I know a lot of socialist anarchists want to abolish prisons and end punishing criminals all together which I think is insane. I support having a free market prison system with competing prisons. Only I’ve encountered some problems with this view. First of all, who would pay the private prison company? Who is the “customer?” I know there’s solutions here but I want to ask others.
Yeah, those “problems” are a good indication that prisons are entirely a creation of the State. No State, no prisons. It’s really that simple.
If the crime was so bad that private law does not specify any payment which can settle the matter (e.g. murder) then it can be taken care of through outlawry and bounty hunting, etc. Otherwise, the crime/tort is something that can be settled with a monetary payment. Inability to pay damages is handled through co-liability (i.e. insurance via family or impersonal 3rd party commercial insurers) or outlawry.
Finally, even if victims were willing to pay to house, feed and clothe their aggressors in prisons, I doubt that private law would recognize caging people as a valid form of “payment” for damages. That is, a crime victim could no more demand that he be permitted to cage the aggressor as punishment for his crime than he could demand to be permitted to perform live vivisection on the aggressor as punishment. Imprisoning someone would, I believe, constitute a new tort in its own right, even if the victim of imprisonment had previously aggressed against the person doing the imprisoning.
Clayton -
Not sure about socialists, but most ancaps (as I experienced) do not favor prison system at all. It is counterproductive, it is costly and it is cruel. There would be much less prisons in libertopia if any at all.
As for paying… well, those, who want to keep criminals caged would pay. First in a row - victims. But then again, I doubt prisons can be sustained without massive and coercive taxation system. Fuck prisons, I want my restitution. Leave retribution to God and karma, hehe.
How about this: if A murders B, then B’s family/associates are entitled to as much of A’s wealth and/or property as they want in return. A is essentially forced to pay for his crimes.
Too complicated. Outlawry or lump-sum payment are much more efficient and have been used in many cultures and still are used in a couple even today.
Clayton -
I don’t think incarceration would be used directly as restitution in a stateless society. Instead, I think it would be used on captured outlaws.
Let’s say the accused leaves town before his trial. After doing due diligence in trying to contact him, he’s tried in absentia and found guilty. If the injured party so desires, he/they (or someone on his/their behalf) can place a bounty to capture the convicted. Now let’s say the convicted gets captured by a bounty hunter. In order to insure payment of the restitution, he’s essentially incarcerated in a work facility. This facility could be its own business or part of a larger one. Either way, it could earn a profit through the labor(s) of the prisoners housed there.
Basically this would be a form of involuntary debt slavery. There might also exist facilities for the criminally insane.
You mean, for politicians?
(sorry, couldn’t resist).
“Fuck prisons, I want my restitution. Leave retribution to God and karma.”
Right when I read this, Alice Cooper - schools out just came on. Makes sense. There will be many many questions, though:
what if group of people murdered your brother? What do you do?
What if someone stole your car and then wrecked it. And you caught him, but he says “fck you, I ain’t payin you sht”?
What if someone breaks your mailbox and you catch it on camera, but they say “dude, if you come on my property I’m gonna beat the sh*t out of you”?
@limitgov: All three of those scenarios fall under what I call “The Bully Problem” here. A certain amount of division-of-labor and specialization in the production of security services is required to solve these problems. However, it should always be kept in mind that the State makes problems worse in this regard. Hiring a private bodyguard or private security agency to provide protection makes sense for a lot of people but the market is extremely restricted and generally non-existent at the low end (just like with low-end private education… you can’t compete with free). Hence, the State creates a scarcity in the production of security services for the protection of the life and property of private individuals, while it creates a sufeit of security services for itself and its buddies in the private sector.
Clayton -
In a related question, what happens in a criminal restitution system when, thanks to all that economic growth in a free society, people become too rich to care about the fines?
wait, I didn’t say I advocate lawless society or anything like that. Either I don’t get your question or you didn’t get what I wanted to say.
Does it really matter? What matters is whether victims are happy with the restitution they are paid. From my article on law:
“This process [the law] of feedback on the choices people make continually drives the gangly process of cooperative, catallactic exchange in dispute resolution closer to a process of pure, catallactic exchange – the act of taking a legal risk becomes, more and more, an entirely conscious trade-off based on calculation of costs and benefits.”
What I mean by this is that the first time two people get into a completely new kind of dispute (say, the technology involved is novel or some unique circumstance has arisen), there is no clearly right resolution of the dispute… instead, the two parties involved may sue and counter-sue in an attempt to maneuver for legal advantage, etc. However, as more cases of this type are heard and resolved by whatever means, some sort of precedent is bound to emerge. Some arguments are bound to “stick” and these begin to take on normative force and become law. As they become recognized as law, the choice of whether to engage in a behavior that is in violation of the law is a conscious tradeoff between costs (if someone sues you) and benefits.
In a private law society, the law is not a list of “Thou shalt nots” to be enforced at any cost. Rather, it is a body of knowledge regarding the reasonable and effective resolutions of disputes and the conscious use of this body of knowledge by the individual making cost-benefit tradeoffs is not only allowed but desired. The Thou-Shalt-Not approach to law is symptomatic of the State. Its dictates are rigid and ideological. They must be of the form Thou-Shalt-Not because of what the State pretends to be… the Enforcer and Creator of Social Order.
If the State said “you can speed as much as you like and we won’t take your license away but it will cost you $100 for every 10 mph you go over the speed limit each time we catch you”, this would be inherently deligitimizing of the whole concept of a speed limit. It would make it clear just how arbitrary and useless speed limits are. Instead, the speed limit is issued as an unquestionable dictate which has been crafted as the result of a long process of deliberation by the appointed and wise caretakers of society.
Private law is completely different. There are no “speed limits” in private law, there is only individual judgment, prudence and unlimited legal liability. It is then up to the individual to weigh the potential that his chosen course of action will result in a costly lawsuit against the benefits he expects to gain by engaging in it. The potential for human flourishing that would be unleashed by a transition to private law society is impossible for us to comprehend. Just like entrepreneurs take business risks and weigh the expected chances of bankruptcy against the expected benefits of success, we would see the same kind of calculation process applied to every aspect of human life under private law.
Clayton -
In all probability, even the most heinous people would be ostracized. It is cheaper that way.
Free market prisons will work in the same way that leper colonies work: the people living there will deal with it on their own.
I see it that way too, Clayton. I actually attempted to make that very point the other day.
As such I agree with your theoretical framework. What I asked was more of a practical concern. Punishment of crimes, be it prison or restitution, is mostly disincentive. I don’t think most people could ever be happy about the restitution they received for the death of a loved one, the purpose of the punishment is to disincentivize that murder in the first place. And that disincentive would disappear once people get too rich to care about the fines, which we can expect in a undistorted market. Let’s use texting while driving on a private road as an example. Say to drive on a private road you have to agree to the following clause: “If I am caught texting while driving on this road, I agree to pay 1000 Dollars to the owner.” That should keep people from texting, right? But say you are a billionaire, would you care about the fine? You wouldn’t care about lousy 1000 bucks, so you’d just be texting. The whole system of fines loses it’s effect once people become too rich to care about it.
I disagree. The purpose of legal payment is to settle the dispute, that is, prevent open conflict. I should have used more exact language… when I said “happy with” I meant “willing to settle the dispute.” You may be right that there might not be any price at which the family of a murder victim is willing to settle. In this case, open conflict is inevitable.
As for disincentivization, I think that it is impossible to consciously design incentives or disincentives - it is a form of central-planning. To the extent that settlements act as a disincentive, this is a reflection of the human urge to retribution… we cannot know the particular reasons that people demand more retribution for this behavior than that behavior and I think it is a mistake to try to improve upon human nature by “designing” incentives and disincentives. The correct way to view the private law market in arbitration is that arbitrators are (inadvertently) “discovering” the “going price for settlement of XYZ” in the process of independently settling many disputes over XYZ. I believe there is more than an analogy here to how market prices are discovered by buyers and sellers. Law is really the market in torts.
Clayton -
Billionaires don’t drive, they have drivers. They also don’t text, they have secretaries.
Plus, in that case you can make some income-based system. Even better, make the price outrageously high and then give a panel the ability to bring the price down in cases of emergency/low income, etc. The possibilities are endless.
I’m still not completely convinced some people shouldn’t be jailed. If some gang member robs a place with a gun threatening people, gets caught, and is able to come up with the money, but still free from confinement to do it again, and again, and again, and then kill someone in the process, I think paying fines is not enough.
Especially if after the payment the people are still free to engage in the same exact act. What if someone’s caught doing something, and they have to pay a fine, and then out of anger at another time attack the person who they had to pay a fine to?
I don’t hold the death penalty out of question either, it’s just who’s doing it.
Free market prisons? They could be financed by insurance and security agencies for the few people who commit harmful crimes.
Then the matter is settled from the point of view of the victim and that’s what really matters. The person who committed the tort does not “lose all rights” and does not have a duty to “be made an example of”, that is, to be punished disproportionately or viciously for the purpose of “warning others.” Such behavior on the part of the victim constitutes a new tort of its own against the original aggressor.
Deterrence is a fortuitous by-product of the resolution of disputes.
It is not the responsibility of a victim (or “society”) to subsidize the security costs of the community by confining criminals. Crime is a much more dangerous occupation in a private-law society. For example, an aggressor has no rights in the process of committing his crime unlike in the current system where killing or injuring a home-invader can land you in jail. An aggressor who is unable to pay the settlement will find himself back in court in short order and eventually outlawed for his refusal (or inability) to pay. Once outlawed, he is “fair game” and all the enemies he’s created in his life are free to put a bounty on his head to find him and kill him.
There’s nothing in the prison system that prevents this. In fact, it is my belief that many of the most dangerous criminals that we keep alive in prison today would simply be outlawed and killed in a private law society.
It seems your thinking is trapped in the box of “the way things are”. Why is caging a dangerous person a good security policy? Why not hold property-owners responsible to secure the things they want to keep secure (e.g. put bars in the windows, put fences up, security cameras, etc.)? The only way that caging people makes sense is if every criminal was jailed for life but that seems like an incredibly expensive policy, leaving aside the injustice of forcing innocent people to pay to feed, clothe and house known criminals in cages. It is socialism to force the public to pay to cage offenders when property owners should bear their own security costs.
Clayton -
If we assume everyone has the same mindset in a private law society, then known criminals would be ostracized by the community, but I don’t expect some to have a “lesson learned” attitude and my reference is to repeat offenders with a gang of unknown supporters. The point to where someone (known or unknown) becomes a nuisance to the community. I don’t expect someone to be killed from it, but I expect more than him just be ostracized from the community (does he just get passed along to the next community?). What about those who psychologically cannot be “upright citizens” and constantly resort to petty crime?
I just don’t see the idea of paying for the crime working out for the criminal himself* (not saying inprisonment would be better), but if a community or if the insurance and law companies have alternatives to jail a repeat offender for a given amount of time that option should be available for those willing to pay (if those companies have that option then it would not be mandatory, as I was not referencing to some mandatory payment for jail as I think you assumed).
*I’m thinking of those who probably would just end up in jail multiple times, I don’t see how just paying fines and getting into debt, and owing multiple people money that would never get paid be beneficial and appeasing to the victims of the crimes committed. What options would be viable? Seems like it’s only pay fines, ostracized from the community (if everyone has the same mindset in the entire community), and killed.