this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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How do we deal with them now? Do the police catch murderers, rapists, robbers and thieves? Even in the cases when they can, how often do they take the case?
You should look into whether these institutions work in the way they claim they do first. Some places are better and others are worse, but their main function is to be the running dogs of capital, not protecting the people. That's why they excell at the former and are a net negative at the latter.
So what do we do under socialism with criminals?
:gulag: if absolutely necessary
I feel you're looking at crime as a fact, and while it's true that eradicating crime 100% isn't feasible, a bare minimum if prosperity and stability goes a long way.
Let's take a historical perspective. In times before capitalism, i.e. when the main source of value was still agriculture instead of production, there was no police. There were armies, and they were used to combat crime that was against the interests of landowners, e.g. banditry and revolts, but there were no brigades of armed men "solving" individual crimes. How exactly individual crimes were dealt with changes from place to place, often there'd be an adjudicator figure who'd hear complaints, conduct some sort of an investigation and meet out a punishment.
Mind you, this isn't me saying we'll make utopia with 0 crime or that a justice system is all bad, even if the capitalist understanding of separation of powers always creates perverse incentives. The separarion of police/prosecution/judiciary serves as sieves that filter through the interests of capital while blocking the interests of the people. That's only a small part of the ewuation though. Most crime has some economic ties, from petty crimes committed due to hardship and organised crimes that capitalist system create room to exist. And of the crimes that don't have a direct economic link, most will have a mental health basis, some being unresolved illnesses and other actually caused by the mental stresses of participating in capitalist society. These can be resolved in a system level, and suddenly (it won't be sudden) most of the criminals we ought to deal with don't even exist.
You'll have to forgive me for not actually answering the question. It accept the liberal framing of needing to protect people from themselves, and even the transitionary stage of socialism after a point won't need to protect the people from what capitalism makes of them.
Some things might not be crimes anymore by treating addicts as patients with disease instead of criminals. If we reduce income inequality, there will less incentive to steal. If we implement a system to reduce recitivism of criminal activity that happens by inertia of people's old habits we can hire and train many social workers to fully integrate these people into society. Those that will not reform or just are too dangerous will still be put into a form of prison to isolate them from endangering others. Those are for people of burgerland, I'm not sure what security concerns other countries might have.
Oh yea we'll need a proletarian force of people that is capable of taking out one single gunman shooting up a bunch of children, a very low bar for American communists to measurably surpass.