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).