Can police or some form of community protection exist in your ideal anarchist society? What about jails?

Question

There's no blueprint for an anarchist society—that's part of the beauty of it. Each one of us may or may not have a vision of how they perceive an anarchist society would work out. Does anybody see a use for police, neighborhood watch, etc for a society with no laws? As pointed out in other questions here, no laws doesn't necessarily mean no rules. If someone is driving drunk through a community, what are some ideas as to how the community should stop the danger, and possibly enforce that the person doesn't drive drunk in the community again? Should the community even enforce it? Jails deny freedom to individuals, but do you think it's acceptable to imprison someone such as a serial killer or rapist or someone else considered a "danger" to the community?

Comments

many people use the word "community" like a magic sword: it binds some wounds, and causes others.
if you have to use the word at all (could be more helpful not to for a while, see if it sharpens conversations) a community is a group of people who have some ties to each other.
in an anarchist society, where you would not be punished for looking out for yourself (and in fact were expected to do so), how would you and your neighbors and friends address someone who was (or seemed) dangerous? how would it change if you were friends with the person? or were friends with the family of the person?


by the time the conversation is about words like "police", "serial rapist", and yes, "community", usually the interesting parts of the question/conversation have been bypassed or taken for granted.

Answer 1

Since you ask about "your" ideal anarchist society, I'll answer this question personally, with the understanding that no one assumes this to be a standard or majority anarchist answer.

Hopefully all anarchists would agree that there would be no police or jails (although no doubt there are some who do not). To get more specific, I would prefer to leave the ruins of a couple jails so anyone can wander through them, peer into the few remaining cells, and shiver at the brutality of a society that forced people to live inside them.

I agree with dot that the term "community" needs to be problematized. I do not think that any of us currently have communities, and contemporary forms of responding to harm based on "community accountability" strike me as, at best, an optimistic euphemism, and at worst, a total sham and power play.

In the future community I imagine, in which people are socially and materially interdependent but also as mobile as they choose, the community would sure as shortcake defend itself. We would have the recent, shared memory of banding together to overthrow the government and defeat the very worst psychopaths imaginable (cops, politicians, landlords, etc.) We would still have our guns and our determination to never be ruled again, and I seriously doubt we would be vulnerable, even with the absence of any specialized protection service.

Forms of harm that arise within this community would be dealt with chaotically, by different people in different ways, some offering support, some trying to mediate, some criticizing and pressuring those they see as wrong to change their ways, some breaking connections, and some taking revenge. This is what anthropologists refer to as "diffuse sanctions." The question as to whether this "works" cannot be taken seriously, as it is the most common method in human history. The question for anarchists would be, is this what we want?

As for the truly gruesome acts that are today punished as major crimes, I think it should be said that it is a much healthier dynamic if someone reacts from the gut and kills the other person as an act of vengeance, triggering more conflict in the community as to whether or not that was really okay, than to force everyone to agree on one sanction for the offender, and hide behind a curtain of social legitimacy, excusing in advance as "justice" whatever brutal punishment is agreed upon. The practice of justice is much more oppressive than the outrages committed by people taking things into their own hands.

And no, societies lacking a centralized mechanism of deciding on and dispensing justice did not fall apart in internecine warfare and feuding, so please avoid that Hobbesian fantasy.