PRISON
As anarchists we are against all prisons. Mass breakouts, individual escapes, attacks on prisons under construction, counter-information, are some of the struggles that some from this area of ultimate restraint by capital and the State.

However, with the restructuring of capital we can also see the beginning of what will be a vast restructuring of prison as it manifests itself today. The prison of the future will extend over the whole territory. Old ideas of social correction when it was believed that detention would after behaviour, will come to be substututed by the ideology of control and consensus.
The enclosed space gives little guarentee of control. Apart from increasing social tension the traditional type of prison is becoming more and more contradictory and expensive.
Easier to build a wall around the dominant class. Not a brick wall but a wall of “diversity”: diversity of language, values, perspective, culture, etc.
It won’t be easy to scale this wall. As for the irreducibles, those who continue to show signs of danger for the State’s plans of control, there will always be the traditional prisons, increasingly isolated, increasingly “super”, and increasingly “special”.
Physical annihilation will take the place of social orthopaedics in those cases. Prison will return to its old role of being a rational system for securing the death of the prisoner in the shortest possible time. The illusions of the Enlightenment will dissapear for ever.
But apart from this minority of irreducibles, what interests Power is the control of the great mass of exploited. And this control will necessarily come about in a “consensual” way, not in an “obligatory” or ” violently” contradictory way.
The first objective to be reached therefore will be that of “participation”. The greatest number of people will be enclosed in a project of “recuperation” at all levels. They will have ther illusion that they are “participing” in the management of public affairs: in the programming of their own lives.
Social structures will all be based on participing while at the same time a small part of them will be kept secret and function with anything but participatory aims.
Production will undoubtedly be made easier, with lighter shifts, but a net separation will come about between the “included” who give orders and the “excluded” who will have to carry them out.
Education will come about through mass schooling which will perfect the mechanism of “exclusion”, supplying a reduced language and a constructed culture deliberatly for the “excluded”, supplying a reduced language and a constructed culture deliberatly for the “excluded”: but at the same time there will be places for the privileged where instruction will be supplied at very high levels presilely to make the continuation of the division into classes possible.
From the urbanistic point of view the life of the city will also be restructured by breaking up the ghetto areas and replacing them with dormitory suburbs, “social dispersion” where people manage their own alienation. The classes of privileged will be elsewhere, closed in their “incomprehensibility” as far as the excluded are concerned.
In a society that is so deepply controlled, where the fundamental division into classes (between included and excluded) is camouflaged by a ” participation” at all levels (parliamentary, trade union, education, work, health, administration), it will no longer be possible to speak of repression in traditional terms.

–(text extract from ” INSURRECTION” anarchist magazine, issue 4, may 1988)