It's a common theme in certain types of fics for the wizarding world to be lectured (generally by a pro-Muggle Harry or Hermione) on the various ways its society falls short of (post-Cold War, Western) moral principles. Azkaban is one of the focus points of this assault.

So: would you close Azkaban? Or do you think its existence is justified?

My view is that I don't think people think enough about why the wizarding world might have more extreme and harsh justice than the Muggle world. They just treat wizards as Muggles with guns and think the justice system should translate across worlds.

Ultimately the cause of this is that magic, in the dominant fanon, is generally portrayed as mundane, static, and rather "point and shooty".

Most fanfic readers don't see magic as something genuinely mystical or arcane. They imagine there to be a defined set of magical causes and effects, and that if you protect against the known causes, you have rendered yourself 100% secure (you see a similar tendency in discussions about Harry's placement with the Dursleys).

These readers view all the "one-off" mystical phenomena we see in the books to be unique deus ex machina rather than evidence of magic's mystical nature. So they consider it perfectly feasible to create effective wizarding prisons without dementors. All it takes is a clever application of some charms.

But if you take a more mystical view to magic, a more flexible view where "magic finds a way", then even disarmed wizards, given enough time, are likely to devise some magically inventive means of escape, or otherwise have their magic provide them some opportunity. No set of static defences, no matter how powerful or clever, are likely to prove effective -- not against the creativity and determination of the human spirit.

Dementors are unique, so far as we know, in their ability to suppress a wizard's magic, and therefore cut off wizards' means of escape at its root. Without that, you are left with magically dynamic wizards vs. fixed magical defences. I know what my money is on.

So if you take a more mystical view of magic, you begin to see wizarding justice through the lens where you could never successfully keep a powerful witch like Bellatrix Lestrange contained unless you had dementors. The horrors of Azkaban become a necessity.

A similar theme was developed in the Dresden Files series very well. In that series, it is forbidden to use magic to harm another person directly. Doing so is an instant death sentence, no matter how minor the crime.

For most of the series, our POV character considers this a great injustice, an example of draconian rule, and the reader is along with him. Then later in the series a different perspective is explained to him: the rule isn't about justice, it's about power.

A single dark wizard, if left unchecked, could use unscrupulous means to achieve such power that they would become unstoppable by other wizards. Killing all dark wizards in the early stage of their development is the only way to prevent one of them one day rising to power and becoming a law unto themselves.

I think a similar reasoning can be applied well to the HP wizarding world. An HP wizard, left unchecked, could probably take over the entire Muggle world single-handedly. The damage a single wizard can do is horrifyingly massive. Harsh rules are therefore justified not by principles of fairness or justice, but by necessity - because it would only take one to cause irreversible destruction.

The important thing about all of this is that it doesn't make Azkaban right - that's a value judgement based on people's feelings about the importance of human rights vs. the safety of society etc. The point is that there is a debate to be had. And that is the key to good worldbuilding - if one group is just plainly in the right, then you're probably doing it wrong.

 

I think one key issues here then is utilitarianism versus other forms of ethics as wellas restorative justice vs. punitive justice.

One key problem with Azkaban is not just the issue of human rights, but it offers no recourse for restorative justice.

 

I wouldn't trust the fixed magical defenses either, but that's ultimately just an argument for prison guards :V

The need for debate as a matter of good worldbuilding is fair, but I'd buy the other argument I've seen put forward - Dementors can't be destroyed, so do we let them roam or at least have them in one spot at the cost of having to feed them - before the idea that a wizard just can't be properly imprisoned without Dementors.

Nurmengard held Grindelwald just fine for 50+ years, after all.

 

And, just to expand on Van Ropen’s point: Dementors are a being unique to Azkaban according to Pottermore, whereas wizarding prisons are not unique to Britain.

 

This is a great point.

Anyone released from Azkaban isn't rejoining society having learnt how, after paying their debt, to be a functioning member of that society.

They're being released bitter, resentful, and potentially insane. Recidivism rates would be sky high.

Which, now that I think about it, could be by design - much like private prisons in the real world. They need x number of inmates to make a profit. Or, in Azkaban's case, feed the prison guards. Restorative justice is not only pointless but detrimental to Azkaban's purpose.

 

Hagrid certainly didn't bounce right back after his stay in second year.

Azkaban seems to me like another one of those things that JKR invented without thinking through the larger implications. It's cool and spooky, which gives us a Count of Monte Cristo vibe for Sirius' escape. It gives Harry a chance to overcome his demons, literally, when learning the patronus charm. The dementors are the personification of despair and he kicks their asses. That character-building moment is what really mattered to her imo.

She either (a) didn't care about the world-building implications for wizarding justice, or (b) was fine with portraying it as inherently inhumane and cruel. Fudge and Umbridge certainly didn't mind innocent people suffering in Azkaban.

I don't remember seeing any evidence that dementors 'suppress magic.' People can still cast patronus charms when they're about to get kissed. Their sole purpose seems to be distraction through mental torture.

 

Restorative justice is a shiny idea, but how many people expect mass murderers, gleeful torturers, or child killers to rejoin society in a productive fashion?

And that's the examples of criminals we've seen there-- Bellatrix, Crouch Jr, Sirius and Hagrid. In real life, no one would want those people ever released. You'd see protests if their sentence was ever commuted.

So Azkaban is not so dissimilar from max security prisons in Western countries.

 

Fletcher did spend time in Azkaban.

But in the spirit of the OP, I would close Azkaban - and not just from some ethical/moralistic viewpoint.

The dementors stay on the island due to an arrangement with the Ministry that a fresh supply of souls will come walking through the doors of Azkaban. Those souls slowly wither, grow insane, and eventually stop wanting to eat/care for themselves. The prisoners die more often than not. Lambs to the slaughter. It's capital punishment by any other term.

Sack up and strap them to a pole in front of the Avada Kedavra firing squad if you've decided your society will be one that uses capital punishment.

But that does not solve the problem about what to do with the dementors. Apparently, they can be negotiated with - they can be bargained with. What's to stop an enterprising young Dark Lord from bartering the release of his followers in exchange for a school bus full of tasty muggle children?

The dementors are likely clever enough to know they're being appeased to stay on the island and away from the mainland - which makes them high-priced escorts. They'll turn tricks for whoever has the fattest wallet.

The Ministry views them as an asset when they should be viewed as an extreme liability.

If I were Minister for Magic and I inherited Azkaban in my portfolio, I'd take one look, smile and nod, and then set my Department of Mysteries the task of finding a way to destroy the dementors. They are the living embodiment of depression, a disease, and I'd fund whatever magical vaccine cured them.

Further, recidivism is relevant here because the use of Azkaban has concentrated the worst of the worst and then compounded their beliefs that the current system - the one that stuck them in dementor hell - needs to change. The Ministry is assuming that none of the lifers will escape, but for reasons above and from what we saw in the books, that's a pretty shitty and shortsighted assumption.

I'd close Azkaban. Whether that means my Ministry is now one that executes extremely violent offenders such as Bellatrix, Barty Crouch Jr, and so on is for another discussion. It'd be a damn sight more humane that way.

 

The impression I got from Grindlewald's (admittedly brief) cameo in Deathly Hallows was that he was a broken man after losing his duel to Dumbledore. It might be that he didn't escape for 50 years because he wasn't trying.

 

Its an interesting thought, equating Azkaban to max security prisons (i.e. only for the most dangerous/worst inmates). The problem is that in Canon people get tossed into Azkaban left and right, often without a trial - a particularly egregious example of this being Stan Shunpike in HBP.

As to the point about Dementors being necessary to contain wizards... are there no other wizarding prisons other than Azkaban? Do they all use Dementors to contain their inmates? Because Nurmengard comes to mind. I doubt Dumbledore left Grindelwald to suffer for half a century, and if he did not then we must conclude that a non Dementor prison that can hold the greatest dark wizard at the time could not hold a general prison population for Azkaban to be necessary. I mean, maybe the methods Dumbledore used to chain Grindelwald in place were even worse than the effect of Dementors, or maybe Grindelwald could have broken free if he had really wanted to, but both of these seem unlikely to me.

Of course if we conclude that Azkaban is neither moral nor necessary we must establish a reason why it is indeed in usage, other than incompetence or cruelty. Personally I'd like to think Azkaban being a reaction to the ministry finding a race of lethal and indestructible demons circa 18th century AD and deciding to make a pact with them for a steady supply of souls, instead of trying to fight a war.

EDIT: Fucking ninjas. Yeah, what Joe said, basically.

 

I get what you are saying, but you would think that if that were the case, Grindelwald would have broken out of prison by now.

 

I would suspect that a significant part of the objection to Azkaban is an objection to prison in general, at least in the punitive sense. There's a growing sentiment against using prison as a punishment instead of as a vehicle for reform, and the wizarding prison seems to be the absolute worst vehicle for reform, though that point is moot since everyone in there has at least one life sentence, with other punishments for other crimes. It also seems to be fantastically rare for an innocent person to be released, though the corrupt criminal justice system and super speedy expedient government seems to be an unrelated issue, when you consider that even a fair system has to decide what kind of prison to use. If in a contrary to fact scenario the characters could be reasonably certain, say, 90%, that the people being sent to the prison were guilty of life-sentence-no-parole crimes, the conditions could be as harsh as necessary to prevent escape. The question then becomes what amount of harsh-ness, if any, is necessary to prevent escape. If magic is truly dynamic and mystical, could the criminal justice system come up with some kind of shield charm bubble that whitelists sound, food, water, and air? People with access to books and wizards from other countries should be able to invent magical methodology more effectively than prisoners. If they haven't invented any good mechanism in canon to harmlessly trap prisoners, that's fine, it doesn't undermine the argument, because as long as it's reasonable for wandless prisoners to find some method of escape, it seems more likely that the prison warden whose whole job is to keep them in could find some way of doing that. Layered defenses that activate alarms would give the warden time to react if anyone managed to break through one shield, and I would think that not telling them what the shields and wards are, or what they do, would make it significantly less likely to escape. Perhaps no prison is inescapable with magic, but prisons in real life aren't completely inescapable, and dementor infested Azkaban proved itself to be porous enough for Sirius to escape, and at that point he could have vengefully destroyed Secrecy in an afternoon if he felt like it. Even worse, there was no staff at the prison to prevent fucking Voldemort from breaking out every single Death Eater. The argument that Azkaban and the dementors are necessary because nothing else is effective enough doesn't work because it is not effective enough. A theoretical warden who just thought up new shields and wards every second Wednesday would be significantly more effective against escape attempts both from within and without, and it doesn't involve mind-raping prisoners who even in this contrary to fact scenario have some tiny chance of being innocent. Continuing the contrary to fact scenario, there's a chance that the dementors could be surrounded by a hundred Patroni in a sphere and starved to death, or just trapped there until the end of time, though that would only because they're proven to be willing to attack muggles, while dragons and giants know better for some reason. Leaving the contrary to fact scenario, the canon establishes that the criminal justice system gives exactly zero shits about making sure people are guilty before sentencing them. The Wizengamot appears to value political motivations more than guilt or innocence, and it's even impossible to appeal your case on the grounds that you never had a trial. The only hope of getting to the contrary to fact scenario is overthrowing the government, and that's fraught with perils of its own. Some of the characters in canon and in fanfiction appear to believe that it's just a handful of people who comprise the problem, and everyone else is fine, but the hearing in book five seems to suggest the opposite; there's corruption covering up other corruption and corruption created to survive corruption. The election of a new Minister is unlikely to change anything.
These are the goalposts as I understand them:
Magic is mysterious and unexplored, but not infinite; you can't just come up with a spell to make it impossible to come up with new spells; you can't create an unstoppable force or an immovable object.
Exploration of new solutions is mostly constrained by politics and rational ignorance/inaction, making the universe reasonably similar to our own. Most people just don't care if the prisoners suffer.
Note that they're the goalposts that I believe of the canon, not necessarily where I've moved them for the purposes of writing fanfiction. As an example, canon features no actual trials taking place, only hearings, and for that reason I take the liberty of writing a trial in my current story, in the interest of exploring magical justice, in so far as it is actually implemented. Suffice to say that the characters circumvent the Azkaban closure question, though that might have been an interesting moral quandary over which to have them fight.

 

Except there's plenty of non mass murdering, torturing, child killing prisoners. Even in your example, Hagrid was there during his trial. Before any guilt was proven.

Dung goes there for burglary and pretending to be an Inferius. Morfin Gaunt goes for three years for hexing a muggle. Podmore goes for breaking into the Ministry. Most of Azkaban's prisoners are likely there for short sentences. Some of them haven't even been convicted, if Hagrid's case is the norm.

 

I believe this is the second time you written down what could be the equivalent of the next best thing since sliced bread and the sheer wall of text makes it unreadable. I've attempted to break it down into manageable chunks this time, and as such from reading I do generally agree with what you're getting at.

 

Dung's case is egregious, I grant you, but we don't know his previous convictions. Hexing a muggle is a big deal. It's basically violent assault. Breaking into the ministry probably involves attacking other wizards, no? Which seems bad. Though I grant you that his and Dung's seem pretty harsh.

I mean, if you think Hagrid is literally a monster-controlling, child-killing wizard, who was previously convicted of that (that's why his wand was broken, no?), then sending him to Azkaban while his trial is being organized is not the craziest idea.

 

You gotta eat the whole loaf.

 

POA Chapter 10:

 

Ah, good catch, @Taure. I stand corrected.