"Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?"
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Kropotkin doesn’t argue about prisons so much as indict them, loading the sentence with the kind of moral certainty that reads less like policy critique than an exposure of fraud. The line is built on a rhetorical trap: once you accept his premises - prisons “kill all will,” “force” character into submission, and concentrate vice - the closing question lands as an accusation. “Universities of crime” is the master stroke, a metaphor that turns the state’s proud institutions of reform into training grounds, complete with curriculum and credentials. It’s sarcastic without being jokey: the phrase borrows the prestige of education to show how systematically prisons produce the very thing they claim to prevent.
The specific intent is to flip the standard narrative. Instead of criminality causing imprisonment, imprisonment becomes an engine of criminality. Kropotkin is writing as a revolutionary anarchist who sees state power not as a neutral referee but as a machinery that manufactures obedience and disposability. The subtext is that incarceration doesn’t just punish individuals; it reorganizes social life around coercion, stripping people of agency, then acting surprised when they return hardened, networked, and alienated.
Context matters: late-19th-century Europe was deep into the modern penitentiary experiment, with reformers promising moral improvement through isolation, discipline, and labor. Kropotkin’s jab is that this “improvement” is a lie told by bureaucracies that need prisons to justify themselves. If prison is a university, the state is the dean.
The specific intent is to flip the standard narrative. Instead of criminality causing imprisonment, imprisonment becomes an engine of criminality. Kropotkin is writing as a revolutionary anarchist who sees state power not as a neutral referee but as a machinery that manufactures obedience and disposability. The subtext is that incarceration doesn’t just punish individuals; it reorganizes social life around coercion, stripping people of agency, then acting surprised when they return hardened, networked, and alienated.
Context matters: late-19th-century Europe was deep into the modern penitentiary experiment, with reformers promising moral improvement through isolation, discipline, and labor. Kropotkin’s jab is that this “improvement” is a lie told by bureaucracies that need prisons to justify themselves. If prison is a university, the state is the dean.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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