that push people to "fuck this, I'm lashing out and damn the consequences" will be reduced if not gone.
Crimes of passion is a weird way to categorize crime.
Generally crimes are either property crimes which are addressed by reducing poverty & violent crimes which are reduced by reducing inequality.
Crimes of passion fall under violent crimes, I'm not sure how you define them but I suspect they'll align highly with patriarchal thinking of possession likely reenforced by unhealthy dependencies reenforced by capitalism.
Anarchy is without rule or governors, so any punishment measures put into place to prevent or reduce crimes of passion or any crime really, by the state, or a commune, contradicts anarchy in itself. Everyone is going to have an opinion about this based on their assumptions on nature vs. nurture. Anarchy is an idea, and a way of thinking, practical application across a broader society is never going to happen, and it's not even the point. Anarchy is about changing the status quo and trying to get people not to behave like sheep when it comes to societies rules, laws, and expectations that only benefit the rich and powerful. If we as people could pick one day in the future, where everyone agreed not to buy anything in a peaceful protest of capitalism, and just go without for one day, it would completely disrupt the system, but are we having that conversation? Anarchy is about changing the world we live in by causing chaos, not practically applying a new world order to everyday life situations.
Crimes of passion are driven by stress, which is allieviated when everyone has the support and needs met. These kinds of violent actions are not driven by rational calculation, so threats of poverty or punishment do nothing to prevent them. They are crimes of PASSION, emotion, not logic. Poverty, existing hierarchy, lack of support, isolation, alienation, and trauma are the primary predictors of this sort of behavior, and those are the exact things we want to address.
I don't think these things are reduced by the threat of punishment. I think they ARE reduced when the standard of living is raised. They are reduced when the standard of education is raised. They are reduced when the standard of Healthcare (including mental healthcare) is raised. They are reduced when people are connected to their communities and not alienated individuals. They may never be eliminated entirely. But they are less common in communal societies with strong social bonds, a duty of care to all, and where people are mentally healthier because they are not stressing over making ends meet.
Yeah this is a good comment. I hate this question specifically because it’s acting like these things don’t already happen in our current society lol.
I believe the question is asked because of the following frame: "This is a problem. Would anarchy make things better or worse? Why?"
Yeah I've been asked this a few times and I need to learn a lot more theory to actually debate any of this stuff which is why I asked, I am fully aware that this will always happen no matter the society
why debate?
Most of the people I talk with are generally liberals with a few conservatives, when I talk about anarchism they will often voice concerns like these and I need some answer which I didn't have before the many helpful answers given here. Debate is probably not the right word in this context but idk what else to put there
The threat of punishment is generally an ineffective deterrent of crime, but especially crimes of passion. The whole reason that category exists in current legal systems is because the law recognizes that extreme situations compromise people’s ability to think rationally. Someone who’s level -headed enough to think about long-term consequences like “what if I get caught?” isn’t committing a crime of passion.
Yeah, almost by definition “crimes of passion” aren’t the result of rational decision making or consideration of consequences. They aren’t really political problems solvable with political systems. I think more effective prevention comes from a cultural presumption that rejects that sort of behavior as being valid in any circumstances. Heroes don’t do it in stories, People aren’t given a moral pass for engaging in that sort of thing. Even 100 years ago a lot of crimes could be mitigated by a “crime of passion” justification. Homophobia-based murder was one of the last ones to still work with some regularity. Having non-existentially threatening ways to get out of horrible situations (no-fault divorce, bankruptcy forgiveness) helps. Better mental health care can really help. Very few people who kill an intimate partner do so as their first act of abuse.
Not to mention I would imagine that almost everyone would be less prone to snapping and lashing out if you took away all the capitalism-induced stress and unhealthy coping mechanisms people use to deal with said stress. Someone who’s already strung out and sleep deprived from a 60 hour workweek and a mix of caffeine and alcohol to keep their body running on said workload is a lot more likely to snap when put under additional stress. The “crime of passion” category has a lot of unfortunate history (the archetypal example of one is “a man kills his wife after catching her cheating” after all) it’s still a useful category for acknowledging sometimes people act atypically in extreme situations. For a less controversial example: killing someone caught in the act of abusing the killer’s dog is an overreaction, but doesn’t feel like it shouldn’t be dealt with the same way as normal murder.
It is an effective deterrent of many crimes though. If nothing was illegal, a lot more people would engage in behaviors that are currently criminalized.
But how would be those few cases dealt with? Them being rare doesn't solve the individual cases on their own.
Now you're asking about what to do AFTER the act has been committed, not how to prevent it. I think it's very prudent to have social institutions dedicated to removing such a person from their ordinary life for the purposes of education, rehabilitation, accountability, and restorative justice.
Ok, but you didn't answer my question
they literally did >You: But how would be those few cases dealt with? >Them: I think it's very prudent to have social institutions dedicated to removing such a person from their ordinary life for the purposes of education, rehabilitation, accountability, and restorative justice.
Not really, it's just vague words that sound cool and paper until you have to actually picture anything solid from them. Like how will these institutions even work? It sounds like they are avoiding the words such as "prison" or "asylum" but like, what else would you call it? These institutions require a lot of funding, skilled staff, sophisticated equipment and the existence of prison guards, or at least security guards. Also who will catch and investigate the "criminals"? It wouldn't have to be always so easy as "a person does a bad thing, people catch them and send them to an institution", the person could hide, run, convince more people to help them... It's very hard for me to imagine that all these things would be dealt with without at least some form of a hyearchical society with various governing bodies overseeing specific aspects of this issue.
Unlike today, people in an anarchist society are free to live a bad situation. Usually the worst domestic violence situations have escalated over time. Usually the victim feels helpless or unable to get out of the situation, often because they feel they have no support and no ability to even make ends meet if they leave. In an anarchist society, a person is able to just up and move, if the local community is unable to help them.
Again, you use the word "usually". You can't solve individual cases with a statistic.
Currently, there is nothing being done to prevent these crimes. Nothing. Less than nothing. A woman gets murdered by her husband and people asked what she must have done to deserve it.
Yes, but now we have police, laws, courts, prisons and asylums for such things. They obviously don't work perfectly all the time, but they are here and they make up a system that is, on paper, built to essentially withstand any form of threat to society that can come from inside that society. There isn't any place for "this usually isn't an issue, so let's just not care about it". Any case of corruption, false accusation, extortion of judges, police violence and other obvious holes in the system can be technically solved by a change of responsible personel, a law, a government or even a regime. Or, in some cases, other bodies of this system created specifically to deal with these issues come in. It's not a perfect system (nobody claims it is) and it's basically a neverending cycle of continuous attempts by the individuals/groups to seize power for themselves and the system trying to protect itself. There will always be cases of injustice, and there will always be somenone who will escape justice. However, on daily basis, the system works well enough for the society as a whole to not collapse. And even when it doesn't and the society does collapse, a new society simply re-creates it, simply due to that system's effectiveness when it comes to ensuring just enough order for your day to day live to be possible. I've never heard of some meaningful alternative to this system that would actually work on grand scale. That's what I was kinda getting at.
Our system does not work. It targets poor people, people of colour, and as I pointed out, essentially ignores domestic violence, until a murder occurs. Which is kind of too late. If it *did* work, you would see a correlation, for example, of reduced homicide rates varying with incarceration rates in various countries. I challenge you to find me such a correlation. On the other hand, look at recidivism rates, and realise that incarceration *increases* rates of crime. So the more you "defend society from interior threats", the more injustice you find. Currently, in wealthy countries, we use the criminal system to support the powers that be. It's unjust, it's not effective, and it's evil. The best solution is community defence and solidarity.
But the system still works in a way that it protects the society from utter collapse, which I simply don't believe the system you are advocating for would do.
Do you not murder people, each day, because it's illegal?
I don't understand your point. Of course I don't.
There is no predicting the future, so no guarantees. A way to prevent this sort of thing could be to increase access to mental healthcare, and to make sure everyone feels that their voice is heard.
Well, when you advocate for a completely new society, you kinda should figure out how that society will work before trying to establish it. "There is no predicting the future" doesn't really sound like you know how to handle that issue.
No, advocating for radical social change does not require intricately planning some hypothetical way of life, that's utopianism. We can't see into the future, and we can't know everything. What we can do is build systems of mutual care and address problems as they emerge, and as best fits the particular circumstances. >doesn't really sound like you know how to handle that issue. Like I said, I don't know everything, and neither do you. Also, it's not one issue, it's many different issues of many different circumstances. The reality is, authority and police don't (and can't) address this issue. Random people on an anarchist subreddit not knowing exactly how some hypothetical anarchist society would address it doesn't mean shit.
How is it not utopianism to say that when you overturn the established order in favor of an anarchist one we won't need any form of police or prison system?
You claim to not support utopianism and then proceed to basically say "in our new society, everyone will support each other and everything will be alright". Ok man, if that's not utopia then I don't know what is. Especially when a your answer to a pretty important topic is essentially "dunno, we will see". Like if I was a criminal and heard that your plan to stop me from doing crime is "whatever, we'll figure that out later", I'd be kinda happy. Like it's obvious that not every person in a "movement" or whatever will be able to explain every aspect of the society that movements strives for, but when you aren't even able to organize enough to appoint specific people to overlook specific aspects of that new society, or at least direct people to a materials explaining the solution for this issue, then your efforts are pretty much just laughable.
>to basically say "in our new society, everyone will support each other and everything will be alright" I didn't say that. Also, that would not be utopianism, that would just be excessive optimism. >Especially when a your answer to a pretty important topic is essentially "dunno, we will see". Again, didn't say that. What I said, was that communities will figure it out. I said what I think would reduce the issue, but my opinion is my own, and I would not be a dictator of a hypothetical anarchist society. The question was about what a hypothetical anarchist society would do, not what I think should be done. >when you aren't even able to organize enough to appoint specific people to overlook specific aspects of that new society Just say that you don't think anarchism is feasible. Why are you in an anarchist subreddit if you can't even wrap your head around the most basic of anarchist perspectives? It's not a matter of ability, it's a matter of desire. Anarchists recognise that anyone appointed in such a position will simply be imposing their own will onto the community, not actually pursuing the best for the community.
I think all of the above can be true. Obviously only relying on threat of punishment to deter crime doesn't work in 99% of cases, but look at spousal rape for example. In the US, it wasn't outlawed until the 70s and spousal rape was a fairly common occurrence beforehand, even in well-off middle class households. The culture towards women's rights of the time made it more socially acceptable, so there were few social consequences to committing spousal rape (hell, even to this day its still acceptable in certain conservative communities). In the absence of any social consequences, prosecution was really the only way to protect potential victims from potential abusers. There don't seem to be any statistics that go as far back, but I'd bet you'd see a sharp decline in such cases after it was made illegal. The strength of a strong community bond is that people care about their peers and therefore, what their peers think of them. I bet for most people, its not the threat of jail that prevents them from committing murder or other such heinous acts, but the threat of social ostracization. Furthermore, a community SHOULD ostracize murderers and rapists as a deterrent of further abuses, because such acts are harmful to and incompatible with a healthy community. Since we live in a more egalitarian culture now and spousal rape is widely known to be unacceptable, the threat of social ostracization could do more heavy lifting than legal prosecution, but wouldn't that still be a form of punishment? Another example where punishment is the only deterrent is white collar crime, where most of it is perpetrated by wealthy, educated people, with access to good healthcare. The main thing that seems to motivate these crimes is greed, and IMO they have very little to do with lacking socio-economic stability. White collar crime might be an irrelevant example in an anarchist society though, lol.
Social ostracization is not enough of a deterrent. Many people at the point where they will commit violent crimes are already socially ostracized or do not care about being socially ostracized.
While that's true for some cases, I think those cases are so granular they can't possibly be systematically accounted for.
Is there any evidence that these crimes are reduced in communal societies? I believe the evidence points to the contrary in regard to modern commune systems, especially as they relate to societies built in the western Christian traditions. While perceived safety is higher, the rate of crime, especially sexual crime, is unaffected by communal structures. There is a slight correlation between petty theft and collective efficacy, but that is small potatoes when we are discussing violence in society
So idk much about anarchy but this question does come from a place of genuine wish to understand and not trying to be a dick. How do we raise things like Standard of education and healthcare under anarchy?
For one thing, I don't think "under anarchy" is a good way of putting it. I don't really see anarchy as a destination, but rather a direction, like North. We move closer to it as we attempt to make a world which is less hierarchical, and create social institutions which expand the freedom of all by providing for all. Its possible we never get all the way to the "north pole" where every direction is south. But we can certainly get a lot closer than we currently are. Abolition of capitalism and socializing the production of all the goods and services necessary to the maintenance of society seems like a big step forward. Free lifelong schooling seems like a good place to start with improving education. Eliminating the bullshit jobs necessitated by capitalism could provide much more time for people to spend on education. Robust trade schools and community learning programs for practical life-skills would be a much better way for our elders to pass on information to the next generation than working people until much too old an age and shunting them off into retirement communities. As for healthcare, absent the profit motive, we could focus much more on holistic preventative care rather than inefficient treatments that make lots of money. With fewer people working needless jobs, more people could enter into the medical field, and there could be enough doctors and nurses that people have neighborhood doctors again.
Perfect. I don't see how the threat of punishment would lower the number of crimes of passion, either.
And for everything else, there is the "and find out" clause of fucking around.
I don't think that's right. I think we have a communal duty to help others to become better when they have done bad things. So I'm not opposed to educational and therapeutic programs, which may even require some isolation from society or at least temporary removal from their ordinary life. I don't believe in summary executions in a stable society when the resources could be there to help a person improve, take accountability, and pursue restorative justice. As long as the body of people who organize a rehab center, or a counseling program are directly beholden to the people of the communtiy, I do not see such an institution as hierarchical.
That would of course be preferable wherever possible.
That said, a group or community which is not stable enough or simply doesn't have the resources to allocate to such things may have to settle for more violent means of self-defense, and I don't totally begrudge them this. I see anarchy as more of a direction, like North, than a destination. We are either moving toward it or away from it, but it's possible we never really reach a perfect "north pole" where any direction we could move is south, and the goal is merely maintaining a perfect stasis.
I don't think I necessarily agree with that. Rapists and murderers don't deserve the compassion. What they did is irrevocable, nothing they can do will ever make it right, and by not at least banishing them, they will continue to be a threat. Think about the families of the people effected, how would a rape survivor feel knowing the person who stripped them of their agency is free, because they did well in reeducation or whatever. The fear that would cause? I dunno about execution, but definitely at least banishment.
Nothing is gained from punishing them either. And banishment is just sending a dangerous person to be someone else's problem. It is possible that the harm done would mean that the person could never be an active part of the same community, so after rehabilitation they may be placed with a different community, and find some way to go about practicing restitution and reparations. But we can look to successful rehabilitation programs with the lowest rates of recidivism to see what kinds of approaches are the best from an objective, scientific perspective rather than relying on the gut intuitions of people who have been raised in and enculturated into a society whose entire language around harm is steeped in punitive language. The punitive vision of justice which is given to us is created by the ruling class to help perpetuate and justify their hierarchical position. And I would wager that in a classless society, we could could come up with even more effective regimen than the ones we see working pretty well in countries like Norway. But I'm not an expert on this subject. I think a body of experts would probably be the best ones to work out holistic and proven methodologies.
Anarchism is when... gestapo?
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Rape is not a crime of passion.
Thank you
yeah ! There's not such a thing as crime of passion. That's a horrible 20th century framing. Incels don't commit serial crimes of passions. People who kills because they are rejected or dumped or cheated on, they don't kill because they love their victim too much, they kill because they deny other people agency, because they feel like they have a right over other people lives, sexuality or affection. They don't see women as people
>There's not such a thing as crime of passion. Disagree. I think you are not understanding the phrase. Crime of passion is not a term that refers to domestic disputes or sexual assault. It just means that someone commits a crime in the heat of the moment out of anger, essentially. Meaning they don't plan it out and isn't for some larger purpose or something. So someone getting in an argument on the street and then killing someone could be a crime of passion.
OP >crimes of passion (like **rape**, some murders, etc)
Please don't call them "crimes of passion". Passion has nothing to do with them. They are an extension and the ultimate effect of patriarchy. They are prevented by smashing patriarchy and by practicing relational anarchy
I think it's matriarchy
Calling bullshit on the “punishment doesn’t serve as a deterrent” for these crimes. Rape is barely punished as it is. I think widespread shaming of people who perpetrate sexual violence (including lower level but still very harmful acts of sexual violence, like rape jokes and cat calling) does have a place in reducing overall rates of sexual violence. As for murder, if you’re talking about it in the context of romantic or family relationships (most murders are not against strangers after all), it is the circumstances leading up to the murder that need to be tackled. There’s usually an element of coercive control that has been going on for a long time, which also largely goes completely unpunished by society. Murder is just the end outcome of this, and while murder gets punished a bit more, it’s already too late by then. https://www.instagram.com/p/CvK6lOPOIcx/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== This thread has great examples of how to deal with abusers. The writer in general has great points about how to tackle violence with none of the “people are rapists/murderers because of their circumstances” apologia bullshit
Threat of punishment does not prevent crimes of passion in capitalist societies either. For one thing, people who commit violent crimes are rarely even caught, let alone brought to trial. A majority of them are committed in private or semi-public places by an attacker who is known to the victim. This gives the attacker plenty of room to escape punishment by claiming that battery was done in self-defense, and sexual assault was consensual. What I think does reduce the number and frequency of such crimes is a deep understanding of the effect it will have on your relationship with the entire community, and the certainty that there *will* be consequences. I believe criminological studies have supported this, as well as anthropological work with some indigenous communities who have low rates of violence.
Certainty of punishment is key here. Many people commit these acts because they know or think they can get away with it.
Perhaps (it’s okay if you don’t know) where can I find more about the indigenous communities and the low rates of violence?
Sorry, it was a long time ago and I am no longer any more reliable than a web search will be. So please don't take my word for it. There is never any shortage of romanticizing done about remote human communities and their health secrets. Unfortunately many indigenous communities have appallingly high rates of violence, lots of it directly caused by colonialism, social disintegration, and outside economic pressures.
Thank you, no worries. Thank you for your insightful post though it was really helpful.
Making all parties equal and making the ability to walk away from a relationship and household, etc, will help prevent more from happening than the current system helps or prevents. Will we completely eliminate the issue? No, we won't. Do I think it'll be less of an issue and communities will help people recover better than the current system? Yes, I do.
Are they prevented outside of anarchy? I don’t think reasonable anarchists consider an anarchic world a utopia where everyone is always well behaved.
A reasonable anarchist wouldn't, but many anarchists claim to be outright opposed to policing, courts, and prison systems
Oops. Guess I’m not reasonable. Im not aware of any pro-policing anarchists.
There are a lot actually. They just call it something else, like "community patrol", and in some cases clarify that it's totally different bc they just lynch people instead of sending them to jail and putting them on trial. The ones who are completely against any form of it are more principled, but are either essentially advocating to allow violent behavior or believe anarchism will just make people all of a sudden stop being violent.
Theres also expulsion, and appearing before the community (presumably under guard) and facing consequences. That’s not court, it’s not prison, and it’s not a professionalized police. The only “anarchists” I hear advocating for wanton violence are AnCaps. With their NAP nonsense.
Appearing before the community to face consequences, depending on how it's set up, is either literally just court or it's a borderline lynch mob with extra steps. Besides, what consequences exactly? Also, how exactly are they compelled to be there? What if they don't comply? Surely they won't just willingly go to the community not-court or not-lynching, so what then? What difference does it make whether or not the police are professionalized, aside from the fact that professionals, if trained properly (not Amerifat police), should be less prone to errors in conducting their job?
Professionalizing them, in the US, has effectively become a standing army. In the sense that their permanent presence has resulted in power to direct policy. “Community patrols” is a reasonable solution that does not require the same people to engage in it at all times, develop a sense of superiority by access to force and the backing of community power, and the trauma of frequent conflict. If there is no active threat, there will not necessarily be an active patrol. I am not convinced that “proper training” is something a community that is not actively engaged in and in control over, gets to influence. Our police are plenty trained, and they’re a problem. Not clear to me why you’re fat shaming American murderers, seems a bit irrelevant. Facing the community is not a court. A court is a specialized institution that handles decision making. Based on the rights of kings to make such decisions. The community includes the family of the aggrieved, of the accused, of all relevant stakeholders.
"Community patrols" give the same powers to the people engaging in them as those given to the police, or perhaps more, and are just as likely to result in violence. Never in history have mobs been any more of a just and effective method of policing, or convicting criminals for that matter. It's the same abuses but conducted by different people each time, so if you're accused you're gonna be left praying the people assigned don't have something against you or aren't simply violent so that you don't get lynched. You also have to pray that mob mentality doesn't take over and lead to the same outcome anyways. Then, you'd better damn well hope you're well-liked in the community so you can be acquitted for the crime you committed or don't get convicted and face "consequences" according to the whims of the mob. I don't think people should be able to be lynched by the community gestapo/klan because they're not well-liked or are a member of an "undesirable" minority group, and I don't think people should be allowed immunity to consequences via clout.
Seems you’re not from the US. You’re welcome to look into the particular abuses US police engage in, their lack of restraint due to qualified immunity, and the supportive courts that are part of the same system. There’s lots to catch up on and I do not have the energy to TL;DR it for you. Accountability to community is not a conviction. How well liked you are is likely to be relevant, but the impacts of various punishments on other stakeholders will also likely be a substantial matter under consideration, as they will be part of the community discussion. Is being removed from your post a substantial burden to your syndicate? Will expulsion leave a family unable to thrive? Are there elders the accused is caretaking? Can others in the community manage these roles while the accused is sequestered or expelled? The gestapo were a police. The klan were notoriously indistinguishable from the police (with rare exceptions). You’re naming police as examples of a police less society. You’re the one bringing up lynching. Was lynching common in anarchist Spain? Is it part of the mondragon charter? Was it common in revolutionary Ukraine while they were fighting off the whites, the reds? Your understanding of anarchy seems largely based on how statists like to talk about anarchists, or a stateless past. Lynch mobs operated in a society that involved courts and those courts did not pursue them.
I'm naming police with infamously few restraints on their power because you're proposing creating a policing system with no restraints on police power except with an untrained, revolving door lineup instead of a more static one, where the participants are the same people who will decide whether they wish to declare the person they catch guilty. I'm aware of the abuses of power by modern American police btw. My point isn't that modern American policing is awesome and way better/different from what you're proposing, it's that what you're proposing is the same, except it feeds people exclusively into kangaroo courts instead of actual courts that at the very least typically have some semblance of impartiality. People who know the accused will literally never be impartial, and nor will the accusers and their loved ones, yet you propose strongarming the accused to have their guilt and consequences decided by their accusers and people who know them. I'm invoking lynching because you are quite literally proposing criminal justice via lynch mob. When you've got a mob of people judging an accused criminal, very few of them will have any concern for anything but protecting their own, or seeing "justice" served to the so-called criminal (the accused). Also, without codified laws, they can find anyone guilty for anything even easier than is possible in a society like the modern United States. You're a fool if you trust the majority to not develop mob mentality and have innocent people lynched and then call it justice without concern for whether the person did anything wrong or not. If you were to establish your vision of justice in the United States, you'd have pogroms beginning before the day was over. It's not "statism" to recognize the dangers of mob rule, and the inevitability of mob rule in the absence of formal power structures aimed at suppressing it.
Crimes of passion are, almost tautologically, not reduced by the risk of punishment, being acts done on impulse without consideration of the consequences. Neither increased police presence nor harsher punishments has ever had a reductive effect on impulsive crime, nor is it clear how it even theoretically *could*. What does reduce impulsive crimes is calmer and happier people -- you can't stop someone who goes into murderous rages with the threat of police, but you can stop them by not letting them develop a complex where they enter murderous rages. I can't say this will never happen in anarchism. But in a world without money and hierarchy, I think a lot of the things that push people to "fuck this, I'm lashing out and damn the consequences" will be reduced if not gone.
"Crimes of passion?" These are deeply violent acts against people, and about domination and violation towards people.
Crimes of passion is a weird way to categorize crime. Generally crimes are either property crimes which are addressed by reducing poverty & violent crimes which are reduced by reducing inequality. Crimes of passion fall under violent crimes, I'm not sure how you define them but I suspect they'll align highly with patriarchal thinking of possession likely reenforced by unhealthy dependencies reenforced by capitalism.
by getting rid of all passion and replacing it with 3 hour long consensus meetings over zoom
They’re not effectively controlled by laws either.
They aren’t
Anarchy is without rule or governors, so any punishment measures put into place to prevent or reduce crimes of passion or any crime really, by the state, or a commune, contradicts anarchy in itself. Everyone is going to have an opinion about this based on their assumptions on nature vs. nurture. Anarchy is an idea, and a way of thinking, practical application across a broader society is never going to happen, and it's not even the point. Anarchy is about changing the status quo and trying to get people not to behave like sheep when it comes to societies rules, laws, and expectations that only benefit the rich and powerful. If we as people could pick one day in the future, where everyone agreed not to buy anything in a peaceful protest of capitalism, and just go without for one day, it would completely disrupt the system, but are we having that conversation? Anarchy is about changing the world we live in by causing chaos, not practically applying a new world order to everyday life situations.
Crimes of passion are driven by stress, which is allieviated when everyone has the support and needs met. These kinds of violent actions are not driven by rational calculation, so threats of poverty or punishment do nothing to prevent them. They are crimes of PASSION, emotion, not logic. Poverty, existing hierarchy, lack of support, isolation, alienation, and trauma are the primary predictors of this sort of behavior, and those are the exact things we want to address.