Prisons

The exploding prison populations can be seen as a result of policies like those set out in the war on drugs. Gates states, "Unless on subscribes to the believe that criminal behavior is innate and that the biologically criminal population was reproducing itself in greater numbers, the exploding prison population in the United States of the period of noeliberalization is evidence enough that "incarceration became a key strategy to deal with problems arising among discarded workers and marginalized populations" [Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 165] (Gates, 2001, p. 55). Jonathan Simon [Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed the American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear, p. 152-153] calls it the "waste management prison" because it has replaced the rehabilitation-based prisons of the New Deal time (p. 55).

History

Although history is revisionist, there is a discussed progression of deviance control, often times with three narratives. The first a rationalization drawing on the rhetoric of enlightenment, and that in the late 18^th century/early 19^th century, reform was motivated by “benevolence, altruism, philanthropy and humanitarianism, and the eventual record of successive reforms must be read as an incremental story of progress” (p. 18). The second belief is a “we blew it” understanding of history that has emerged in the mid-1960s, especially through the work of Rothman. According to Cohen, “The record is not just one of good intentions going wrong now and then, but of continual, disastrous failure (p. 19). Rothman sees the changes as being a result of Jacksonian America where reformists saw society as corrupting individuals, so these individuals must be shut away from society to be “fixed” through a “regime of discipline, order and regulation” (p. 19). This was started with good intentions, but there was much evidence to show that it wasn’t working – the institutions were just warehouses for those that needed rehabilitation (p. 20). Failure and persistence dominated though, and these institutions (and those that controlled them) continued to exist. The third belief is that “it’s all a con” (p. 21) and emerged with the work of Rusche and Kirchheimer. As opposed to Rothman who explained that the prisons could be seen as a failure, instead, they were really successes because, although reformers said they based the models on reform and more humanity, they were really just trying to repress the members of society that didn’t fit into the capitalist constructions. While reformers may have declared their intentions as good, really, “They constitute a façade to make acceptable the exercise of power, domination or class interests which, in turn, are the product of a particular politico-economic imperatives” (p. 22). Reform was essentially about getting the deviants fixed and back into the workplace (p. 23). Some have referred to these ideas as economic determinism and left functionalism. Some, however, such as Ignatieff still place the origins of the reform on religious ideals that were “driven by a perceived disintegration of society” (p. 24) and a desire to return to more stability. Overall though, for Ignatieff, there was a specific class problem to be solved, so the prison succeeded. Foucault was one of the most ambitious critics. For him, power and knowledge were inseparable; forms of knowledge like criminology and psychiatry were linked to power, and this power created more things to study (p. 25). For Foucault, the prisons represented power and control in a capitalist society. The spectacle of power was replaced with private exhibitions of power over the mind, and thus “more deeply into the social body” (p. 26). Thus the disciplinary society emerged where “the subject was to be observed, retained and rendered obedient, not just punished along some abstract scale of justice” (p. 26) with the prison coming to represent all forms of punishment; Bentham’s panopticon could only truly be realized as a prison. Surveillance (and panopticism) became the exercise in power and control (p. 26). Many institutions (i.e., employments, hospitals, and schools) became surveillance agents, turning people into ‘projects of docility’ (p. 26). Beyond surveillance, there is also “classification, examination, ordering and coding” (pp. 26-7). Ultimately, prisons turn into their own micro-systems of power which are not reducible to outside, generalized classifications. Cohen does come to the conclusion that each different theory does share five common characteristics: 1) motives of prison reformers were more complicated than hating cruelty or impatience with administrative incompetence or scientific discovery; 2) we can’t understand the prison without looking at the other institutions of the time; 3) a general theory (like social order, power, class, or the state) can explain the shift; 4) experts were able to capitalize on the structures which supposedly showed their superiority; and 5) controlling institutions can exist despite that they may be seen as failing (p. 30). After the push for destructuring prisons, the prison population declined. Cohen says that this was a result of cognitive, theoretical, and ideological reasons. First, cognitively, people believed in the common sense and saw prisons as not working right and instead of reform, may have actually made things worse; community operations were an alternative to the large, institutional controls (p. 33). Second, theoretically, stigma and labeling theories suggested that the more someone is processed into the system, the harder it is to get out (p. 33). It was thus thought that communities themselves offered the best solutions rather than artificial, isolated institutions existing outside of embedded community contexts (p. 34). The idea should not be revenge or rehabilitation; it should be reintegration. Third, ideologically, destructuring comes out of larger movements of thought such as questions of large, centralized bureaucracies, the beliefs of experts, questions of state intervention, or even the idea of the welfare state in general (p. 34). The goal “should be less harm rather than more good” (p. 34). As time has moved on though, destructuring has seen its own consequences, and despite attempts at destrcuturing, prisons and prison populations have only flourished and grown (p. 37). The failures were seen in six ways: 1) the reasons for decarceration and community control were not for good reasons and were mostly because of fiscal pressures and reaction to welfare policies; 2) although decarceration was a goal, this was not happening and prisoners were still widely populated; 3) community alternatives weren’t showing more “success” than traditional measures; 4) the “new” methods weren’t cheaper; 5) the new measures weren’t more humane and were often just more neglected; 6) the system is actually larger and places more under the power and gaze of the state (p. 37-38).

References:

Cohen, 1985

Gates,