Certainly, something needs to be done about prisons. Proven reoffending statistics are in long-term decline, but this seems less an effect of being banged up and more a consequence of the secular long-term trend downturn in crime. Nevertheless, suicide and self-inflicted injuries have seen increases in recent years, probably as a consequence of overcrowding and the disproportionate incarceration of men - and it's mostly men - with mental health difficulties. Exacerbating matters has been a collapse in staff morale and an exodus of prison workers, a crisis so bad the Commons justice committee launched an inquiry. For the reform-minded, prisons are ripe for it.
The interesting thing is that the concern with prison reform is far from new. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that as the prison system was born so was its critique and calls for reform. Commentary on the book talks about panopticism, discipline, subjection, and rehabilitation as signs that the economy of power in early modern societies moved away from the arbitrary, haphazard, but often spectacularly brutal exercise of power in the sovereign's name to something much more subtle. This for Foucault was coincident with the rise of capitalism, and enabled the significant multiplication of complex organisation in industrialising societies. The discipline of the barracks, the prison, the school, the hospital, and the factory all fed off and enabled one another. They trained people through the application of rules, surveillance, and were backed by systems of punishment and reward. Prison was designed to take in convicts, discipline them, and churn out reformed characters who would become productive citizens.
Foucault pointed out that prison is not just a spectacular failure that falls short of what its designers and supporters advocate for it, it has always done so. The criticisms of Foucault's day, of our time, and back at the birth of the prison remain fundamentally unchanged. The charges of prison reformers that crime rates are indifferent to rates of imprisonment, that high rates of recidivism persist, that it encourages reoffending and, in fact, instead of producing docile subjects what comes out the other end are delinquents have all been heard before. The problems of prison regimes, from corrupt wardens to arbitrary authority to forced labour to the stigmatisation attending former prisoners are well understood and have been high on the complaints list since the modern penitentiary emerged in the late 18th century. Foucault notes the critique of the prison falls into two types: that it is insufficiently corrective (broadly the liberal position), or that it is insufficiently punishing (the right wing position). He argues,
The carceral system combines in a single figure discourses and architectures, coercive regulations and scientific propositions, real social effects and invincible utopias, programmes for correcting delinquents and mechanisms that reinforce delinquency. Is not the supposed failure part of the functioning of the prison? (Discipline and Punish 1991, p.271)Or to put it another way, if prison is such an abject failure why has it continued to play the central role in the criminal justice system? Even though, arguably, disciplinary power has become subsumed by new logics of surveillance and are, by themselves, obsolete technologies of power. Why prison persists is not for the elimination of crime or, for that matter, keeping the public safe. The object is not to deter offending but to distinguish them. In other words, it's an apparatus of subjection. Because disciplinary power is in the business of classifying and, through the application of discipline, developing knowledge about different kinds of human being. The transgression of the law might, in the abstract, be construed as a challenge to some normative aspects of social life but apprehension and imprisonment allows for the classification of, and therefore the truth of the convicted to be established and assimilated into the technologies of social control. The consequence is, like policing, we are all positioned in relation to prison, and the economy of incarceration and punishment can be extended at any time to bring more activities under its purview. That's why for Foucault the establishment solution to the problems of prison can only and always be more prison, whether extensive in building more or becoming intensive in more sustained, "scientific" rehabilitation efforts.
For Foucault, disciplinary institutions are the problem. They violently force people to fit into prescribed moulds. The model prisoner conjured up by penology is always the aspiration, but to get there discipline, surveillance, and force are individually applied to curb resistance to its demands. Building a free society means consigning such institutions and the modes of governance they foster to the dumpster of history. Their difficulty, ultimately, isn't that they are used to incarcerate criminals. It's that carceral logics work to imprison everyone.
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7 comments:
There is a constant tension between punishment and rehabilitation, and between separation and integration. Prison does neither well. But it projects state power and establishes boundaries around acceptable behaviour. We can see this in the contrasting ways that those who caused a traffic jam by protesting against oil, and those who corruptly leach of our political system are treated.
Its fine to take large sums from the government for inadequate or non-existent PPE, but sit up on a gantry on the M25 and you get 5 years.
Prison is the embodiment of state power, and is most potently directed at those who cross the line in challenging that power, or reveal its corruption.
Fine, ok, but let's make this more practical and real.
A colleague of mine was raped recently, violently. We know who it was - he owns a business, has a wife and two children. He's been convicted (he owned up) and is in prison currently.
What's Foulcault's answer when asked what to do about him? If you can, could you compress this into a summary because I'm not asking for a foucault- why use two words when a hundred will do - impersonation.
I recommend Susan Neiman's 'Left Is Not Woke' on the reactionary logic of Foucault's rejection of enlightenment universalism and, especially, on his negativity towards prison reform. She quotes Jean Amery, who had suffered torture at the hands of the Gestapo, reviewing Foucault's 'Discipline and Punish':
"Only a fool would deny that prison improvements of the 18th and 19th century were also an expression of bourgeois capitalist striving for profit, as if the powers that were didn't also consider that a halfway humanely treated prisoner has better working potential than one who is starving. But it is an aberration to describe things as if this humanization were only the result of profit and production."
The underlying problem with Discipline and Punish, as in fact, also with Foucault's other work before the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality, is the assumption that the Enlightenment-theoretical constructs of 18th-19th century France came first and the practices followed the Enlightenment theory. The reality is that forms of carceral discipline with a view to 'reforming' the offender began in late medieval Italian city-states before being reinvented or imitated in the early modern Netherlands and England.
They were invented/ adopted pragmatically, as a "solution" to *low-level* crime (petty property offences, purity offences like prostitution and drunkenness) at a period when serious crimes attracted the death penalty or exile/ transportation.
Prison reform in late 18th to 19th century England is equally pragmatic - about (a) 'jail fever' and the periodic deaths of numerous judges and lawyers when remand prisoners brought typhus into the courtroom, (b) the crisis of transportation after the American revolution, leading to a politically unsustainable spike in executions, and transportation to Australia never really being affordable. It may be guessed that similar drivers (exile failing due to increased control of borders, revulsion at the number of executions, etc) also affected other European countries - but Foucault's anti-Enlightenment insistence on theory-drives-practice, already present in Madness & Civilisation, means that he does not investigate such issues.
Jim, perhaps you should read Discipline and Punish. If you had you'd know Foucault makes exactly the same points.
And Mike, I have to also question whether you've read the book. Time and again Foucault there and elsewhere makes the point that discipline and subjection are the foundations of the human sciences, not the other way round. Trying to cram him into an idealist framework so you can write him off won't wash, I'm afraid.
Only ever really came across Focault in secondary reading, but there is a sense he says interesting things but they're not always robustly evidenced or reasoned. Prison may fail on many counts, but it does largely deter the criminals on the inside from harming the non-criminals on the outside, no matter how inefficient it may be. That's perhaps the problem, it's more of deterrent to the people who mainly live inside the law, and not so much for career or lifetime criminals.
As for idiots bemoaning the fate of 'activists' bravely punching down on people going about their lawful business in the name of saving the planet, maybe they should read the sentencing remarks and ask why it's other people's cancer treatment they get to delay, why their privilege makes it okay to sacrifice vulnerable people for their heroics, delay medicines and critical supplies, why their need to be the centre of the drama is worth other people's health, wellbeing and livelihoods? Strangely, these brave campaigners don't heroically stand in front of ambulances taking their own family to hospital, it seems sacrifices only go so deep?
What is a "dumpster"? Do you mean a skip?
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