why cant he be a screw and a socialist, is there something wrong with locking up rapists and child molesters?

I'm sick and tired of people saying that just because you're a prison officer you're right wing. I had three gold brooches for the amount of prison officers I have recruited to the Labour Party. I'm sad at having to leave the Labour Party but I couldn't stay in it with Jack Straw being politically dishonest to me.

I have respect for some Labour politicians and I have lots of friends in the Labour Party. Lots of my executive are still members of the Labour Party.

But being the general secretary of a union means you get face to face with people and you can ask questions that others can't. I asked questions and got waffle when I expected to be treated with respect and given honest answers.

I left a meeting at our conference with Jack Straw and made a presentation to him of a decanter from the POA to say thank you for coming to the conference. I also gave him a book entitled The Right To Strike and I said: "I've got you a third gift. You can have my Labour Party card after being a Labour Party member for 40-odd years."

I got a standing ovation.

He asked me what I was going to do now politically. I said I'll join the workers' party.

He did say that his father had been locked up for being a conscientious objector. I asked him what the founding fathers of the Labour Party would think of him now - fighting illegal wars and privatising prisons. I got a standing ovation for that as well.

So we should have no jails in your socialist utopia. We should just allow criminals to terrorise everyone. Prisons are a necessity as long as there is crime. And you will never reach a society where there is zero crime. So prison officers will be a necessity for a very long time to come.

Prison officers are the same as police. They enforce repression on working class people. How many women are in places like hollaway due to debt and poverty? How many men or children are being locked up due to the lack of opportunities that some in our class get. They are there because of the class system because of capitalism it is irrespective if there are some people in prison for rape or murder. The main purpose of prisons in a capitalist society is to discipline and repression.

But it the SP really a revolutionary party or just another fake one?

.. that the cowards over at libcom will be voting socialist party next time

Erm, just a reminder. This is IndyMedia not the Labour party.

Fuck off and recruit elsewhere. You warmongering murdering c @%$ s.

Do you think anybody here gives a flying rats arse about socialism. Like fuck do we.

Accepting Caton into membership is only the logical conclusion of the SP's "workers in uniform" nonsense (see  http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no30/no30-Screws_out_PCS.html) and their fawning over Caton as some kind of semi-socialist (now the full-blown thing it would seem) at last years "Socialism".

true it'll alienate the working class, but it won't alienate the middle class worker fetishists who make up the vast majority of political organisations of radical left and revolutionary vanguard. Including the internet anarchist nutters.

many people in prison due to reason beyond poverty or class. The survival of the fittest system we live in does promote crime, there is no morality in business being a motto of many CEO's.
Having been forced to live with & near criminals for over a decade I can say yes we do need prisons still, not universities of crime as they are today, but correctional & educational centres. In a real democracy without massive inequality in justice & theft, there would obviously be alot less theft.
Unfortunately it was the Marxists who almost destroyed the idea of communism & similar hopes with the Soviet Union with Lenin who literally got into power with a deal with the Kaiser that gave the Kaiser millions of people & the best land in eastern europe that didnt belong to either of them& then Stalin tookover.
Anarchists mainly in the Ukraine threw off these deals & were the major factor in stopping the western & White armies using modern tactics with machine guns on cavalry, when this had been done, Lenin the "peacemaker" then sent in mechanised units to take out the "dissenters".
Anarchism & direct democracy appealled to peasants who lived in autonomous communities for many years, workers in cities without roots were easier to con.

We wont get a real democratic society unless we organise more & get mass support universally rather than continue to fight thousands of small rear gaurd actions & campaigns, this is why centralised undemocratic systems often overtake us. The Socialist party is way ahead of us in this resect & its why many anarchists join the Greens, liberals or cooperative party or even better just give up.
Standing candidates who sign agreements to represent people with regular consensus& referendums as well as on the condition of being a returnable delegate would be a good start. Anarchism is about democracy, anarchy is order, its about cooperatives rather than states, its not about any of the things which its portrayed in the media.

i don't care what this guy says - he's a screw; he's scum. all cops are bastards. all screws are scum. doesn't matter if he has good intentions.

We're never going to get rid of the prisons, tough crap the majority of people in this country would rather rapists, paedophiles, serial killers, and gun/knife totting maniacs were kept behind bars to stop them preying on the vulnerable. You're never going to have a zero crime society no matter what your ridiculous class war bullshittery says. The sooner you all grow up and realise you wouldn't last five minutes on the streets if all the dangerous convicts were let out the better. Most of you scrawny, white, middle class, burn the prisons, wanabe anarchists are simply a bunch of internet gobshites.

for cleaning dirty coppers? if you have a particularly dirty copper try vinegar & salt for even more vigourous phosphoric acid action
 http://www.biglearning.com/article-cleaning-copper-science.htm

What do we do with particular "anarcho" judges who dont use a jury?

for cleaning dirty coppers? if you have a particularly dirty copper try vinegar & salt for even more vigourous phosphoric acid action
 http://www.biglearning.com/article-cleaning-copper-science.htm

What do we do with particular "anarcho" judges who dont use a jury?

We live in a capitalist society.

So who here is not tainted with capitalism?

What do we say to workers who work producing military aircraft?

What do we say to workers who work in prisons?

What do we say to workers who work in the civil service? who work for MacDonalds who work for polluting and greedy companies?

We can all live in a tent on the moors and eat turnips, or we can live in the world as it is and struggle to change it.

That prison officers are looking for alternatives to capitalism is a sign of how fragile our capitalist state has become.

Google Melchor Rogriguez,
He was the CNT/FAI anarchist who was in charge of Madrid prisons during the Spanish Civil War.
He saved many prisoners lives from slaughter by Stalinists, though failed in many other cases.

Right, first of all, we as Anarcho-communists, left-communists and council communists have that whole 'you want to destroy prisons?!' argument delt with. Read the fookin manual. ABC of Anarchism by Berkman, or the AF pamphlet 'Aspects of anarchism'
 http://afed.org.uk/publications/pamphlets-booklets/90-aspects-of-anarchism.html


Secondly, SP have been peddling nationalisation as if its got anything to do with workers control, so we can discount any argument about 'workers in uniform'. As long as you have workers in uniform protecting the property ad privilege of the employing class and the state, we won't have socialism. End of.

The thing is that Brian Caton is not a complete fool. So to the Socialist Party, RMT or anyone else he is speaking to about the POA's campaigns against privatisation and for better wages and conditions, he puts this in the framework of general attacks on the welfare state, support for his fellow workers etc. And I am sure he is sincere.

But it is what he DOESN'T say in these arenas and says elsewhere that you have to look at. POA spokespeople everywhere (and Caton is not the worst - try googling Glyn Travis) oppose rights for prisoners (the majority of whom are not child molesters in case anyone wants to respond on those lines). The POA does not care about the working class men and women it has behind bars; indeed demonising them is good for its cause.

So, for example, Caton doesn't mention that he was one of the riot squad screws at Strangeways who charged into the protesting prisoners and gave evidence in court putting someone away for a further 9 years. And while he could tell the RMT-organised ‘Conference to discuss the crisis in working-class political representation’ in January this year where he was a key speaker: ‘We want trade union and human rights and we won’t get them from this government. We want liberty, justice and peace. I want to see the shackles that currently tie us down broken', he's not so concerned about those who are genuinely shackled within the prison system.

In a POA press release in December 2008 he and Colin Moses welcomed Jack Straw's statement in an interview with the Daily Mail that he would be trying to reduce prisoners' access to the law. Caton said 'The compensation culture amongst the mainstream prison population is constantly on the increase at an unbelievable cost to the taxpayer. I hope that Mr Straw takes a serious look at the way some law firms appear to exploit the Human Rights Act to gain compensation for prisoners using the Legal Aid Scheme. Justice has to be seen to be done and currently POA members and employees working in the criminal justice system are getting a raw deal.’

Ironically, it is not only prisoners who sue for compensation. POA members regularly make claims on the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority and litigate over assaults, illness, stress and the distress of witnessing murders, suicides or riots. The union retains the services of a specialist solicitors’ firm for this express purpose. In 2006 over £1 million was paid to six Cardiff prison officers for trauma caused by finding the mutilated body of a prisoner murdered by his cell-mate, while prisoners who have witnessed suicides and murders rarely receive any counselling, let alone compensation for the trauma. The government has even capped the compensation payments to innocent prisoners released following the over-turning of wrongful convictions.

Straw told the Mail he has ‘given instructions in the services I control to be much tougher on compensation claims, such as for injuries at work.’ The state will therefore be vigorously resisting compensation claims from prisoners AND prison officers, but rather than standing shoulder to shoulder with prisoners, Caton and the POA sided with Straw and attacked the prisoners. This total lack of basic solidarity is never challenged by the Socialist Party or the other left groups and trade unions who frequently invite Caton to speak on their platforms, where he champions workers’ rights and boasts of how the POA has stood up to the government’s ban on its right to strike.

I could go on...

Of course it makes complete sense, you know after the glorious revolution the SP will need screws on thier side to bang up all us anarco's

You say:

"Right, first of all, we as Anarcho-communists, left-communists and council communists have that whole 'you want to destroy prisons?!' argument delt with."

Go on then. I've read Aspects of Anarchism and was in the AF for many years. The role of prisons and prisoners was never dealt with at all, and neither was crime.

Copy and past the bit you think deals with the prisons here please.

as people have rightly pointed out, knee jerk 'fire to the prisons' stuff is not good enough. You cannot seriously think its simply a case of removing all prisons, right now, setting everyone free and killing all the cops and guards. If you do, sorry but I oppose you and most other anarchists do too, whatever their rhetoric. 99% of the Left see some form of isolation and secure rehabilitation as neccessary for anti-social crimes.

The problem with the SP recruiting this man is that he is part of the prison system NOW, as it is NOW. He has not expressed any interest in transforming it, any concern at ballooning levels of incarceration. He has not accepted that simply locking people up as 'punishment' is sick, and totally ineffectual. He has not accepted that many prisoners are in for blatantly economic crimes of poverty such as benefit fraud or shoplifting and should not be in jail at all.

Prison is a complicated and complicating subject, it is not good enough to say that all prisoners are victims of capitalism and they're behaviour patterns will disappear overnight in socialism. We need to deal with crime as a class - telling working class people who are terrorised by anti-social crime that its not the crimoinals fault and they should blame the state will get you exactly nowhere. As socialists of all stripes (personally i'm a libertarian) we need a progressive plan of how to tackle crime and reform the idea of incarceration along methods that actually work.

but it is pretty straightforward that someone with NO CRITICISMS AT ALL of the prison system today has no business being part of a Party that wants to have a socialist revolution.

 http://afed.org.uk/ace/aspects.html#Part20


Also, As We See It mentions a bit

 http://afed.org.uk/ace/aswecit.html

Anarchism would be the end of 'law and order' as we know it. The legal system which includes the police, magistrates, judges and prisons are a means of protecting the rich and powerful from the mass of the people. After the destruction of inequality and government such bodies would be disbanded. The prison would be demolished, the judges retired and the police officers re-engaged doing socially useful work. Most crime is against property and is caused by inequalities of wealth. As property becomes communalised and inequality disappears, so will most crime. There may still be anti-social elements but these would be dealt with by the communities themselves on a just and humane basis.

The reason I said 'We have it covered' is that a long discussion about materialism in relation to anti-social crime would kill the thread and it's expected that you can make a point, ie: "Fuck Caton" without having to explain it with 4 paragraphs of writing.