PRISONS by Kropotkin

The prison does NOT prevent anti-social acts from taking place. It increases their numbers. It does not improve those who enter its walls. However it is reformed it will always remain a place of restraint, an artificial environment, like a monastery, which will make the prisoner less and less fit for life in the community.

It does NOT achieve its end. It DEGRADES society. It must disappear. It is a survival of barbarism mixed with Jesuitical philanthropy.


In prisons as in monasteries, everything is done to kill a person's will.

He generally has no choice between one of two acts. The rare occasions on which he can exercise his will are very brief. His whole life is regulated and ordered in advance. He has only to swim with the current, to obey under pain of severe punishment.

(the 6 restraining positions)

Under these conditions all the will power that he may have had on entering disappears.

And where will he find the strength with which to resist the temptations which will arise before him, as if by magic, when he is free-of the prison walls? Where will he find the strength to resist the first impulse to a passionate outbreak, if during several years everything was done to kill this inner strength, to make him a docile tool in the hands of those who control him?

This fact is, according to my mind, the most terrible condemnation of the whole penal system based on the deprivation of individual liberty.

Anti-social acts need NOT be feared in a society of equals.....

.....in the midst of a FREE people, all of whom have acquired a healthy education and the habit of mutually aiding one another. The greater number of these acts will no longer have any raison d’être. The others will be nipped in the bud.

As for those individuals with evil tendencies whom existing society will pass on to us after the revolution, it will be our task to prevent their exercising these tendencies. This is already accomplished quite efficiently by the solidarity of all the members of the community against such aggressors. If we do not succeed in all cases, the only practical corrective still will be fraternal treatment and MORAL SUPPORT.


This is not Utopia. It is already done by isolated individuals and it will become the general practice. And such means will be far more powerful to protect society from anti-social acts than the existing system of punishment which is an ever fertile source of new crimes.

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The first duty of the revolution will be to ABOLISH prisons — those monuments of human hypocrisy and COWARDICE !!!

(Artwork produced by a young offender in Feltham)