Anthony J. Nocella II - Classic Writings in Anarchist Criminology

Ruth Kinna

One of the exhibits in the Kropotkin House Museum in Dmitrov, near Moscow, is a pencil or charcoal sketch by Kropotkin depicting him in his prison cell. The space is small, dark, and frightening and it perfectly captures the isolation and bleakness of incarceration.

Kropotkin was hardly the only anarchist to gain personal experience of the prison system or to use his reflections on his imprisonment to think more broadly about the operation of the bourgeois justice system and the punishment regimes that are integral to it. As the editors of this pioneering collection argue, anarchist critique draws anarchists magnetically toward its analysis. That is not to say that anarchism is defined by criminology (understood in a narrow sense) but that the anarchist refusal to recognize the justice of our current political arrangements effectively criminalizes the doctrines anarchists espouse and encourages anarchists to place questions of order at the heart of their social theory. Anarchists often wrote about prison because, like Alexander Berkman, they were deeply affected by their experiences. Anarchists analyzed crime, punishment, discipline, and social compliance because of the critiques of power, domination, and authority they advanced.

Looking again at the substantial body of work that anarchists produced on crime and criminology reminds us of the practical force of anarchist critique. The eloquent arguments that anarchists put to their accusers were intended to highlight the translation of legal norms into policy. When the Chicago anarchists explained the tyrannical nature of the property laws enshrined in the constitution and protected by the state, they were not simply making a technical point about justice and injustice. They were explaining the consequences of the power asymmetries that the justice system upheld for millions of dispossessed and exploited peoples. It did not follow, Albert Parsons argued, that because a man is a judge he is also just. Leaving questions of individual virtue aside, the American courts were packed: candidates for judgeships, throughout the United States were named by corporation and monopoly influences. More than one Chief Justice had been appointed to the bench of the US Supreme Court at the behest of leading railway magnates. No wonder, then, that justice was systematically denied to the poor and unemployed. Parsons described the streets of Chicago filled with 30,000 men in compulsory idleness; destitution, misery and want upon every hand facing the First Regiment out in a street-riot drill practicing a street-riot drill for the purpose of mowing down these wretches the working people are to be slaughtered in cold blood, and men are drilling upon the streets of the cities of America to butcher their fellow men when they demand the right to work and partake of the fruits of their labor. How far things have changed since 1887 is a moot point. Of course, situations vary across the globe and unemployment is only one of the issues that attracts aggressive policing. But the thrust of Parsonss analysis is about the institutionalization of injustice, the legality of violent repression and the unreasonable measures deployed to regulate disadvantage.

Revisiting anarchist criminology also draws attention to the alternatives that anarchists propose when they attack the prevailing order. The anarchist critique of bourgeois justice was targeted, not generalized. Indeed, it was predicated on an alternative conception of justness. Those who followed Proudhon described justice as immanent, and understood it as a contingent idea, simultaneously a condition and a practice that emerged from individual reflection or reason and social engagement. Like Nietzsche, anarchists denied the possibility of making absolute, universal moral judgments and the possibility that justice could be externally imposed. Justice emerged as part of a social process. Thus in attacking the unfairness and corruption of bourgeois justice systems, anarchists did not dismiss the possibility that rules could be broken, that norms could be transgressed or that harms could be inflicted. The point that Kropotkin made in Law and Authority was that military, clerical, and political elites adopted community rules and customs and gave them a new spin. Law corrupted established social practices and fixed them authoritatively so that they could always be enforced coercively and changed only when it suited the ruling elites.