Someone asked: Well, if we don’t have prisons, what should we do with those who can’t be helped?

My reply (I think the last paragraph is really important):

It’s a reasonable concern. One answer is a social system where people can embody meaningful roles in an endless array of social and economic contexts. Jobs are a terrible substitute for this. The problem is that our cultures are so malformed that they »have to produce criminals as a symptom of what’s missing… and we cannot place the blame firmly on the criminals… for reasons that vary from the necessity of symptoms like this in a broken system… to the fact that punishment is nearly useless in resolving them.

So one answer is that we establish a society where people know and depend upon each other, have a vast array of meaningful roles and relationships that produce value in their lives, and are actually supported as families and individuals by each of the levels of community from personal to international. We have to go after the causes… not the results… and until we are willing to do this… the symptoms »must continue and worsen as the crisis of ‘the missing community’ continues to expand and mutate into new forms.

As to ‘what we do’ with those ‘who cannot be helped’, we should probably first ascertain why… in each case… and realize that each person is unique… rather than just an instance of a class… those who cannot be helped (a class, not a person or people) represent the greatest challenges… but also the greatest opportunity to understand their origins… what made them this way, and respond intelligently. I think they also call us to a higher, rather than a lower standard of relation… to establish contexts in which they, too, may lead meaningful and transformative roles, to whatever degree is possible… and we can work together to make that degree greater and more human.

I would turn this question around though: what shall we do with cultures that cannot be helped, are inhuman, and produce criminals endlessly as a symptom of their disease-like character and contexts? That’s the important question here… since I see these cultures as necessarily producing criminals the same way cancer metastatizes….