Restitution And Incarceration in a Stateless Society

In a stateless society justice would be that which found restitution for an offence caused against another's property (property being in self or material possession). What form a restitution took would be for a free-market 'dispute arbitration service' (call that a common law court if you like) to establish. A 'court' could establish that, (if an offender was unable or unwilling to make sufficient restitution to compensate for the damage they caused to another's property), it was a legitimate act to capture (kidnap) and imprison (hold hostage) an offender until sufficient restitution was made.

Restitution should not take the form of just holding the offender against their will, imprisoning them, until a sufficient period has elapsed that the harm then cause to the offender's 'property in their self' was the equivalent to the harm they had originally caused in committing their offence. That is not restitution but rather it is only punishment or revenge.

Should it be apparent that an offender will evade making restitution if they are not incarcerated, it is a legitimate use of force to 'hold them hostage'. This is because it is legitimate to use force in defence of self and in defence of physical property. It is, therefore, legitimate to use force when seeking restitution for harm caused to property because, until restitution has been made, the offence against another's property is still present and ongoing.

An incarcerated offender should be given every practical opportunity to be able to make due restitution though they cannot legitimately be directly forced to do so. The offender has to make the decision, come to the understanding, that to end their incarceration they have to make the restitution found due. This is not a process of prison slave labour but rather just a process of prison labour in order to robustly ensure offenders will, and are able to, make restitution.

Such an internment could be paid for without having a 'state' that takes money from the public via taxation to pay for prisons and there are many possible mechanisms that could provide such a service, for example if offenders were incarcerated (and we trust helped where possible to get on the 'right track') policing and insurance providers could see economies in their operational costs.

Victims of property offensives could also wish to fund an offender's incarceration and, if they did, clearly it would be in the victim's interest that their offender was willing to work, at least sufficiently, to cover the costs of their time 'inside'. This would require a replicable understanding between victim and offender where perhaps an offender could enjoy better conditions and more freedoms if they agreed to such an arraignment.

Whilst thinking through such scenarios I was interested, and amused, to realise that the treatment of such an incarcerated offender, to encourage them to be willingly productive, is not so very different to the optimum management of a human tax-payer resource (the human herd of tax-cattle) in 'the state', (the modern nation-state tax-farms).

Crime and Incarceration In a Stateless Society

At the core of 'the state' is the coercive threat and use of violent force. If 'the state' did not reserve for itself the use of force it would fail. In general people may appear to willingly comply with the requirements of the state but that is either because:

* they would act in that way regardless, (they would generally not want to transgress against other people's property), or
* they would act in a different way to the edicts of 'the state' but do not because of the prospective repercussions, or
* they believe it is moral to comply with the edicts of 'the state'.

'The state' is central to, sets the tone of, modern human society in great part. Because people individually agree that employing the use of force is only moral in defence of self and property and agree that groups of people have no more right to employ force than they do individually, there is an unanswered dichotomy, a dissonance, between the circumstances when an individual can morally use force and when 'the state' makes use of it. There is no moral justification for 'the state' to use force outside of those same perimeters of an individual's moral legitimacy.

When 'the state' employs morally illegitimate violent force it attempts to set itself apart from human morality and instead endows itself with a false morality to break this code. Without violent force at its disposal 'the state' ends. 'The state' is nothing without the use of violent force. 'The state' is nothing but violent force. 'The state' is violence.

This violence, which is 'the state', is the cause of enormous harm that runs through human society as a virus. 'The state' breaks the moral code that is the foundation upon which a harmonious human society should be founded. The overall effect of this violence at the core of 'the state' is that the infection spreads through human society and especially manifests in weak points within the social order.

So how would a stateless society deal with crime? In a fully functional stateless human society crime would be vastly reduced as a result of having taken the use of faux legitimated violence out of the core of society. There would still be crime one can suppose, human nature remains and part of that may be for some to still act immorally, against others and their property, if they can get away with it. So assuming there would remain some crime in a stateless society it would need to be dealt with or the immoral people would simply be unconstrained and encouraged.

The lesson to be understood when accepting the utility of a stateless human society is that: answers to every supposed problem are possible to find and then develop. All the people working toward finding resolutions to the needs of society will develop a plethora of solutions and the best of those will rapidly be widely employed. Further, attempting to predict what these solutions will be is as ridiculous, and likely as inaccurate, as it would have been attempting to describe how society and the economy would appear and function after the abolition of slavery. Slavery was not ceased because a 'slavery-free' future was planed and understood in detail but because the immorality of slavery demanded it was made to end. So it must be demanded that 'the violent state' is made to end too.

I do have many ideas of cause as to how free-market policing and justice would take place in a system offering a level of service and accessibility clearly unobtainable when these functions of human society are usurped and monopolised by 'the state'. I too have ideas for what would replace 'the state' operated penal system. The focus of that would greatly depend on what the free-market demanded and what the free-market judicial system could legitimately find legally sound and therefore moral.

I suppose when people cannot be made, by the threat of violent force, to pay to incarcerate offenders there will be a very different criteria emerge as to what is realistically desirable, such as cost-effective achievable goals for reform, deeper psychoanalytical understanding, life-retraining and so on. People who had to be removed from society because of the danger they presented would need to also be accommodated within a system, but clearly; being faced with an entire population entitled to carry whatsoever means of protection they felt prudent the population of hardened criminals would soon reduce to manageable numbers too.

Holding us as prisoners to taxation

Rt Hon Peter Bone MP

Dear Mr Bone,


Re: Sudden and imminent closure of Wellingborough Prison

As a local to the area I have seen, over the last twenty years, what appears to have been an enormous amount of expansion and development work at Wellingborough Prison with the buildings appear to double in size.

Sir David Ramsbotham HM Chief Inspector of Prisons report dated September 2000 states the facilities included a recently built kitchen (catering for over 500 prisoners plus staff) and in June 1999, two substantial new living units had been built.

The facility, from afar, appears modern and in impressive repair. There must be a very considerable investment of tax-payer's money represented by this facility.

I do not specifically object to private prisons.  I object to the government monopolising the judicial and prison market, demanding I pay taxation by the threat of violent force, squandering the money on such services as the development of prisons only to abandon them even when they appear to be functioning reasonably and then subcontracting the provision of that service, still funded with money obtained via forced taxation, to profit making organisations.

If the government is in agreement with my belief that market-forces should be a better mechanism to provide all services with efficiency, could we not simply cut-out the middle-man and do away with the involvement of the state in all matters that require involuntary taxation.  That will then allow market-forces to function without the distorting effect and ultimate failure the involvement of the state always causes.

Yours sincerely

EUbrainwashing