Given how easy it is recognize in both paradigms that justice is about victims, why do people so often think justice is about punishing the criminal? Often, when protesters call for justice in the name of a victim, they call not for reparations or restitution, but for criminal prosecution of the perpetrator. Why does this attitude persist? Even libertarian theorists, most notably Murray Rothbard in The Ethics of Liberty, attempt to move from justice for victims, restitution, to criminal law, retribution.

For too long, the state has had a stranglehold on justice. Frederic Bastiat noted that when justice is perverted by the state, the people come to know nothing else but the state’s actions as “justice.” It is no surprise, then, that justice is thought to be some kind of persecution of those who do harm to others. The state uses justice as the banner under which it may take its looter’s share. By parading about as the “thin blue line” police become symbols of morality, even as they leave destroyed lives in their wake. Prisons are warehouses for the socially discomforting and pens for the downtrodden who would otherwise mar the cityscapes of the influential, not temples of justice, nor cages for social decay. The state and its agents have stolen justice from its citizens.

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Justice is the virtue of giving each his or her due. As a person, as a human, as a members of various relationships, each person deserves some particular kind of treatment. Justice is thus, in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, “a habit whereby a man renders to each one his due by a constant and perpetual will.” So justice is about the person with whom one interacts, their dignity and standing as who and what they are. Other virtues, like prudence or fortitude, are about the agent who wishes to display them. To be insufficiently brave is to feel too much fear, or to feel fear of an improper object, but justice is about other people.

This makes sense in libertarian theory. The non-aggression principle is not framed in terms of the violator. It is wrong to aggress against another person’s justly held property primarily because it harms the victim, not primarily because the gains therefrom are not real accomplishments (though this is the case). The right of self-ownership does not follow from the fact that others have no ability to control one’s will but from the fact that one has the inalienable ability to make decisions for oneself. Even the law of equal authority is fundamentally about the wrong done to someone when power is expressed over them.

Leftists recognize that justice is about victims, also. When explaining the problems in rampant bossism, the callousness inculcated in bosses is morally secondary to the vulnerability endemic to the employees’ position. Underprivileged groups’ stigmatization is a wrong committed by the privileged against the marginalized. Privilege is not about the privilege holder, it is about the unfairness of the social dynamic it forces onto the underprivileged.

Given how easy it is recognize in both paradigms that justice is about victims, why do people so often think justice is about punishing the criminal? Often, when protesters call for justice in the name of a victim, they call not for reparations or restitution, but for criminal prosecution of the perpetrator. Why does this attitude persist? Even libertarian theorists, most notably Murray Rothbard in The Ethics of Liberty, attempt to move from justice for victims, restitution, to criminal law, retribution.

For too long, the state has had a stranglehold on justice. Frederic Bastiat noted that when justice is perverted by the state, the people come to know nothing else but the state’s actions as “justice.” It is no surprise, then, that justice is thought to be some kind of persecution of those who do harm to others. The state uses justice as the banner under which it may take its looter’s share. By parading about as the “thin blue line” police become symbols of morality, even as they leave destroyed lives in their wake. Prisons are warehouses for the socially discomforting and pens for the downtrodden who would otherwise mar the cityscapes of the influential, not temples of justice, nor cages for social decay. The state and its agents have stolen justice from its citizens.

State interest in retributive, perpetrator-focused justice is natural. It makes the rightness of a choice dependent on the one performing the act against another. Taking property from another is theft, unless the state is levying a tax. Shooting another person without cause is murder, unless an “officer of the law” is holding the gun. The quasi-divine sanction of the state removes moral responsibility from one who would rightly be a criminal. The victim is of no importance under a state’s so-called justice system. The perpetrator is everything, and the state has the power to decide who the perpetrator is, criminal or agent of the law. This is the identifying feature of the state and the source of its influence. It claims the final right in deciding the legitimacy of a use of force. It holds itself up as the final arbiter. It decides who matters.

To have true justice the state’s model of punishment must not be the operating paradigm. Those who have been harmed by another, no matter who the other was, must be made whole again, and it is the responsibility of the damaging party to ensure that this is so. This cannot be done by focusing on the perpetrator. Only the victim’s status matters in evaluating whether justice has been done, and victims deserve better than the farce the state has conducted for centuries in the name of its own victims. They deserve justice.

As prison system inspectors visited Franklin Correctional Institution they discovered an incident from three years prior in which an inmate, 27-year-old Randall Jordan-Aparo, begged officer Rollin Suttle Austin, to take him to the hospital because of a blood disorder and the officer ordered him “gassed.” Jordan-Aparo died that night.

The inspectors rightfully found that the fiasco constituted “sadistic, retaliatory” behavior by the guards, but they allege that when they brought their findings to Florida Department of Corrections Inspector General Jeffrey Beasley, he told them he would “have their asses” if they didn’t back off. The involved officers remain on staff, although the U.S Department of Justice is investigating the situation.

That makes me feel so much better…

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Scavando tra i documenti della prigione, alcuni giornalisti hanno trovato diversi casi di abusi e di cosiddetti “usi impropri della forza”.

In visita all’Istituto Correzionale Franklin, gli ispettori del sistema penitenziario sono venuti a conoscenza di un incidente avvenuto tre anni prima. L’incidente aveva per protagonista un carcerato ventisettenne, Randall Jordan-Aparo, che chiedeva all’agente Rollin Suttle Austin di essere ricoverato in ospedale per via di un disturbo del sangue. L’agente diede l’ordine di “gasarlo” (pestarlo a sangue, es). Jordan-Aparo morì quella stessa notte.

Gli ispettori giustamente hanno definito il comportamento delle guardie “sadico e vendicativo”. Ma, dicono, quando i risultati degli accertamenti sono stati portati davanti all’ispettore generale del dipartimento penitenziario della Florida Jeffrey Beasley, quest’ultimo ha risposto: “vi faccio fottere” se non ve ne andate. Nonostante il dipartimento federale della giustizia continui con le indagini, gli agenti coinvolti restano in servizio.

Questo mi fa sentire molto meglio…

Un altro incidente vide coinvolto un carcerato con disturbi mentali, Darren Rainey; dopo aver defecato nella cella fu rinchiuso dagli agenti nel box doccia, “bombardato con acqua bollente,” insultato e lasciato a morire. Testimoni dichiarano di averlo trovato nel piatto doccia con la pelle a brandelli.

Questi incidenti di male puro sono considerati semplici storie da chi si sforza di giustificare lo stato prigione. Quanti altri esempi di abusi odiosi occorrono per capire che il problema è strutturale? Quanto altro sangue deve finire sulle mani dei carcerieri perché siano considerati, correttamente, nemici e non protettori di una società pacifica?

Se da un lato le vittime sono semplici nomi su un pezzo di carta per i vari funzionari di stato che fingono di interessarsi ai loro casi, dall’altro erano persone vere, in carne ed ossa, che hanno sofferto le pene della tortura per mano dello stato prigione. Randall Jordan-Aparo e Darren Rainey non sono semplici storie. Sono esempi di un problema istituzionale molto più grande.

Ecco perché i licenziamenti non risolveranno nulla. Gli abusi dello stato prigione, nella loro tristezza, sono una conseguenza prevedibile del fatto che la “giustizia” è affidata al monopolio dello stato. Lo stato prigione è un sistema oppressivo che rende normali gli abusi di potere e gli atti di terrore lasciando i carcerati alla mercé di guardie prive di responsabilità.

La mancanza di responsabilità, come nel caso dell’agente Austin, è un fatto normale. La logica interna del sistema carcerario monopolistico semplicemente non incentiva a tenere a bada le guardie carcerarie. Solo quando qualche giornalista esterno scava nei rapporti, il che accade raramente, lo stato è costretto ad agire “responsabilmente”. E anche allora la risposta è spesso più uno spettacolo fatto per placare il pubblico che un cambiamento reale. Dopotutto, un vero cambiamento comporterebbe l’estinzione del potere statale: l’ultima cosa che un funzionario di stato vorrebbe permettere.

Ci sono voluti tre anni perché la morte di Randall Jordan-Aparo venisse alla luce, e tutto quello che abbiamo è una “indagine”, il sonnifero preferito dallo stato. Un’indagine sembra una ricerca della responsabilità, ma in realtà non lo è affatto. Una vera e propria responsabilità si potrebbe avere solo con la dispersione del potere, ovvero con l’abolizione dell’intero sistema.

Lo stato reclama il monopolio della giustizia, ma non è così. La verità è che lo stato elimina ogni possibilità di giustizia.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Reporters digging deeper into the prison records found multiple incidents of abuse and so-called “inappropriate uses of force.”

As prison system inspectors visited Franklin Correctional Institution they discovered an incident from three years prior in which an inmate, 27-year-old Randall Jordan-Aparo, begged officer Rollin Suttle Austin, to take him to the hospital because of a blood disorder and the officer ordered him “gassed.” Jordan-Aparo died that night.

The inspectors rightfully found that the fiasco constituted “sadistic, retaliatory” behavior by the guards, but they allege that when they brought their findings to Florida Department of Corrections Inspector General Jeffrey Beasley, he told them he would “have their asses” if they didn’t back off. The involved officers remain on staff, although the U.S Department of Justice is investigating the situation.

That makes me feel so much better …

Another incident involved mentally ill inmate Darren Rainey; after defecating in his cell he was locked in a closet like shower, “blasted by hot water,” taunted and then abandoned by officers to die. Witnesses report he was found on the shower drain with chunks of his skin falling off.

These incidents of pure evil are deemed anecdotal by those who continue to try and justify the prison state. How many examples of despicable abuse will it take for people to realize the problem is structural? How much more blood will prison guards have to get on their hands until they are rightly viewed as enemies of a peaceful society, rather than its protectors?

While the victims are merely names on a paper for various state functionaries to pretend to look into, they were real, flesh and blood individuals who suffered sickening torture at the hands of the prison state. Randall Jordan-Aparo and Darren Rainey are not anecdotes. Rather, they are examples of a much bigger, institutional problem.

That’s why the layoffs are not going to solve anything. The abuses of the prison state, while sad, are a predictable consequence of handing “justice” over to a state monopoly. The prison state is a system of oppression that normalizes abuses of power and acts of terror, leaving inmates at the mercy of unaccountable guards.

Unaccountability, as in the case of officer Austin, is routine. There are simply no incentives for the inner workings of the prison monopoly to tend toward keeping guards’ power in check. Only when outside reporters delve into the reports — a rare occurrence — is the state forced to act “responsibly.” And even then, the response is often mere show to appease the public rather than actual change. After all, real change would involve relinquishing state power – the last thing state functionaries will allow.

It took three years for Randall Jordan-Aparo’s death to even come to light and now all we get is an “investigation” — the state’s favorite appeasement technique. While it looks like accountability, an investigation by a fellow state functionary is no such thing. Real, true accountability is only achievable through a dispersion of power — and that means abolishing the whole system.

The state claims a monopoly on justice, but that’s not the real truth. The real truth is that the state removes any chances of justice.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Nessuna Giustizia dallo Stato Prigione.

Maria Isabel Veliz Franco was 15 when she was sexually abused, tortured and brutally murdered in Guatemala in 2001. Her mother fought for justice and, on July 28, 2014, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that the Guatemalan authorities had not adequately investigated the murder, neglecting it in an environment of systematic violence and discrimination against women.

Sebastian Elgueta, a researcher from Amnesty International who writes on Guatemala, stated that the “lessons from this case will only be apprehended when the death of every women in Guatemala is taken seriously, and when concrete measures begin to be taken to prevent violence against them, creating a safe and respectful society for all.”

This tragic case highlights the importance of courts and rulings outside the nation state, for they judge whether governments are respecting so-called obligations they take upon themselves to respect human rights and hence legitimize their power.

The first case I researched in the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court was also a Guatemalan case, Street Children (Villagran Morales et al) v. Guatemala.

I was already a libertarian then and I was actually surprised to see that the case of five kids killed by the police, which no doubt would’ve been ignored forever if it was up to the Guatemalan state, had been taken to an international independent court that would rule and sentence the state to compensate the families of the victims, investigate and punish the responsible and take measures to avoid that situation in the future.

The emergence of these courts is important in that it’s at least an independent power acting to limit the state and challenging the idea that the state is the final arbiter of our liberties and rights within its borders. The state here is faced with the awkward situation of being the defendant rather the accuser in a court that holds them up to the standard of actually respecting the rights they vowed to uphold.

In a Brazilian case of a mentally impaired patient, Damiao Ximenes Lopes, who had been neglected and died in a nursing home linked to the government health care system, the Brazilian state was condemned for lack of investigation of the occurrence. Another case involved the disappeared people from the Araguaia guerilla during the military dictatorship, where the Court understood that the Brazilian Amnesty Act, forgiving blatant violations of human rights committed by the dictatorship, was illegal, something I’ve touched upon in other article.

From a radical free market perspective, these international courts could allow us to argue that Brazil violates human rights for not allowing union freedom to its citizens.

The possibility exists because the Inter-American Court of Human Rights can evaluate rights violations listed in the American Convention on Human Rights, which deals with civil and political rights, but can also examine some of the provisions of the Protocol of San Salvador, that deals with economic, social and cultural rights. Among them, there’s this one:

Article 8
Trade Union Rights
1. The States Parties shall ensure:
a. The right of workers to organize trade unions and to join the union of their choice for the purpose of protecting and promoting their interests. As an extension of that right, the States Parties shall permit trade unions to establish national federations or confederations, or to affiliate with those that already exist, as well as to form international trade union organizations and to affiliate with that of their choice. The States Parties shall also permit trade unions, federations and confederations to function freely . . .

Since Getulio Vargas, Brazilian workers have had no freedom to unionize, for they must submit to “union oneness,” a legal monopoly that allows only one union to represent a given segment of workers in a territory. No wonder the largest unions in the country, CUT and Forca Sindical, are firmly aligned with corporate interests.

That’s also one of the reasons the Brazilian government doesn’t recognize the Convention No. 87 of the International Labour Organization. ILO in its own constitution establishes the freedom of union association, but by ratifying it Brazil would have to commit to the application of the principle in its work relations. Article 2 establishes that workers, without distinction and previous permission, have the right to constitute the organizations they deem convenient and to affiliate themselves to them, provided they respect their internal statutes. ILO’s Article 2 and PSS’s article 8 are very similar and are meant to protect a simple principle of union relations that the Brazilian government violates.

Should we secure a condemnation of Brazil in an international court for impeding the functioning of a free union, outside its monopoly system, that would be a very important step in calling attention of workers of this aburd denial of their righs to free association and better work conditions.

Thus, international courts may possess one of the few authorities a state might be forced to recognize, and we can use that to have it investigate the murder of street kids or to have it sentenced for not respecting workers’s rights to unionize the way they see fit. The means might not be radical, but the idea is: the state can’t have the last word on our lives and rights.

Legislative activism will not guide us to freedom, but there’s a law on our side, we might as well exploit it.

Translated into English by Erick Vasconcelos.

Kids are being locked in cages by the government all across the country. The consequences are devastating. According to a report from the Justice Policy Institute:

A recent literature review of youth corrections shows that detention has a profoundly negative impact on young people’s mental and physical well-being, their education, and their employment. One psychologist found that for one-third of incarcerated youth diagnosed with depression, the onset of the depression occurred after they began their incarceration, and another suggests that poor mental health, and the conditions of confinement together conspire to make it more likely that incarcerated teens will engage in suicide and self-harm. Economists have shown that the process of incarcerating youth will reduce their future earnings and their ability to remain in the workforce, and could change formerly detained youth into less stable employees. Educational researchers have found that upwards of 40 percent of incarcerated youth have a learning disability, and they will face significant challenges returning to school after they leave detention. Most importantly, for a variety of reasons to be explored, there is credible and significant research that suggests that the experience of detention may make it more likely that youth will continue to engage in delinquent behavior, and that the detention experience may increase the odds that youth will recidivate, further compromising public safety.

So the state is engaging in violence that scars young people physically and mentally, and hurts their economic prospects; and this practice may even increase rather than decrease the chance of future crime. Moreover, according to the same report, most of these youth are not even a threat to others, as “about 70 percent are detained for nonviolent offenses.”

Once incarcerated, youth are subjected to severe abuses. For example, many youth are isolated in solitary confinement, which is widely recognized as a form of psychological torture. According to the American Civil Liberties Union:

Solitary confinement can cause extreme psychological, physical, and developmental harm. For children, who are still developing and more vulnerable to irreparable harm, the risks are magnified – particularly for kids with disabilities or histories of trauma and abuse. While confined, children are regularly deprived of the services, programming, and other tools that they need for healthy growth, education, and development.

The impacts of solitary on adults are harmful enough. “It’s an awful thing, solitary,” wrote John McCain, “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” Subjecting youth to this kind of torture is monstrous.

Incarcerated youth are also all too often raped and sexually assaulted by guards. According to David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow, “4.5 percent of juveniles in prison and 4.7 percent of those in jail reported such [sexual] victimization—rates that ought to be considered disastrously high.” Their risk was higher in youth detention centers, “minors held in juvenile detention suffered sexual abuse at twice the rate of their peers in adult facilities.” Most of this abuse is committed by guards employed and paid with tax dollars:

Some 2.5 percent of all boys and girls in juvenile detention reported having been the victims of inmate-on-inmate abuse. This is not dramatically higher than the corresponding combined male and female rates reported by adults or juveniles in either prison or jail. The reason why the overall rate of sexual abuse (9.5 percent) was so much higher in juvenile detention than in other facilities is the frequency of sexual misconduct by staff. About 7.7 percent of those in juvenile detention reported sexual contact with staff during the preceding year. Over 90 percent of these cases involved female staff and teenage boys in custody.

Government employees are committing child sexual abuse against caged victims. These guards are often repeat offenders. “In juvenile facilities, victims of sexual misconduct by staff members were more likely to report eleven or more instances of abuse than a single, isolated occurrence.” All of this data comes from research conducted by the government’s own Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The impacts of the state’s systematic caging and abuse of children are not equally distributed across the population. The Center for Children’s Law and Policy documents many studies showing the racially disparate impacts of youth incarceration and juvenile justice policies. LGBTQ youth also face disproportionate impacts from the juvenile justice system. According to an article in The Nation:

The road to incarceration begins in pretrial detention, before the youth even meets a judge. Laws and professional standards state that it’s appropriate to detain a child before trial only if she might run away or harm someone. Yet for queer youth, these standards are frequently ignored. According to UC Santa Cruz researcher Dr. Angela Irvine, LGBT youth are two times more likely than straight youth to land in a prison cell before adjudication for nonviolent offenses like truancy, running away and prostitution. According to Ilona Picou, executive director of Juvenile Regional Services, Inc., in Louisiana, 50 percent of the gay youth picked up for nonviolent offenses in Louisiana in 2009 were sent to jail to await trial, while less than 10 percent of straight kids were. “Once a child is detained, the judge assumes there’s a reason you can’t go home,” says Dr. Marty Beyer, a juvenile justice specialist. “A kid coming into court wearing handcuffs and shackles versus a kid coming in with his parents—it makes a very different impression.”

Queer and transgender youth are treated differently by the justice system before they are even tried and convicted. Once incarcerated, they face brutal violence. From beatings to victim blaming to bigoted slurs from guards, queer and transgender youth are regularly abused in juvenile corrections facilities.

Some of America’s youth incarceration problem begins in the schools. “Zero-tolerance” policies in public schools criminalize violating school rules, producing what is often called the school to prison pipeline. The racially disparate impacts of this school to prison pipeline are well documented, and they often criminalize minor infractions.

Outside of school, youth are often directly targeted by police thanks to ageist laws like curfews. Laws often restrict freedom of movement and bodily autonomy for youth, and justify this coercion through condescending and paternalistic platitudes. In a particularly appalling recent case of paternalism sending youth to prison, a transgender girl was sent to an adult prison without charges or trial, because the state had power over her as her “guardian.” The desire to protect youth provides ideological cover for the state to treat them even more abusively than it treats adults.

The American state is uniquely punitive in some respects. According to Amnesty International, “The United States is believed to stand alone in sentencing children to life without parole.” Amnesty identifies “at least 2,500 people in the US serving life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for crimes committed when they were under 18 years old.” Before turning 18, these youth were permanently separated from society, permanently sent to violent hellholes.

The essence of imprisonment as we know it is throwing away a human being, treating them as disposable. Prisoners are subjected to violence, abuse, and torture. They are held in austere and inhumane conditions. And they are kept out of the general public’s sight. They are punished rather than being made to make amends or provide restitution to victims. It’s bad enough to treat any human being this way. To treat children this way is unconscionable. Stop caging kids.

When we are disgusted by the unnecessary pain inflicted even on those who’ve inflicted unnecessary pain, we are disgusted with retribution. When we are outraged by the horror of a botched execution, we are outraged by the use of punishment to make an example out of its victims.

It is time to take the final steps on the path we’re already taking.

It is time to abolish the crime of punishment.

But if we can’t face the man on his knees, and if we don’t want to see ourselves as the man holding the pistol, should we be killing at all? Clayton Lockett was tortured to death last night so we could pretend we are somehow better than the man holding a pistol to the base of another man’s skull. If we are fine with killing, then why do we not kill the right way? If killing the right way troubles you, are you really fine with killing?

The particular incident sparking national attention this time was a lethal injection in McAlester, Oklahoma that failed to immediately kill its intended victim. Instead, convicted murderer and rapist Clayton Lockett died — of a heart attack — after 43 minutes spent writhing in pain and struggling to get out the words “Man,” “I’m not,” and “something’s wrong.”

Unsurprisingly, Amnesty International calls it “one of the starkest examples yet of why the death penalty must be abolished.” Even the White House — headquarters of worldwide mass drone assassinations — made a point to publicly state that the execution “fell short” of the standard for humane executions.

We might ask ourselves, though, why we find such a horrible death for such horrible crimes repugnant. If we think punishment should be retributive and proportionate to the crime committed, we ought to welcome particularly cruel punishments for particularly cruel crimes. If we think punishment should serve as a deterrent, we ought to welcome such gruesome, excruciating deaths in hopes that they make crimes like those committed by Lockett less likely.

In fact, we arguably passively accept more cruel punishments already.

As jokes in popular culture reveal, it’s socially understood that a prison sentence involves condemning a convict to a hell of constant abuse from both guards and fellow inmates. This looming threat lasts much longer than the 46 minutes of pain Lockett experienced, leaving permanent psychological damage. Even when sentences end and inmates leave with their bodies, they don’t always escape with their souls.

None of this is to downplay what happened to Lockett in McAlester, especially considering that his time on death row ensured he went through the torture of prison as well.

The problem is not just that what Lockett experienced was cruel and unusual. The problem is that the all too usual practice of punishment itself — the process of intentionally inflicting harm on another human being for the purpose of inflicting harm — is irredeemably cruel.

If this is where punishment has brought us, to systematic killings and mass incarceration, then it’s time to reexamine punishment. We must reflect on what it is we really want out of punishment, and whether or not we can achieve it some other way.

One of the most basic things we want out of punishment is a way to restore respect for victims and their dignity. When a murderer escapes conviction, our anger comes out of solidarity with the victim.

What better way to respond to crime, then, than by demanding restitution for victims or their loved ones? The focus there is placed firmly on showing respect for those harmed, and away from bringing new harm to the criminal.

The most obvious objection to such a proposal is that no amount of monetary compensation will ever bring back the dead, or undo an assault, making full justice impossible under restitution. While this is unfortunately true, it is also true of punishment — even if Lockett had suffered for three hours, his victim would still be just as dead.

The difference is that with a restitutive model of justice, we can at least go some way toward healing the wounds of crime. With a punitive model, no steps are taken in that direction at all and new injustices are committed.

When we look back at the history of criminal justice, most of us mark progress by the abolition of the cross, the rack and the guillotine. We take it as a mark of our humanity that our modern debates about lethal injections are about how we can punish with the least additional pain possible. When we fail in that goal, as Oklahoma did with Lockett, we are repulsed. Those who oppose capital punishment take it as a reason to abandon the practice altogether.

Each of these steps that we praise backs away from the principles used to justify punishment.

When we are disgusted by the unnecessary pain inflicted even on those who’ve inflicted unnecessary pain, we are disgusted with retribution. When we are outraged by the horror of a botched execution, we are outraged by the use of punishment to make an example out of its victims.

It is time to take the final steps on the path we’re already taking.

It is time to abolish the crime of punishment.