AllPrisonersArePoliticalPrisoners

Quora Answer : How true is the following statement - "All prisoners are political prisoners"?

Nov 9, 2015

Well, it's true in the following sense.

All laws are political. Every law defines a boundary between acceptable and unacceptable. And the definition of that boundary is a political act. "Politics" isn't just what "politicians" do. It's any kind of argument / negotiation we enter into about how we should live together. So laws are the result of political negotiation, even laws that are as "self-evident" as it being wrong to kill other people. (No, they're not self evident, just very widely agreed-upon.)

So all prisoners have crossed the lines that politics has drawn. Had the politics been different and the line been drawn in a different place, they'd not be prisoners.