lhe fifth anniversary of the Attica massact brought with it new headlines of prison conditions and rebellions by inmates.
When the Attica rebellion ended five years ago with government troope killing forty-three people, all kinds of studies were done and changes in prison conditions recommended. Yet nothing changed, forcing inmates once again to protest.
end of August, organized a strike. Their demands included the right to shower daily instead of twice a week; an end to overcrowding; more telephone privileges; an end to strip and rectal searches; the right to kiss, hug, and touch visiting relatives and friends; and an end to brutal and racist treatment.
Socialist Workers party supports their struggles and demands. But the ultimate aim of socialists is not to have some prettified version of these dehumanizing institutions. As Eugene Victor Debe, that great pioneer of American socialism, put it fifty years ago, "Socialism and prison are antagonistic terms."
At fret the idea that there will be no prisons in the socialist future sounds wild and utopian. But not all human societies in the past have had them, and under socialiem there will be no need for them either.
It is not only a matter of prisons, but of the whole "law enforcement" machine. The function of this machine-to oppress, brutalize, and terrorize-18 best symbolzed by the recent legalzanon of the death penalty in the United States. The whole machine will be swept away.
Product of class society Prisons and the rest of the machine are products of a specific kind of society-a society that is internally divided into different classes.
As long as there has been master and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and worker, there have been cops, courts, and prisons. But before class societyin the communities of American Indians before the Europeans came, for example-there repressive institutions of this kind.
Class society needs prisons, cops, and courts to keep the oppressed majority of the population from overthrowing the rule of the exploiting minority.
The kind of class societv repression to its highest pitch is modern capitalism, especially American capitalism. But it is not crime in general that is punished in the United States. It is the poor who get victimized. Especially if they happen to be young Blacks, wholeheartedly Chicanos.
soukal new avoroacnes Capitalism breeds crime. defective parts.
that has brought Puerto Ricans, or revolution.
overcoming this problem.
new social order name or class of its victims.
Trotsky's view they can do as they please."
Ending frustrations and uncertainties of daily life under capitalism will lay the basis for eliminating crimes of passion, alcoholism, drug addiction, and What then to do with the prisone?
I would raze them to the ground. Except for one or maybe a couple to be kept as museums.
There will, of course, still be antisocial behavior in the years immediately following a socialist But torturing people in prisons will not solve that problem-if nothing else, the experience of capital. ist societies has taught us that. We will have to devise more effective and humane methods for Finally, we will have to decide what to do with the small minority of unrepentant capitalists and their hangers-on. Some aren't likely to accept the What do we do about them? Lock them into Attica and let them rot? No. That's not the answer A socialist revolution will be made, in part, to do away with such sadistic revenge, not to change the Russian revolutionist Leon Trotsky wrote about this in a popular American magazine in 1935. "If America Should Go Communist was the name of the article in which Trotsky wrote:
"As to the comparatively few opponents of the [socialist] revolution, one can trust to American inventive genius. It may well be that you will take your unconvinced millionaires and send them to some picturesque island, rent-free for life, where