Prison

About: Prison is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 25120 publications have been published within this topic receiving 470474 citations. The topic is also known as: jail & gaol.

Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity

Abstract: The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation and to impose precarious employment on the postindustrial proletariat. It also erects a garish theater of civic morality on whose stage political elites can orchestrate the public vituperation of deviant figures—the teenage “welfare mother,” the ghetto “street thug,” and the roaming “sex predator”—and close the legitimacy deficit they suffer when they discard the established government mission of social and economic protection. By bringing developments in welfare and criminal justice into a single analytic framework attentive to both the instrumental and communicative moments of public policy, Punishing the Poor shows that the prison is not a mere technical implement for law enforcement but a core political institution. And it reveals that the capitalist revolution from above called neoliberalism entails not the advent of “small government” but the building of an overgrown and intrusive penal state deeply injurious to the ideals of democratic citizenship. Visit the author’s website.

Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and other Inmates

Abstract: “Deinstitutionalisation” has become one of the stated aims of modern, establishment psychiatry. Somewhat like motherhood and apple pie, it seems to have become a concept that is nearly impossible to criticise. Whether institutionalisation was ever exactly like its critics described it is a moot point; another is whether what we have seen since the move to community psychiatry is really “transinstitutionalisation”—with those patients who formerly would have been in asylums now in prison or homeless—rather than deinstitutionalisation. Goffman’s Asylums , a key text in the development of deinstitutionalisation, anticipated and indeed predicted some of these …

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison:

Abstract: Contemporary Sociology 7(5) (September 1978):566—68. When the intellectual history of our times comes to be written, that peculiarly Left Bank mixture of Marxism and structuralism now in fashion will be among the most puzzlingofourideastoevaluate.Aliteral “archeology of knowledge” (the title of one of Foucault’s earlier books) will be required to sort out the valuable from the obvious rubbish. I suspect that in this exercise the iconographers of the present (like Barthes) will fare less well than those who have read the past. Of such “historians” (a description which does not really cover his method) Foucault is the most dazzlingly creative. Discipline and Punish (which, shamefully, has taken over two years to be translated into English) follows Madness and Civilization (1961) and The Birth of the Clinic (1971) as the next stage in Foucault’s massive project of tracing the genealogy of control institutions (asylums, teaching hospitals, prisons) and the human sciences symbiotically linked with them (psychiatry, clinical medicine, criminology, penology). His concern throughout is the relationship between power and knowledge, the articulation of each on the other. Here (as he makes explicit in an interview recently published in the English journal, Radical Philosophy) he opposes the humanist position that, once we gain power, we cease to know——it makes us blind—— and that only those who keep their distance from power, who are no way implicated in tyranny, can attain the truth. For Foucault, such forms of knowledge as psychiatry and criminology (with its “garrulous discourses” and “intermidable [sic] repetitions”) are directly related to the exercise of power. Power itself creates new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. Thus to “liberate scientific research from the demands of monopoly capitalism” can only be a slogan. Placing such programmatic Big Issues on one side, though, a superficial first reading of the book mightstartatthelevelofitssubtitle, “The Birth of the Prison.” The key historical transition——at the end of the eighteenth century——is from punishment as torture, a public spectacle, to the more economically and politically discreet prison sentence. The body as the major target of penal repression disappears: within a few decades, the grisly spectacles of torture, dismemberment, exposure, amputation, and branding are over. Interest is transferred from the body to the mind; a coercive, solitary, and secret mode of punishment replaces one that was representative, scenic, and collective. Gone is the liturgy of torture and execution, where the triumph of the sovereign was symbolized in the processions, halts at crossroads, public readings of the sentence even after death, where the criminal’s corpse was exhibited or burnt. In its place comes a whole technology of subtle power. When punishment leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters into abstract consciousness, it does not become less effective. But its effectiveness arises from its inevitability not its horrific theatrical intensity. The new power is not to punish less but to In Retrospect: 1978 29