“LAW AND AUTHORITY”

Peter Kropotkin (1898)

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If one studies the millions of laws that rule humanity, one can easily see that they are divisible into three main categories: the protection of property, protection of government, protection of persons.  And in analyzing these three categories one comes to the same conclusion regarding each of them: the uselessness and harmfulness of the law.

                […] the greater part of our laws – the civil codes of all countries – have no other object than to maintain this appropriation, this monopoly to the profit of a few against the whole of humanity.  Three-quarters of the cases judged by the tribunals are merely quarrels that have cropped up among monopolists, two robbers quarreling over the booty.  And a great part of our criminal laws have the same aim, since their object is to keep the worker in a position subordinate to the employer, to assure to one the exploitation of the other.

                […] when we consider the so-called ‘crimes’, the attacks against the persons, it is well known that two-thirds or even three-quarters of them are inspired by the desire to lay hold of somebody’s wealth.  That immense category of so-called ‘crimes and misdemeanours’ would disappear on the day private property ceased to exist.

                ‘But’, we shall be told, ‘there will still be the brutes who make attempts on the lives of citizens, who strike with the knife in every quarrel, who avenge the least offence by murder, if there are not laws to restrain them and punishments to hold them back.’  This is the refrain that has been sung to us ever since we expressed doubt of society’s right to punish.  Yet one fact has been clearly established: the severity of punishments in no way diminishes the number of crimes.  You can hang, draw and quarter the murderers as much as you like, but the number of murders will not diminish.  On the other hand, if you abolish the death penalty there will not be a single murder more.  Statisticians and legists know that when the severity of the penal code is lessened there is never an increase in the number of attempts against the lives of citizens.  On the other hand, when the crops are abundant, when bread is cheap and the weather is good, the number of murders decreases at once.  It is proved by statistics that the number of crimes increases and declines in relation to the price of necessities and to good or bad weather.  Not that all murders are inspired by hunger.  Far from it; but when the harvests are good and necessities are affordably priced, people are happy and less wretched than usual, and they do not let themselves be led away by dark passions that tempt them to stick knives into the chests of their neighbours for futile reasons.

                Besides, it is well known that fear of punishment has not halted a single murderer.  Whoever is about to kill his neighbour for vengeance or poverty does not reflect a great deal on the consequences; there has never been a murderer who lacked the firm conviction that he would escape from prosecution.  Let anyone think about this subject, let him analyze crimes and punishments, their motives and consequences, and if he knows how to reason without letting himself be influenced by preconceived ideas, he is bound to reach this conclusion:

                ‘Without considering a society where people will receive a better education, where the development of all their faculties and the possibility of using them will give men and women so much pleasure that they would not risk it all by indulging in murder, without considering that future society, and taking into account only our present society, with the sad products of poverty we see everywhere in the low taverns of the cities, the number of murders would not increase in any way if one day it were decided that no punishment be inflicted on murderers; indeed it is very likely there would be a fall in the number of cases involving recidivists, brutalized in the prisons.’

                We are told constantly of the benefits of the law and of the salutary effects of punishment.  But has anyone ever tried to establish a balance between the benefits that are attributed to the law and its penalties, and the degrading effect of those penalties on humanity.  […] You need only to go into prisons and observe there what the man who is deprived of liberty and thrust among other depraved beings permeated with all the corruption and vice that breed in our prisons today, to realize that the more they are ‘reformed’, the more detestable the prisons become, our modern and model penitentiaries being a hundred times more corrupting than the dungeons of the Middle Ages.  Finally, you need only consider what corruption and deprivation of the mind is generated among humankind by these ideas of obedience (essence of the law), of punishment, of authority having the right to punish and judge apart from the urgings of conscience, by all the functions of executioners, jailers and informers – in brief by all that immense apparatus of law and authority.  You have only to consider all that, and you will certainly be in agreement with us, when we say that law and its penalties are abominations that should cease to exist. […]

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