We have talked at some length about the ubiquitous nature of coercion in organized society, not simply directed at minority groups, as well as about some of the issues of education in particular. It is now time to turn our attention to prisons. Why do we have prisons, anyway? While there has always been a need in any kind of community to deal with justice, often through some kind of attempt to make the victim whole, a retributive justice which I am, in general, supportive of, contemporary society largely views the state and not the victim as the one who is predominantly injured by crime. The stated goals of penitentiaries–inherent in their name as being places where penitent criminals are to reflect on their crimes and repent of their evil ways–are wholly at odds with the actual achievement of such hotbeds of recidivism in educating criminals on how to better commit crimes in the future and increase their relationships with other members of the criminal class, leading mostly to a revolving door of people involved in crime and punishment throughout their adult life (if not starting before the criminal reaches adulthood, as is often the case).

While admittedly any sort of punishment is coercive in the sense that it is directed against those who harm persons and/or property, there are serious issues with viewing the state as the primary victim of crime. This danger, at least in contemporary societies as well as throughout the recent history of humanity, can come from two directions. For one, the state can view itself as the victim of crime for any act which makes the state or its corrupt agents and authorities look bad, which can often lead to a proliferation of political prisoners and the development of the gulag or laogai archipelagos where people receive heavy political sentences for wrongthink. For another, the state can conveniently overlook and disregard their responsibility to punish people for crimes against people and property to the extent that it views the criminal class as a political faction worth appealing to through what are labeled as bail reforms and prison reforms that lead to criminal behavior being tacitly encouraged so long as it is directed against perceived enemies of the regime. The favoritism that corrupt regimes have towards actual career criminals as opposed to political dissidents is deeply self-interested, in that career criminals at least have no opposition to the regime per se and their acts of lawlessness and disorder can be tactically useful in delegitimizing orders that the authorities oppose and in terrorizing law-abiding citizens that the regime wishes to terrorize, while political dissidents oppose the legitimacy of a corrupt regime and are committed enemies of the state.

It should be noted as well that the coercive aspects of prison are themselves multi-faceted. The coercion of prison is not limited merely to the prison itself, but also can include jail–where people are held under restraint during the time before their conviction, mental institutions where people are restrained for some sort of diagnosed mental illness, halfway houses as well as supervised release where people remain under constraints and are subject to the oversight of probation officers, and any areas where prisoners are subject to exploitation as slave laborers. Prisoners are regularly subject to invasive searches, the seizure of personal effects, coerced labor in prison jobs, verbal, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and often a permanent removal of their full civil rights, including the right to vote or to bear arms. As noted previously, those who are unable or unwilling to restrain their own conduct in a society that is pervasively at least mildly coercive as our own is (and every other contemporary society, to a greater or lesser extent is) will often find themselves sooner or later subject to far greater coercion by the justice system.

It is fundamentally rebelliousness and having an attitude that is hostile to authority that tends to lead one to suffer the full coercive power of the state. Those who use their agency to make the best possible accommodations with the situation in life where they find themselves, whether that is to seek the best possible regimes to live under if one is born in a particularly oppressive situation, or whether it is finding out which of one’s skills and abilities allows one to live the life of the greatest amount of freedom possible, are generally able to avoid the full brunt of coercion. Not everyone is able to escape the horrors of slavery and oppression which serve as prisons of the body and mind, but human beings have shown a remarkable ability to maintain their spirits and their dignity in the most harrowing of circumstances.