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

However, with the restructuring of capital we can also see the beginnings 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 alter behaviour, will come to be substituted by the ideology of control and consensus.

The enclosed space gives little guarantee 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", increasingly "special".

Physical annihilation will take the place of social orthopaedics in those cases. Prison will return 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 disappear 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 "violent" 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 the illusion that they are "participating" in the management of public affairs: in the programming of their own lives.

Social structures will all be based on participation 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 deliberately for the "excluded"; but at the same time there will be places for the privileged where instruction will be supplied at very high levels precisely 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 privilege will be elsewhere, closed in their "incomprehensibility" as far as the excluded are concerned.

In a society that is so deeply controlled, where the fundamental division into classes (between included and excluded) is camouflaged by a "participation" at all levels (parliamentary, trade unions, education, work, health, administration), it will no longer be possible to speak of repression in traditional terms.

[ Insurrection, Issue Four, May 1988, London, UK ]

Insurrectionary Anarchists of the Coast Salish Territories