Author
: ziq
Title
: You Can’t Build Anarchy by Building Prisons
Subtitle
: Against the Carceral Imagination
Date
: August 9, 2026
Notes
: This essay is also available in zine form at
https://archive.org/details/againstthecarceralimagination
Source
:
raddle.me
I’m genuinely disenchanted by how many internet anarchists seem determined to spend their time debating how they would build and administer prisons after their fantasy revolution. This new generation of YouTube-informed “anarchists” is honestly hopeless: people who have somehow managed to take a political tradition founded on opposition to prisons, police, and state coercion and turn it into an endless exercise in designing “better” ways to police and imprison people.
We’re not getting a revolution in our lifetimes. More importantly, the world we actually inhabit is already structured around a vast prison-industrial complex. People, including countless anarchists, are being incarcerated, surveilled, policed, deported, criminalized, and subjected to state violence right now. Yet instead of working toward abolition, standing in solidarity with prisoners rotting away in cells, or even imagining radically different forms of social organization beyond police, prisons, and state coercion, this new crop of anarchists would rather spend energy debating the finer points of administering imaginary prisons in some hypothetical post-revolutionary future.
The priorities are baffling. There are real prisons, real prisoners, and real state violence happening right now, but the urgent question for these anarchists is what their hypothetical prison system should look like in an imaginary future run by them.
Sure, they avoid outright calling them prisons. Their brave leader, YouTuber Anark (Daniel Baryon),
prefers the more Orwellian-sounding phrase
“monitored democratic rehabilitation communities with required rehabilitative measures.” But world-salad euphemisms don’t change the underlying institution he’s advocating for.
He says “permanent separation of citizens from society” should be rare, but necessary when someone is deemed an “active threat to the community.” He then outlines a “tiered justice system,” a “constitution” containing “laws,” and courts i.e. his “community justice councils” that would try criminals, whom he calls “sequestered citizens” and “violators of the common law.” Those councils would determine what “the process of rehabilitation and reparation” should look like, including when someone is forcibly removed from the community and placed in one of these “monitored democratic rehabilitation communities.”
According to his fans, it’s not really prison if we call the cells “democratic involuntary living quarters,” the inmates “democratically instituted detainees,” and the guards “democratic rehabilitative facilitators.”
WTF is happening with these so-called anarchists who insist their leader isn’t describing a prison? If they ever got their revolution, I suppose disruptive wreckers like me would be sent straight to the Democratic Rehabilitation Internment Facility for reeducation, where I could learn that my confinement is actually liberatory because the not-prison committee voted on it.
The whole discussion is perverse. What happened to simply calling coercion coercion? Where is the intellectual honesty? Why are so many self-described anarchists reaching for increasingly elaborate euphemisms for reproducing coercion rather than simply admitting that they want prisons?
They loudly insist I propose a “better system” to replace prisons, while treating as the only acceptable answer a marginally more humane or more democratically administered version of incarceration. I offer them something different: anarchy. And their response is always the same: that I’m merely using “anarchy“ as a buzzword, or that refusing to bless their redesigned prisons is just “LARPing.“
Apparently, asking whether we need prisons at all is “unserious,” while building a more egalitarian carceral bureaucracy is treated as radical. It’s maddening that to these kids, prison abolition counts as less serious than Baryon’s patented I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Prison.
If you reject anarchy because you don’t believe it can address the problems you’re concerned about, that’s your prerogative. You’re perfectly entitled to want law, government, police, courts, prisons, and the institutional machinery of “law and order.” No one is stopping you from going to …