For breaking with the fantasies surrounding crimes and penalties

Abstract

From the understanding of the relativity of the substantial concept of crime and its functionality for the maintenance and reproduction of structures of domination, from the understanding of the irrationality of punishment and its instrumentalization for the exercise of power, the critique of the criminal system emerges, of its selectivity and injustice, of the perverse illusions and fantasies that feed it, of its dangerous expansion in the social formations of post-industrial capitalism. This critique, by making understood the negative character of punitive reaction, leads to the affirmation of the need for an urgent and immediate containment of the State's power to punish, of an effective rescue, of a penal order consistent with its essentially minimal nature, as first and indispensable steps on a path leading to the rupture with feelings of revenge and guilt, with the Manichaeism that divides people between good and bad, with the desire for punishment and the search for scapegoats, thus being able to lead to a future abolition of the criminal system.