From the fall of the Bastille in 1789, which actually released only seven prisoners, to the death of Stalin in 1953, which slowly liberated millions, the anarchists, through personal experience, provided an impressive literature on the defects of the penal system. Kropotkin’s first book was his account of his experiences In Russian and French Prisons (1887), and Alexander Berkman’s was his Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912).

It was Kropotkin who first used the phrase ‘prisons are the universities of crime’, and his observation remains true in the sense that the first imprisonment of any offender becomes a guarantee that he, like the people with whom he shares a cell, will learn in jail a long series of more sophisticated criminal techniques than the petty larceny that started off his prison career. Kropotkin claimed in 1886 that a society built around cooperation rather than competition would, for that very reason, suffer less from antisocial activity. He argued that

Peoples without political organization, and therefore less depraved than ourselves, have perfectly understood that the man who is called ‘criminal’ is simply unfortunate; that the remedy is not to flog him, to chain him up, or to kill him on the scaffold or in prison, but to help him by the most brotherly care, by treatment based on equality, by the usages of life among honest men.

It could be claimed that the best service the British and American governments in the two world wars of the 20th century could have provided to the cause of penal reform was the imprisonment of war-resisters. The jailed objectors, beyond the appalling hardships that befell some of them in the First World War, had several important attributes. They tended to be literate people and keen observers of their surroundings and of their fellow prisoners. They also had a useful sense of moral superiority over their jailers, seeing the humiliations they suffered as a reflection, not of their own situation, but of that of the good citizens who had chosen to incarcerate them.

These observers recognized and publicized what a handful of 19th-century reformers had already pointed out: that many of their fellow prisoners, serving the current prison sentence for a lifetime career of petty theft, petty violence, drug-dealing, or drunken idiocy, came from a background that made their offenses and incarceration almost inevitable. Many of us, learning the cost to the citizen of keeping any individual in jail, and realizing that it is far more than our own incomes, could fervently wish that we had taken heed of the warnings of the penal reformers, who had sought to draw our attention to the common factors in the lives of the people we imprison. Frequently, for example, inmates have a background of institutional childhood, of mental instability, or of educational failure. They are also, overwhelmingly, male.

Recognition of these factors was one of the influences at the end of the 19th century leading to the establishment in both Britain and America of the probation service, in which, as an alternative to prison, a probation officer was charged with the task of becoming the friend and adviser of the offender, and with helping him to lead a normal working and family life. Through much of the 20th century there was a slow humanization of the penal system, so far as this was possible, inspired by the reformers who had been inmates and observers in the war years, despite frequent opposition from the staff of penal establishments.

Practitioners of various therapeutic approaches gained access, sporadically, to the penal system, with the support of some prison governors, with significant results. They urged the prison staff that their own status and job satisfaction would be enhanced if their work was perceived as curative rather than custodial. Many anarchists were skeptical about these efforts to civilize the penal system, and so, of course, was the popular press, which regularly described open prisons as holiday camps (revealing their journalists’ ignorance of both). In the decades following the Second World War, many countries witnessed a steady decline in the prison population. (Notable exceptions were the Soviet Union and the nations whose governments it influenced.) David Cayley explained that

The Netherlands set the standard, bringing a rate of 90 prisoners per 100,000 of population after the war down to a remarkable 17 per 100,000 in 1975 . . . Reductions in imprisonment had been brought about by what Dutch criminologist Willem de Haan once called the ‘politics of bad conscience.’

But from the late 1970s onwards, the politics of bad conscience were replaced by the contrasting approach described by the criminologist Andrew Rutherford as ‘a politics of good conscience about imprisonment’. Criminal statistics are notoriously difficult to interpret, because they reflect simply the number of arrests for a range of offenses that any police force is expected to record. But penal statistics are readily available and tell a terrifying story. David Cayley reported in 1998 that

To help house the 1.5 million Americans currently in prison, 168 new state prisons and 45 new federal prisons were built between 1990 and 1995 alone, but these were still not enough to accommodate the numbers of new prisoners . . . The United States has now exposed so many of its citizens – especially its Black and Hispanic citizens – to the brutalizing effects of its prisons that a self-fulfilling prophecy has been set in motion. The more Americans who are manhandled by the criminal justice system, the more there are whose behavior seems to justify and demand this treatment.

By the year 2000, prisons in the United States had received their two-millionth inmate. The sociologist David Downes remarked at a conference on crime at New York University that no other nation in history has ever put a bigger proportion of its citizens in jail. The judicial system also ensures that African-American men have a 1 in 4 chance of going to prison during their lifetimes, while the chance is 1 in 23 for their white fellow citizens. Professor Downes was asked whether Europe would be affected by the American example. He replied that ‘The components of a steep rise in imprisonment in Europe have already been assembled.’ His answer was correct, and Britain leads Europe in the proportion of its citizens that it incarcerates. Alternative approaches, shared by the anarchists with other penal reformers, have been rejected by the politicians and their public. This does not persuade reformers to change their opinions, but merely to await an eventual shift in public attitudes.

There is just one field of law-breaking and law-enforcement in which a policy of decriminalization is gaining advocates, and which would greatly reduce the prison population. This concerns the imprisonment of drug users and drug traders. Everyone agrees this policy is an expensive failure that, as David Cayley observes, ‘has fostered evils far worse than those it was supposed to eliminate’. It has the additional irony that many users find the drugs of their choice are more easily available inside prison than on the outside. Here it is worth noting the opinions of the anarchist Errico Malatesta, as far back as 1922, long before our parents or grandparents imagined that we had a drug problem.

<strong> It is the old mistake of legislators, in spite of experience invariably showing that laws, however barbarous they may be, have never served to suppress vise or to discourage delinquency. The more severe the penalties imposed on the consumers and traffickers of cocaine, the greater will be the attractions of forbidden fruits and the fascination of the risks incurred by the consumer, and the greater will be the profits made by the speculators, avid for money.

It is useless, therefore, to hope for anything from the law. We must suggest another solution. Make the use and sale of cocaine free from restrictions, and open kiosks where it would be sold at cost price or even under cost. And then launch a great propaganda campaign to explain to the public, and let them see for themselves, the evils of cocaine; no one would engage in counter-propaganda because no one could exploit the misfortune of addicts.

Certainly the harmful use of cocaine would not disappear completely, because the social causes which create and drive those poor devils to the use of drugs would still exist. But in any case the evil would decrease, because nobody could make profits out of its sale, and nobody could speculate on the hunt for speculators. And for this reason our suggestion either will not be taken into account, or it will be considered impractical and mad. Yet intelligent and disinterested people might say to themselves: Since the penal laws have proved to be impotent, would it not be a good thing, as an experiment, to try out the anarchist method? </strong>

Errico Malatesta in Umanità Nova, 2 September 1920,
reprinted in V. Richards (ed.), Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas
(London: Freedom Press, 1965)

In two European cities, Zurich and Amsterdam, local authorities have boldly sought to implement such a policy, and in Britain, by the beginning of the 21st century, at least two chief constables have expressed a similar point of view, earning sensational headlines but little practical support.

Politicians of the major parties in Britain won popular acclaim with rhetoric about giving offenders a ‘short, sharp shock’ or sending them to ‘Boot Camps’, and by circumscribing the efforts of the probation service to keep released offenders out of jail. Even the staccato, single-syllable language of these programs indicates that the intention was not to cope with the problem of crime but to satisfy the headline-writers of the popular press, the real determinants of penal policy. In the United States, the Republican Party’s electoral success is seen to be related to its ability to portray its opponents as ‘soft on crime’.

Meanwhile, suicides grew among young prisoners jailed for offenses that were a nuisance, rather than a threat, to society. Moreover, it is perfectly obvious that prison does nothing to reduce the crime rate. As Lord Waddington, Home Secretary to Margaret Thatcher, put it, ‘Prison is a very expensive way of making bad men worse’. Even the politicians no longer believe in the policies they administer. This is hardly surprising when you consider the statistics. In 2003 it was reported that 84% of young people released from custodial sentences in Britain rapidly reoffend. Figures from the United States would exceed this record.

But the issues raised by the anarchists, among the ranks of the penal reformers, will not disappear. They are made more intractable by society’s assumptions, as manipulated by the popular press.

Another crucial question, which arose early in the history of anarchism, concerned its application to the world of work, especially since the anarchist pioneers tended to have links with the emerging trade union movement. They identified with the radical end of the union spectrum, proclaiming anarcho-syndicalism (from the French syndicat, meaning union), which saw every local industrial struggle as a step towards a general strike, when the collapse of capitalism would lead to a take-over by the workers.

In France the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and in Spain the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) became large-scale mass movements, as, for a time, did the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the United States. There were, of course, inbuilt conflicts within syndicalist unions, between those members who were willing to fight and sometimes win little local battles over small issues, and the militants who hoped to turn every small dispute into the final struggle to seize control of the means of production and thus ‘expropriate the expropriators’, continuing production under workers’ control.

But the fading away of the aim of liberating work has little to do with the gulf between reformers and revolutionaries in the workers’ organizations. It has a far closer connection with the new, ultimate weapon in the hands of employers against the claims of workers: ‘accept our conditions or we will transfer our activities and your jobs to South-east Asia or Latin America, where the labor force will be delighted to work on our terms.’ The owners of capital remain in the rich world, but the providers of labor are now in the developing world, and if they should demand a larger share of the products of their work, the employers simply shift to a cheaper labor force in another country.

Meanwhile, the rich world has a concealed labor force of its own. Agricultural work in the picking and packing of fruit and vegetables is undertaken by gang-masters with their teams of illegal immigrants, East European public employes waiting for wages in their own countries, students, and migrants. Another underclass copes with telephone and Internet inquiries, operating in call centers from provincial Britain to Bangalore in India.

11. Liberating work: the community workshop, as envisaged by Clifford Harper.

A century ago, the ‘new unionism’ in Britain and the IWW in America set about organizing and representing the unskilled and uncounted workers on the fringes of the official economy, and succeeded. At the same time, the anarchist Kropotkin was addressing a British audience which assumed that Britain was the workshop of the world, and that for ever more the whole globe would depend on textiles from Lancashire, coal from Newcastle, and ships from the Clyde. In 1899, when he wrote his Fields, Factories and Workshops, one of his aims was to demonstrate that, while the politicians and economists thought in terms of vast factories, the greater part of industrial production was actually carried out in small workshops and little local enterprises. Electricity and modern transport had decentralized production, and Kropotkin urged that this liberated not only the location of work but the individual’s choice of occupation. It was now possible to combine brain work and manual work, which was his industrial ideal.

Anarchists are seldom to be found in the diminishing world of career employment in formal industry or bureaucracy. They tend to find their niche in the informal or small-scale economy. This is not surprising, since industrial psychologists frequently report that satisfaction in work is directly related to the ‘span of autonomy’ it offers, meaning the amount of the working day or week in which the workers are free to make their own decisions. In this post-industrial world of work, the only serious study of the small businessman finds him to be not a Thatcherite hero, but a creative rebel against the compulsion to be either an employer or an employee. Paul Thompson reports that

It turns out that far from being an especially purposeful breed of men, Samuel Smiles’ heroes a hundred years on, many small businessmen are closer to a kind of drop-out. They disliked the whole modern capitalist ethic, and especially being employed by others; instead they preferred to feel the satisfaction of providing a ‘service’ and ‘doing a good job’. Quite often it was a mere chance that allowed them to find their present vocation. Moreover, they will not provide the basis for our next industrial revolution, because they don’t want to expand: that would imply employing people and losing the personal relationships they like to have with a small number of workers.

Findings like these are far from the expectations of the anarcho-syndicalists, who envisaged a triumphant take-over of the factory by its workers, but they indicate clearly that anarchist aspirations are close to the dreams of vast numbers of citizens who feel trapped by the culture of employment.