Vengeance is not the point; change is. But the trouble is that in most people's minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing the enemy coincide.
From Barbara Deming
Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try - by punishing the troublesome - to deter others. No doubt, in certain instances this deterrence actually works. But generally speaking it fails conspicuously.
Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.
After the revolution, it might very well remain necessary to place people where they could not do harm to others. But the one under restraint should be cut off from the rest of society as little as possible.
After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist - if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.
All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.
I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision... is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive.
Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.
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