Prison and what it represents and determines seems to occupy a reserved space in our thoughts and minds.
Justice is a concentrate of the way society has chosen to regulate its conflicts (by force and through the image), whereas prison sums up what directly crushes and oppresses us. For us it is a question of understanding how and where one can act to put an end to all the filth of survival, including facing the problem of the destruction of prison and justice. And in order to put an end to justice it is also essential to stop speaking and thinking with the language of law, that normally used to denounce the "abuses" of power. By so doing we certainly don't want to contest the prisoners' possibility to demand to be treated properly when tormented by the screw. But shutting oneself up in partial wrongs (the screw's abuses) without considering the monstrousy of the very existence of prison, the prisoner finds himself drawn into a perverse accountancy: what does it mean to ask for the right to be treated properly? Would any individual whatsoever not rather not be treated at all?
Law as the right of an individual to obtain or do such and such a thing or as a whole of texts and judicial practices. The latter seem to include and guarantee the former. So the democratic procedure always consists in padding out law with the rights of man, whereas any law we might benefit by is in itself a dispossession, a search for ourselves in something other than ourselves.
But what do laws define? Freedom conceived of only in negative terms: "my freedom ends where another's begins". A vision of the individual as a territory limited by others, a vision of small proprietors, precursors of the famous "my body belongs to me". It is not by chance that these spacial concepts lack the temporal dimension, a fundamental human wealth.
Every right/law is by nature a principle and practical means of exclusion and privation. Whoever says right says exchange, because the law is there to organise a measured repartition of rights and duties and, in the case of damage it prescribes the amount of compensation. A right always belongs to an unfortunate proprietor, because he needs a property title on what he is afraid of losing or on that which can be taken from him. Law is always aimed at governing a community which cannot manage to live as such, so that it does not explode completely.
Law is also an ideology: a mental and rational construction that serves to justify the real social function of justice.
Today law is a precise, quantifying codified instrument which determines and indicates what each person, including each civil servant, must do. The police are held to respect very severe regulations and at the same time they continually have to break them in order to function. Judicial control of their work is a fake: everyone knows the pig uses instruments to act and exert pressure which judges nearly always close an eye to. Whether applied to investigator or the common citizen, the law does not serve to prevent excesses, but to keep the same within reasonable limits so as not to put the social order and institutions at risk. In the same way a sentence serves to circumscribe the exact revenge of the injured party by keeping it within the limits that have been established and applied by a third party that is "above the parts", because any society disposes of norms which allow those in power to regulate their arguments, legitimise their dominion and obtain the consensus of the exploited.
The bible does not define: it lists justifying such an operation with the unknowable and inscrutable divine will what one should and shouldn't do? The modern era also supplies a definition of Man and bases itself on this to organise its social rules. The same happened for justice, with the pretext of establishing what is good and what is bad. Hence the classification into good and bad. Innocence and guilt are attributes of the judicial mechanism as they contain a judgement (which the person concerned is heartily invited to interiorise). Now, to be precise, to understand and live the crudest acts (rape, murder, torture) does not mean to judge them. Whoever sits judgement acts in the name of something which goes beyond the social relations which determined these same acts.
Precisely in the same way as morals do in interpersonal relations, justice applies a pre-established norm to a conflict or violence, to solemnise the trauma, defining it in order to expel it. In this logic it is necessary for there to be a guilty party, not just someone responsible, given that guilt penetrates the guilty, becoming his whole being. This is complete when justice claims to judge not just action, but the whole being in the light of the action, reinforced with an analysis of the motivations, psychiatric reports and personality tests.
The sphere of State control extends to the extent that rights increase, as it is necessary to make them respected and sanction transgressions. The tendency of democratic society is to penalise everything, it foresees a clause and a punishment for every form of violence, from the slap of the parent to rape. The extension of rights is synonymous with generalised criminalisation. It is claimed that the violence of all social relations has been banished. But that comes to reinforce the monopoly of violence that has been "legitimised" by the State, which is infinitely worse than any other kind. Justice does not reduce violence, it normalises. Like democracy, it constitutes a filter to both intolerance and violence.
Like democracy, justice functions on the basis of reason without having recourse to might. But for this reason to express itself, for discussion to take place in the terms it does, brute force is also necessary. In the same way democracy bases itself on the refusal of the violence it has generated and which it needs in order to perpetuate itself.
And so this filter also affects radical action when it enters a court for example, only managing to propose what is acceptable to the law. However, this is not a reason for not acting, or for regretting having acted, but rather for doing it knowingly: no revolutionary intervention can exist within the ambit of justice. The apparatus separates the accused from the discussions that concern him by delegating his power, as is continually done in democracy, to a few of its representatives: in this case to the lawyers.
The worst is that because the trial is public, one is convinced one is controlling justice, whereas it is really justice that is controlling the public. The image that oozes from the court carries an essential, hypnotically repeated message: violence is the monopoly of the Sate; and when conflicts between parties lead to confusion and uncertainty it is the State that sorts things out: "I also have a monopoly of truth". The trilogy "police - justice - media " must therefore be analysed as a whole even if the game between the three partners sometimes turns topsy-turvy it is able to absorb any scandal. There is scandal when it reveals that someone has broken the rules: but this very accusation presupposes ones remaining inside the game. The real rupture would be to break out of it.
No denunciation, no blinding glare of truth contains in itself the strength to threaten the existence of social institutions and relations.
So, why take up the question of repression and justice? Certainly not just because of the existence of the primary, essential, exemplary horror in the courts and prisons. We have no need to seek a peak of horror in order to put the whole of society in question, as it fails to supply us with elements for going to the roots of exploitation and alienation. Moreover, a scale of atrocities is inconceivable. The prisoner in jail, the soldier being trained for fighting in the mud of a trench, the worker who has an accident at work, the peasant who toils sixteen hours a day, each one has a number of good reasons for finding the ultimate in horror in their own condition.
In effect a solid and efficient society knows how to cover up a relationship of oppression with the honey of partial satisfactions. Is the humanisation of work not one of Capital's constant programmes? And then, in a "free" and democratic society it is not necessary to simply produce wealth, it is necessary above all to "find a job". Now also in prison they understand that no one should stay idle any longer: the prisoner will be conceded a job in order to earn his time, and to mobilise himself by filling up his time. The concept of the inflicted sentence alone is now historically and culturally out of date. So these same subjects who did not manage to fulfil and "ennoble" their existence when they were outside the walls, now find themselves with an occupation that offers considerable advantages to them and the State.
The penal institution is necessary to the class society, no matter how many or how few prisoners it holds. Any possible suppression of it is pure illusion, just as the idea of an economy managed from the base would be, of firms where the wage earners could "selfmanage" their own exploitation (a horror worthy of the most sanguinary dictators). Prison has a symbolic function which cannot be substituted; the reclusion of the few recalls the very existence of the norm that has been violated. But which however does not cease to function as a point of reference, rough border of the limits not to be gone too far beyond.
Today's society is one of maximum impotence, and also of generalised assistance. Now the whole of existence requires intermediaries, so there is a proliferation of public services whose function is assured by the network of induced needs. The State fills the void of existence with instruments that is uses to control at the same time maintaining structures like prison as places of social dumping. Of course, this function could be assured in other ways, a society capable of reforming itself would do so with minor costs (social and accounting). But it would still not cease to maintain that function in some way.
The superficial and interesting critiques which are incapable of conceiving of the end of justice consider that it can and must be maintained, at best without the need for it to intervene, imagining a future society without violence, attributing all the present violence to the misdeeds of the class society. This has been the dream of many enlightened and the partisans of all those schools of thought which desire a "perfect" world.
A separate mechanism for the resolution of conflict through the projection of an image and the exclusion of the individual, justice will not be abolished even if its functions are entrusted to another entity, that is above people and far more malleable, revocable, summitted to elections, controlled by popular assembly. A spontaneous form of justice with flexible laws or even without a head at all, would not for that cease to be machinery dividing good from evil independently of and against social relations, and which is fatally against them. Whether the judges be bureaucrats or not, the penal codes rigid or adaptable, it makes no difference to us. It is the very notion of law that want to destroy. Even if the law changes every day with the "evolution of customs" we does not change its function.
No matter what the science of the polls, the social order wins every time one votes, in the same way no matter what the jury vote, the very existence of justice is what constitutes its victory: it does not need anything else.
The modern judicial apparatus is extremely rational and scientific, while it ostentates its superior "impartiality" through the application of procedures which weigh the possibilities conceded to the accused and their defence (almost to the milligram). It can even allow itself to be scrupulous to individuals who are obliged to submit to it: it controls them, despoils them completely, having acquired full powers over their existence. Its very existence is a victory as it constrains everyone, including those like us who contest it, to playing according to its rules.
Only the incorrigible political and zealot left can consider a sentence or an acquittal to be a victory or a defeat of justice. And it is no wonder that it is precisely those who refuse to criticise justice as such who do not understand or accept the nature of Democracy, Fascism and Antifascism, and so on. In the same way as they participate in elections or claim immigrants right to vote. They call for working class juries instead of "bourgeois" judges. Their perspective is not at all that of destroying justice as such, but of democratising it like everything else. However, one sees there in a tragic or a comical way, the reproduction of the characteristics of justice and its prison corollary which often takes place among the exploited themselves, demonstrating the effective extent of the problem.
Someone can at times feel themselves obliged to pass over to the field of the adversary and argue in judicial terms, in spite of but that never constitutes a victory. And however it its always a task that is best left to the lawyer. For example, a public action carried out from the outside capable of raising doubts, waving the scarecrow of a clamorous "judicial error" and some good work by the lawyers during the debate can even force the judiciary to renounce coming down heavily on the accused, but that does not alter the fact that justice will in any case have acted according to its own rules, moreover by obliging us to respect them. Moreover an institution that knows how to admit its own mistakes is an institution that strengthens itself.
In the same way a court that acquits, like one that condemns, is still a court. It is difficult to imagine a place where the disinherited have less power than in a court. An exceptional case could arise from pressure exercised on the judiciary by a social movement for example when a crowd gathers demanding an absolution, precisely in the same way as a police station can be besieged by hundreds of demonstrators demanding that those arrested be freed, but this pressure is external. It is always elsewhere that the strength of the exploited can constitute itself.
All the same it is often an arduous task to eradicate the conviction that the only way to obtain benevolent treatment by the judicial apparatus is to busy oneself from the inside to show up the social inoffensiveness of those caught up in it.
Yes, and in theory we are all convinced that the best way to solidarise with an act of revolt is to commit another. Many are capable of applauding and praising a successful action, and there is no lack of comrades ready to put this maxim into practice by reproposing it and therefore contribute to its generalisation. But an act of subversion goes far beyond its actual outcome, in good as in evil. On the contrary, regularly when things "go wrong" and the authors of the gesture of rebellion are individuated or arrested, it does not come to mind to anyone to act in turn. Solidarity no longer concretises in our action but in the reaction to the actions of other, in this case, the judges.
So, we prefer to wait, listen to the advice of lawyers, the arrested comrades' declarations, the completion of investigations, one waits to see how things are going as if before what mattered was our desires and our attempts to realise them, and now it is just a question of getting our comrades "out".
Not intending to act instrumentally, or wanting to create new "martyrs to the cause", and although getting comrades out of prison is undoubtedly our primary aim, all the same it is necessary to evaluate the means one intends to use and be aware of their nature and their limits.
Instead it happens that it seems more becoming or proficuous to put aside the usual critiques of justice, forget the bellicose declarations of war against society and limit oneself to be just and consequently to acquit an innocent, to free a sick comrade, to considering childish pranks what in different circumstances we would be ready to accept as gestures of revolt. But is that really what we want? To appeal to the humanitarian sentiments of those we despise?
In the face of justice and the fear it arouses, it seems that we are incapable of doing anything other than recanting ourselves and what we say we desire.
Rebels and revolutionaries when we are free, once we are in the hands of the enemy we are only capable of showing innocuousness of the actions we carried out.
Power puts subversives, anarchists, in prison because as such they are "socially dangerous". To get them out all we can do is paint them as inoffensive lambs.
Are we cynical? Are we making an apology for sacrifice? Nothing of all that. We are simply tormented by a question that worries us torment which worries us - are we just good boys and girls?
Aldo Perego