Edward Carpenter’s Realist Utopian and Contingent Abolitionism

Edward Carpenter’s penological views were most coherently expressed in his damning indictment of the modern prison system of his day. In Prisons, Police and Punishment (1905), Carpenter condemned the archaic laws and penal system of Britain. His criticism of them were threefold: they corrupted individuals and caused them to commit crimes; they were systematically directed against the welfare of the working classes, and they were preventing society as a whole from reaching its humanitarian ideal. However, unlike a number of his contemporaries within Britain’s utopian socialist and anarchist circles, Carpenter did not see absolute abolition as a reasonable action. His utopian ideals led him to think that the total eradication of the legal system may be possible when the Common Life had emerged, but Carpenter – for all his humanitarianism and moral philosophy – held a place for prisons in society, even capital punishment. I argue that Carpenter’s penological thought fits into the frame of ‘contingent abolitionism’ and advocates for a transitional penology with a ‘politics of bad conscience’ where imprisonment or punishment is the last resort, and must go hand in hand with radical sociopolitical transformation following a libertarian socialist ideal.