Carceral archipelago
The concept of a carceral archipelago was first used by the French historian and philosopher
Concepts developed in Foucault's Discipline and Punish have been widely used by researchers in the growing, multi-disciplinary field of "carceral state" studies, as part of the "carceral turn" in the 1990s.
Etymology of the term
Foucault first used the phrase "carceral archipelago" to describe the
"Archipelago", as used by Foucault, refers to
Discipline and Punish
Foucault was writing Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison in the early 1970s, against the backdrop of prison revolts "throughout the world" that protested a century-old system of cold, suffocation, overcrowding, hunger, physical maltreatment, so-called "model prisons", tranquilizers, and isolation.[2]: 30
As a co-founder of the Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons (GIP)—a group that was active in France for several years in the early 1970s—Foucault was highly critical of the French penal system, believing that it converted petty criminals into hardened delinquents.[12]: 233–34 A year after the GIP folded, Foucault published Discipline and Punish, in which he examined the evolution of penal system, away from corporal and capital punishment, into the modern carceral system that began in Europe and the United States around the end of the 18th century.[13] His biographer Didier Eribon described Discipline and Punish as "perhaps the finest" of Foucault's works.[12]: 233–34
Foucault described Discipline and Punish as providing an "historical background" to the "formation of knowledge in modern society".[2]: 304 It provides a "history of the modern soul."[2]: 33 He provided a "genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules." In both Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault developed archaeological and genealogical methods which emphasized the role that power plays in society. The carceral network, with its mechanisms of normalizing social control,[2]: 304 made the human sciences "historically possible" through its analytical investment into "knowable man"—his "soul, individuality, consciousness, and conduct.[2]: 306 Foucault refers to the term "discipline" as used within punitive penal systems. In his 1969 publication, The Archaeology of Knowledge, and again in Discipline and Punish, he investigates the origins of the "disciplines" in the humanities and social sciences.[14] In the chapter on "Science and Knowledge", he suggested that 'disciplines' could be called "groups of statements that borrow their organization from scientific models" that once they were accepted, became "institutionalized, transmitted, and sometimes taught as sciences." He goes on to challenge these disciplines—which he also does in Discipline and Punish—asking "[C]ould one not say that archaeology describes disciplines that are not really sciences, while epistemology describes sciences that have been formed on the basis of (or in spite of) existing disciplines?"[14]: 178
In his final chapter entitled simply "Carceral", Foucault described how, within the penal system, disciplinary networks expanded to include carceral mechanisms and technologies, the carceral city, culture, society, system, and network—that are all part of the carceral archipelago.[2]: 300 "Medicine, psychology, education, public assistance", and social work began to assume "judicial functions" with an "ever greater share of the powers of supervision and assessment".[2]: 305 Foucault called these disciplines, "mechanisms of normalization" and described them as "becoming ever more rigorous in their application". He said that the knowledge generated by the disciplines of "psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, criminology, and so many other strange sciences" have a "terrible power of investigation" that developed the technologies and procedures of panopticism.[2]: 304
Foucault described how new forms of punishment in the 19th century became transformed into general techniques and procedures for controlling populations and how twentieth century society normalized social control, through constant and permanent surveillance and monitoring.
American historian, Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century[15] wrote that Foucault's "great confinement"[2]: 198 —was a contemporary form of "'enclosure', an important interpretative idea for understanding neoliberalism." "Enclosure indicates private property and capital: it seems to promise both individual ownership and social productivity, but in fact the concept of enclosure is inseparable from terror and the destruction of independence and community".[16] In The London Hanged, Linebaugh described how the population in London had become criminalized in the 18th century—"People were so impoverished, they had to steal to survive." As the meaning of property changed, property laws were rewritten.[15]
From a culture of spectacle to a carceral society
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traced the genealogy of contemporary forms of the penal or carceral system, from the eighteenth century until the mid-1970s in the Western world.[2]
The "culture of spectacle" included public displays of torture, dismemberment, and obliteration of the human body as punishment.
According to Foucault, punishment and the criminal become an integral part of 'western' scientific rationality by the late 18th century. Reformers called for "better punishments. It was based it on a model 'cure' for reforms—to "punish with an attenuated severity perhaps, but in order to punish with more universality and necessity; to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body."[2]: 82 This involved the submission of bodies through the control of ideas and the analysis of representations as a principle in a politics of bodies. Foucault quoted Servan—a member of the influential group called the Idéologues—Parisian intellectuals in the 1790s who developed ideology as a "science of ideas".[18] Servan described how a "true politician" guides citizens by forming a "chain of ideas" on [crime and punishment] that is "strongly linked" with the "stable point of reason" securing the "end of the chain."[2]: 82
By 1810, in France, detention in the large "enclosed, complex and hierarchized structure", had replaced the scaffold as the "essential form of punishment" and punishment was "integrated into the very body of the state apparatus."[2]: 116 The modern carceral system, was taking form with the publication by 1838, of books on prison reform by Charles Lucas, Louis-Mathurin Moreau-Christophe,[19] and Léon Faucher. In his book House of Young Prisoners, Faucher prescribed "strict discipline, exact rules, surveillance and rehabilitation". From the late 18th century through the early decades of the 19th century, modern criminal codes were implemented in Europe and North America. By 1838, with the publication of Leon Faucher's book on prison reform, society had transitioned—the public execution was replaced by the "timetable".[20][2]: 5–7
The carceral society—in which "punishment and discipline" was "internalized and directed to the constitution and, when necessary, rehabilitation of social subjects"—had replaced the culture of spectacle.[17][2]: 7
According to Foucault, modern penal theories—including their inherent power structures—originate with the
The body of knowledge based on prisoners in institutions, such as Mettray and Neufchatel, was the origin of the concept of the "delinquent" class.[21] In his discussion on illegalities and delinquency, Foucault illustrated how "programmes for correcting delinquents" and "mechanisms that reinforce delinquency" were are all part of the carceral system that "combines discourses, architectures, regulations and scientific propositions, and social effects."[2]: 271 Foucault described three characters caught in this system, Eugène François Vidocq,[2]: 282 [Notes 1][22][23] Pierre François Lacenaire (1803 – 1836), and a 13-year-old charged with vagabondage who was sentenced to two years in a reformatory.[2]: 290–292 Vidocq's contemporary, Lecenaire, was the typical "delinquent" according to what the dominant class considered to constitute delinquency, in the first third of the nineteenth century.[2]: 290–292
Panopticon to panopticism in a carceral culture
By "carceral culture, Foucault refers to a culture in which the panoptic model of surveillance has been diffused as a principle of social organization."[17]
Foucault used Jeremy Bentham's prison reforms, which included architectural plans for the Panopticon as a "representative model for what happens to society in the nineteenth century."[17] Although few of Bentham's Panopticon's were actually built, his plans included a central tower with individual cells that prevent interaction with each other while being constantly under the gaze of the panoptic tower, which can "pan" and see everything.[17] Foucault quoted a 19th-century legal scholar who argued that Bentham's design was an event 'in the history of the human mind'. It was the "birth certificate" of "disciplinary society".[2]: 216 Foucault said that the idea of the Panopticon became used in many different settings in diverse ways, including the university classroom, prison schools, some classroom auditoriums, hospital and factory architecture and in "urban planning—organized on a grid structure to facilitate movement but also to discourage concealment."[17]
The Panopticon is "an architectural plan", while panopticism is a "set of general ideas about the control of populations".[17]
In the chapter entitled, Panopticism, Foucault argued that the procedures and technology for the control of the plague established around 1700 became a template for a more general form of social control.[2]: 195- In order to control the plague, a village was sequestered and every street was put under constant surveillance. The plague, he says, "stands for all forms of confusion and disorder".[2]: 199
Foucault explains how the "panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body" and to "become a generalized function."[2]: 207 "We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism."[2]: 217
Beyond panoptic forms of control
In his work after Discipline and Punish, Foucault became interested in a related question. Instead of looking at panoptic forms of control, he became interested in how people use information to think about themselves. He sometimes referred to this as a study of 'ethics', other times he used the grander title: 'technologies of the self'. Foucault studied two related issues: what information was on hand and what people chose to do with the information. In many ways, this took him in a new direction, suggesting perhaps ways of living in the carceral archipelago without striving to escape from it.[citation needed]
Foucault elaborated the notion of
The carceral state
In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s prisoner coalitions — including the Chicano Movement and Black Power organizations — in American prisons protested together under the banner of "slaves of the state". Their legal challenge to prison conditions was successful.[27][failed verification] In response, the state introduced a "new prison regime" with paramilitary equipment and practices, the increased use of privatized prisons, "massive prison building programs", and new levels of punishment, such as "23-hour cell isolation". Author Robert Chase called this the "'Sunbelt' militarized carceral state approach that became exemplary of national prison trends."[27]
Nils Christie, a criminology professor at the University of Oslo in Norway, in his 1993 book Crime control as industry: towards gulags, Western style? - a modern classic of criminology - argued that crime control was more dangerous to societal future than crime itself.[28] In his 1994 review of Crime control as industry, Andrew Rutherford described Christie as a criminologist of "international renown", who has written prolifically about punishment and the role of law for decades.[4]: 391 Rutherford said that Christie "exemplified the enlightened humanist tradition" and called for criminal law with a "minimalist intervention". Rutherford said that Christie's writing had become much "darker" by 1993, as he warned of the "rapaciously devouring crime control industry" particularly in the United States. In a reference to Foucault's "Great Confinement" in Discipline and Punish, Christie says that these "new great confinements" are part of an "unparalleled escalation of prison populations" with "combat-style probation officers", and "widespread privatization" of prisons.[4]: 391
In her widely cited 2006 book, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America,
"a tenacious carceral state has sprouted in the shadows of mass imprisonment and has been extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It includes not only the country’s vast archipelago of jails and prisons, but also the far-reaching and growing penal punishments and controls that lies in the never-never land between the prison gate and full citizenship. As it sunders families and communities and radically reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship, the carceral state poses a formidable political and social challenge."
She said that until the carceral turn in the social sciences in the late 1990s, "mass imprisonment was largely an invisible issue in the United States".[citation needed] By 2014, there was widespread criticism of mass incarceration but very modest reform.[30][page needed
According to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a geographer, whose 2007 book entitled, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, in 2007, California had the largest prison-population in the United States. Gilmore, who co-founded
Both Gilmore and Gottschalk are "established in their fields";[31]: 834 their ideas and assumptions reflect their home disciplines and not necessarily those of criminology, for example.[31]: 834 The interdisciplinary field of carceral-state scholarship began to emerge in the 1970s in the United States as a critique of the penal system. Carceral-state scholarship, an area of study whose "boundaries are notoriously difficult to map", includes "cognate disciplines" such as history and sociology, as well as critical theory, journalism and literature.[31]: 834
Foucault's Discipline and Punish has been a critical work for those whose work on geographies of power examines how the state uses detention and confinement to exclude populations.[3][35] Geographer Anne Bonds investigated how social and criminal justice policies had become "increasingly punitive" as class and race inequalities became more entrenched. She argued that discourse on the poor obscures how poverty is produced or increased because of the "neoliberal restructuring of rural economies and governance".[36]
By 2017, the concept of a penal or carceral state - with varying definitions and parameters - had become widely used in "punishment and criminal justice literature".[37]
According to a 2017 article in Theoretical criminology, the carceral state is far from being a "single, unified, and actor-less state responsible for punishment".[37] As a result, the phrase, the carceral state, has a "proliferation of meanings and is frequently undefined."[37]
According to Dan Berger, author of The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States (2014),
For geographers Stefano Bloch and Enrique Olivares-Pelayo and sociologists Loïc Wacquant, Robert Weide, and Patrick Lopez-Aguado, the Carceral State maintains racial segregation as part of enforcing prison control.[39][failed verification]
See also
- Police state
- Prison-industrial complex
- Prison of the peoples
- Surveillance
Notes
- criminal who became the first director of the crime-detection Sûreté nationale and the head of the first known private detective agency. Victor Hugo, Edgar Allan Poe, and Honoré de Balzacwrote about Vidocq's life story. He is considered to be the father of modern criminology.
- ^ "In 2008, the Pew Center on the States reported that incarceration levels had risen to a point where one in 100 American adults was behind bars. A second Pew study the following year added another disturbing dimension to the picture, revealing that one in 31 adults in the United States was either incarcerated or on probation or parole."
References
- ^ Foucault, Michel (1975). Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison. Bibliothèque des histoires. Paris: Gallimard.
- ^ OCLC 809640229.
- ^ ISSN 1749-8198.
- ^ . Retrieved January 9, 2020.
- ^ "Incarceration | The Sentencing Project". The Sentencing Project. Retrieved November 15, 2016.
- ^ a b c Berger, Dan (October 29, 2018). "Scales of Struggle and the Carceral State – AAIHS". Retrieved January 9, 2020.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved January 9, 2020.
- JSTOR 2166597.
- ^ Butler-Bowdon, Tom. 50 Politics Classics: Freedom, Equality, Power (50 Classics) (Kindle ed.). Nicholas Brealey. pp. Chapter 43.
- ^ "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Speaking truth to power". The Economist. August 7, 2008.
- ^ Scammell, Michael (December 11, 2018). "The Writer Who Destroyed an Empire". NYT. NYT.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-674-57286-7.
- ^ Druzin, Bryan (2015). "The Theatre of Punishment: Case Studies in the Political Function of Corporal and Capital Punishment". Washington University Global Studies Law Review. 14: 359.
- ^
- ^ a b The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Allen Lane. 1991.
- ISSN 0163-6545.
- ^ a b c d e f g Dino, Felluga (December 12, 2012). "On Panoptic and Carceral Society". Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Modules on Foucault. Archived from the original on December 12, 2012. Retrieved January 9, 2020.
{{cite book}}
:|work=
ignored (help)CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - ^ Möllenkamp, Andreas; McCaffery, Peter (2004), Who were the Ideologues? (PDF)
- ^ Moreau-Christophe, Louis-Mathurin (1838). De la réforme des prisons en France, basée sur la doctrine du système pénal et le principe de l'isolement individuel. Paris: Huzard.
- ^ Faucher, Leon (1838). De la Réforme des prisons. Paris: Angé.
- ^ a b "Model Prisons" (PDF). The New York Times. August 25, 1873. Retrieved January 9, 2020.
- ISBN 0-8493-2132-8, S. 12.
- ISBN 0-7637-8352-8, S. 39.
- ^ Michel Foucault The History Of Sexuality p. 140 1976
- ^ Michel Foucault Security, Territory, Population p. 1 2007
- SSRN 1902949
- ^ a b Chase, Robert T. (2019). We Are Not Slaves. Retrieved January 9, 2020.
{{cite book}}
:|work=
ignored (help) - ISBN 978-0-415-09478-8.
- OCLC 452916038.
- ISBN 9781400880812.
- ^ JSTOR 23639309.
- ISBN 978-0-520-24201-2.
- ^
ISBN 9781452960883. Retrieved August 8, 2023.
- ^ Trecka, Mark (October 19, 2019). "The Carceral Invasion: On Brett Story's "Prison Land"". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved January 9, 2020.
- ^ Story, Brett (2015). Dis-placing the Prison: Carceral Space, Disposable Life, and Urban Struggle in Neoliberal America (PDF) (Thesis). Retrieved January 9, 2020.
- ISSN 1467-8330.
- ^ PMID 29937687.
The concept of a penal or carceral state has quickly become a staple in punishment and criminal justice literature. However, the concept, which suffers from a proliferation of meanings and is frequently undefined, gives readers the impression that there is a single, unified, and actor-less state responsible for punishment. This contradicts the thrust of recent punishment literature, which emphasizes fragmentation, variegation, and constant conflict across the actors and institutions that shape penal policy and practice. Using a case study of late-century Michigan, this paper develops an analytical approach that fractures the penal state, demonstrating that, far from a unified entity, it is a messy, often conflicted amalgamation of the various branches and actors in charge of punishment and the ways they resist the aims and policies sought by their fellow state actors. Ultimately, we argue that fracture is itself a variable that scholars must measure empirically and incorporate into their accounts of penal change.
- dream hampton
- .