Philosophy and the Carceral Society

The nation’s prison population has hit a new peak and the international business of private prisons is growing.  Moreover, there is a convergence of this disturbing trend with the detention practices the U.S. government uses as part of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in its recent crack down against undocumented immigrants in the United States. The parallels go beyond the growth of each of these sorts of prisons.  Some activists assert that the torture that has been revealed in Iraq and Afghanistan are used against U.S. prisoners.  Likewise, just as enemy combatants disappear in our secret detention centers, so do undocumented immigrants in I.C.E. facilities.

This problem is ominous and philosophers, particularly those who work on the issues of gender and race, should be paying attention.  Clearly, some of us are.  There has been some discussion about prisons (beyond liberal theories of punishment) for some time and by significant philosophers.  The two that come immediately to mind are, of course, Angela Davis and Michel Foucault.  I recently came across an article by Eduardo Mendieta that draws on their work (see the link below for the article), and it got me to think about the relationship of philosophy to what some theorists call the “carceral society.”  Particularly striking to me is the word “abolition,” which of course refers to the prison abolition movement which refers back to the antebellum movement to abolish slavery in the United States.  Are contemporary philosophers, especially philosophers of race and gender, missing the boat on this one?  Are we failing to see and address one of the biggest political and racial issues of our era?  What is behind this lack of attention? 

While there are political philosophers and philosophers of race  working on the issue of prisons, it is not a subject at the center of the debate.  For example, in the most influential recent analytic accounts of racism, prisons are hardly mentioned.  Racial profiling and other such issues are mentioned, but prisons, surprisingly, are not!  I suspect that philosophers, myself included, have seen prisons as symptoms, as outcomes of institutional racism and distributive justice at other levels of society.  Thus, while educational and residential segregation are regularly addressed, prisons as a subject are neglected.

After reading Mendieta, I worry these standard approaches misses the full spectrum of how prisons function within nations and the political, really geopolitical significance of prisons.  Drawing on Angela Davis, Mendieta lists 10 ways that prisons are racialized and serve to racialize population, and  I think his list deserves some thought.  For example, his claims that prisons, among other things, are “political machines that disenfranchise racialized others leading to their civic death,” and are “branding devices that lead to the accumulation of negative symbolic capital” are deeply intriguing and help us think about prisons beyond the idea that the are merely static symptoms of social injustice.  According to Davis and Mendieta, prisons, in their own way, are resources in the perpetuation and production of social injustice.

Eduardo Mendieta, “The Prison Contract and Surplus Punishment: On Angela Y. Davis’s Abolitionsim,” http://www.usfca.edu/fac-staff/rrsundstrom/Mendieta_Prisons.pdf

New York Times, “Prison Nation,” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/opinion/10mon1.html?scp=4&sq=prison%20population&st=nyt

Comments

[Rob Wilson]

Yesterday I was wandering around a website that may be of interest here if people don't know of it, that for Restorative Justice Online (http://www.restorativejustice.org/), a project of the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation at Prison Fellowship International. As the name suggests, the Centre has a religious grounding; it was started by Chuck Colson after he did his time for Nixon crime. But RJO is itself an interesting resource for thinking more systematically about prisons in ways that I think philosophers, for the most part, haven't. Especially as incarceration rates have risen, and become more racialized, prisons have come to play more sustained roles in propogating racism. If others know of some more philosophical treatments of this, please share.

[Eduardo Mendieta]

Rob:

Thanks for pointing out this useful website. Evidently one of the dimensions of the use of incarceration as a racializing social institution is to precisely continue to occlude questions of restorative justice. The reference to abolition democracy in my texts takes up the commitments to restorative justice expressed in the post-Civil War period, the so-called Reconstruction Period. The 4 Acres and a Mule was a meager, but profoundly symbolic expression that we could not have political equality until some modicum of economic parity had been achieved. In my own writing I point out that prisons are mechanism of political disenfranchisement, but also and simultaneously, of capital extraction. To roll back the reliance on prisons as a way to deal with increase poverty per force demands that we look at issues of restorative justice, and reparations.

[Ronald Sundstrom]

Turning to restorative justice, or other familiar conceptions of justice within the liberal tradition, most obviously, distributive justice is in line with standard approaches in political theory and political philosophy. However, I am unclear about whether Eduardo Mendieta can accept such approaches to the problem of the carceral society.

First, restorative justice programs within prisons to help prisoners reconnect with their home communities has been useful, and has been used by some groups, most notably Native Americans for some years now. It has also been used by victims’ rights groups and other restoration-inspired groups who seek to heal or repair broken ties between prisoners and larger communities.

However, these attempts at micro-level, or community oriented justice do not address the larger role of prisons as generators of race and class divisions and disparities in the first place. Restorative justice, or distributive justice, in Mendieta’s reading, don’t address the power of the carceral society. But is Mendieta’s view of prisons correct?

If we accept Mendieta’s view of the carceral society, what conception of justice can we use to critique it and how can we work for justice within its confines and systems? My suspicion is that Mendieta’s claims go to far. He lists 10 ways that prisons are racialized and serve to racialize society. Some of which are assimilable to standard approaches to social justice. For example, here are some of his assimilable claims about what prisons are:

1. Political machines that disenfranchise racialized others leading to their civic death.
2. Economic machines for wealth extraction and accumulation through dispossession and de-socialization.
3. Branding devices that lead to the accumulation of negative symbolic capital.

Some of his other claims remind us to think about the US problem of prisons in a global context:

10. [Prisons are] Geopolitical machines that connect a feedback loop that links US prisons abroad and at home.

I understand some critics of liberalism, and other standard approaches in political philosophy, don’t think that such approaches can effectively address the above claims. Whether that is true depends on the specific policies that emerge from some specific political framework. All the same, Mendieta’s further claims makes addressing the problems of the carceral society near to impossible. For example, consider his claims that prisons are:

4. Relay switches in the psycho-social-racial contract that facilitates psychic cathexis leading to both the tolerance and condoning of surplus punishment.
5. Political-pyschological-social dispotifs that augment the need for surplus punishment while concealing its social costs.
6. Necrophilic machines that live in symbiotic relationship with the military industrial complex.

These claims need to clarification and Mendieta, and other proponents of the carceral society approach to analyzing prisons in our society, need to provide some guidance about what sort of answers can be offered or expected to this cluster of monumental problems.

[Jeffrey Paris]

Thanks for the interesting post, Ron. You're right about philosophers under-addressing prisonization as a racial phenomenon, or addressing imprisonment at all! There are a number of reasons for this, I think.

The first is that philosophers already have a long history dealing with punishment, its justifications, and its role within moral theory generally. So, to the extent that there is a philosophical discourse that exists, it is only marginally (and even that seems like an overstatement) about imprisonment. Even those who have argued that there is no possible legitimate justification for state punishment (a recent example is an excellent work by David Boonin, "The Problem of Punishment" (2008), following in some ways the approach taken by Ted Honderich back in 1969) haven't typically done any further work regarding the significance of abolition, the transformations in imprisonment practices and regimes, or the emergence of a carceral society. The status of this long history with only a few exceptions suggests to philosophers that, as with other "perennial problems" in philosophy, the lack of a final or coherent justification for imprisonment is not an obstacle to its continued (prima facie "necessary") use.

The second is that the historical sources of a philosophical analysis of imprisonment are either not known or misunderstood by most philosophers. For instance, Rusche & Kirscheimer's "Punishment and Social Structure" (1939) is a secondary text within the already marginal tradition of the Frankfurt School. Eric Olin Wright's "The Politics of Punishment" (1972) prefigured a lot of later arguments about the need to sever the analysis of crime from that of our institutions of punishment. But more to the point, and since you mention it, Foucault's work in Discipline & Punish is typically misunderstood. For one thing, it is considered to be a mere instance of his well-known institutional genealogies, but not necessarily one that was carried through in the remainder of his work, nor one that represented a sincere practical engagement with the prison as it existed in the early 1970s. Both these mistakes (ones that I have made myself, to be sure) are corrected by Brady Heiner's wonderful analysis entitled "Foucault and the Black Panthers" in City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 11.3, see http://mysbfiles.stonybrook.edu/~bheiner/.

A third is that a lot of proto-philosophical work on race and imprisonment is carried through by non-philosophers with whom philosophers are often unfamiliar. These include folks like David Garland ("The Culture of Control" [2001]) and Loic Wacquant ("Prisons of Poverty", "Deadly Symbiosis", both forthcoming [2008]), but many essays available at http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/wacquant/). Within (or nearby) philosophical circles is the work of Joy James, Dylan Rodriguez, and Michael Hames-Garcia. (For James, see "States of Confinement" [2000], "Imprisoned Intellectuals" [2003], and "The New Abolitionists" [2004]; for Rodriguez, see "Forced Passages" [2006]; for Hames-Garcia, see "Fugitive Justice" [2004].) All of these focus more on theorizing or presenting the voices or practices of the imprisoned, and in particular those with a political consciousness. Another recent intervention has been the "turnaround" work of former neo-con economist Glenn Loury, whose 2007 Tanner Lectures at Stanford take up much of this work on race and imprisonment. (But where Loury goes wrong is looking to dead-end philosophical ideologies like that of Rawls to help think through issues of justice, rather than looking to the history of social theory.)

The fourth reason for under-addressing prisonization, and this is more speculative, is a class bias. If one thinks, rightly, that women, African-Americans, lesbians, gays, transgendered people, and disabled people are under-represented in philosophy, people formerly incarcerated are perhaps even more so. And of course, most (not all) of the under-represented philosophers are not (or are no longer) class disadvantaged disproprotionately beyond their already marginalized status. And so the existential draw to theorizing imprisonment has not yet had an impact on the work of philosophers who have rightly brought attention to serious and generalizable social and political issues and structures having to do with race and gender, especially. The claim has often been made, and it is well-defended and -articulated, that sexism is a problem for men, as racism is a problem for whites, but now we should begin to be able to add, as imprisonment is a problem for those who are "free". In each case, the privileged benefit, yet in each case also undergo serious moral harm.

I'm interested in taking up some of the more substantive claims made in Eduardo's essay, as well, but perhaps some other folks want to take some time to read the essay that Ron posted, and we'll see what they have to say about it.

[Rebecca Gordon]

Thank you, Ron, for pointing out Eduardo Mendieta’s valuable recapitulation of the genealogy of Angela Davis’s work on the prison-industrial complex. I think that you have identified an important lacuna in philosophical treatments of race and imprisonment: a penal system like that of this country does nor merely reflect its racial structure; it is a crucial site of the formation of race and racialized power relations in the United States.

(One minor cavil about Mendieta’s article: it’s not actually the case that all 50 states deny drivers licenses to ex-offenders. Like the laws governing the electoral franchise, the regulations about drivers licenses vary widely from state to state. This is not to say that incarceration does not lead to profound economic and civic disenfranshisement, or even and Mendieta says, death. But wholesale denial of drivers licenses is not one of the mechanisms.)

As an unreconstructed materialist myself, I have to agree with Mendieta that one of the (many) strengths of Davis’s analysis is its grounding in material and historical particularity. In that context, I have a couple of thoughts to offer.
First, I think it is no accident that this country’s explosive expansion of imprisonment has occurred over the last four decades, and not earlier in our history. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 marked the end of a century of legal, codified segregation, violent repression, and disenfranchisement of people of color, especially (but not only) of African Americans.

This is not to say, of course, that with the passage of such federal legislation, racial segregation, repression and disenfranchisement themselves have disappeared from the landscape of the United States. Rather they have moved to new arenas, and in particular to the prison complex. I would argue that in the last four decades the site of legally codified racism has shifted venues. It has migrated from the world of civil law, with legal structures like Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, and federal housing and development policies – all backed by the visible reality and constant threat of racialized violence. Its new home is the criminal law, with its Rockefeller-style drug laws, lengthy indeterminate sentences, post-incarceration economic and political disenfranchisement – all backed by the visible reality and constant threat of racialized violence, both inside and outside prisons.

Which brings me to a second observation. In his overview of Davis’s analysis of the prison-industrial complex, Mendieta mentions that prisons are a “Site for the enactment of ritualistic violence” that exists as part of a continuum of racialized violence that begins with slave floggings and extends to public lynchings and televised violence of attacks on civil rights workers. Mendieta makes the excellent point that such racial violence remains “visible” – at least in the imagination – even when it takes place behind prison walls. Citizens can still “imagine that inside someone is getting what they had coming to them (Mendieta, 306).”

Here I believe Mendieta (and Davis) diverge in an important way from the Foucauldian view. Unlike Foucault, they argue that – at least in its racial projects – modern U.S society has retained the spectacle of publicly-sanctioned racialized violence. The physical body of the person of color remains a legitimate site of “correction,” and it is an open secret that those consigned to “correctional facilities” will likely experience physical pain and/or sexual violence.*

This emphasis on the public nature of prison violence is relevant to my own work on U.S. torture in the post-9/11 context. The Bush Administration has openly sanctioned the torture of officially-designated “really bad guys” – who are also, not incidentally, identified as “Arab” and/or “Muslim” (both identifications which assume a racial character in the context of a so-called war on terror). The Administration expressed distress when photographs of the tortures at Abu Ghraib surfaced in public. However, I think that such exposure is essential, if torture is to have its primary political effect, i.e., the suppression of organized resistance to a regime.

I would also argue that Mendieta and Davis demonstrate that the present-day practice of racialized torture is not anomalous in U.S history. Rather it forms part of a continuum that stretches from the earliest slave plantations to the latest U.S. prisons.

* For information on violence visited on prisoners, see for example Human Rights Watch, No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons. (2001: http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/) and "Sexual Assault and Misconduct against Women in Prison", Amnesty International http://www.amnestyusa.org/women/womeninprison.html (accessed 5-24-2006 2006), among many other sources.

[Eduardo Mendieta]

I like to begin by addressing one central issue in Ron’s post. It would be foolish of me to disagree with his call to address some of my own ways of reading Angela Davis’s pioneering and indispensable insights into the multiple levels and layers of the racialized-gendered aspects of imprisonment in the US. But I do want to note that my agreement with the prior post about the need to consider questions of restorative justice are embedded –now meant in the true sense of embedded—within an analysis of prisons. We can’t dismiss the call for restorative justice, which is per definition a political-economic referent of the critique of the prison system. In other words, while I am convinced that a political-economic analysis is not enough, it is nonetheless indispensable. Race, or rather racism, is always being re-produced by newer and newer system of racialization, and one of the most essential systems to that process of the perpetuation of racism in our society is precisely the myriad of ways in which capital, social capital, economic capital, is structurally transferred and withheld from African-American communities. I am not entirely afraid to sound like Rusche and Kirchheimer who offered us one of the first historical-materialist analysis of the economic productivity of punishment, and this brings me to Jeffrey’s post.

[Eduardo Mendieta]

Jeffrey Paris, responding to Ron Sundstrom, makes several important points. I would like to address them in the same order that he presented them. First, again, beginning with Rusche and Kirchheimer, we have learned to disaggregate, or uncouple crime from punishment. Jeff is absolutely right that there is a long philosophical tradition dealing with punishment. In fact, we could easily claim that this philosophical tradition begins with Plato. Think here of the Euthyphro, and the issue of punishing, i.e. bringing a father before a court of justice for having caused the death of a slave. The Euthyphro circles around the morality of punishment, the duty of punishment, the justice of punishment, the need for punishment, and the relationship between piety and justice, and how piety is a subset, a subordinate member of the larger set of justice. Sadly, Socrates is more concerned about the relationship between justice and piety, than with whether we have particular moral responsibilities towards those outside, or the margins, of our polity. I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates, remains one of the best introductions to this fascinating question. But, continuing down the history of the Western canon, we come across figures like Boethius, Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Sartre, Levinas, and as recently as Negri, who have suffered in their own flesh, imprisonment, and without doubt, leaving a trace in their thinking. But here I will go on a limb, Blacks and Jewish’s prisoner’s have been the ones to elaborate most critically and systematically, how their punishment had nothing to do with their alleged “crimes.” I am thinking of Primo Levi’s reflection on the “useless violence” of the Concentration Camp and the George Jackson’s reflections on the political dimensions of imprisonment that Davis’ echoes, expanded, systematized, and articulated in a language that can travel across generations. And I should be justifiably chastised if I failed to mention Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham” –a text that should be taught and read along with Plato’s Euthyphro.
In other words, I agree with Jeff, philosophers have not been attentive to imprisonment –many of them were martyred for their views, and their philosophies reflected the “injustice” and immorality of the punishment they suffered. But they have been inattentive to “imprisonment.” To put someone away for a specific amount of time, under specific conditions of “civic exclusion,” is surely a very modern phenomenon. We must take recourse to Foucault, partly, to explain the emergence of imprisonment as a “preferred” device, or social mechanism, for punishment. When you think about imprisonment, it should strike anyone as absurd, but also equally logical, under capitalist modes of thinking. What I mean is that under capitalism we have some identity equations: work=salary, salary=time, time=work. So, punishment can only be though in terms of these equations, i.e. how to enact a penalty on one of these. Yet, when you are in prison, all of these equations are compounded: prison= (-work)+(-salary)+(-time). You have no work, you have no salary, and your time is not your time. Your time (and work in some cases) belongs to the State. As with capitalism, the time of the laborer belongs to the capitalist, in the modern system the time of the “punished” belongs to the state. Yes, I agree, too quick and to clinical. This analysis does not allow for the ways in which race and gender factor into this compounded accruement, i.e. incremental increase in value extracted from imprisonment, that is to say, the value of the time=salary=work extracted from their imprisonment. But as we all know, to be punished as a black person in the US, has greater value than being punished as a white person. Why? Not because of a simple capitalist equation, but because of a capitalist equation compounded by race and gender. The value extracted from the imprisonment of racialized and gendered subject is simply greater than that which could be extracted from de-racialized subjects. But the value accruement here unquestionably has to do with the psycho-social contract, or what I called in other places a “carceral contract.” But, in the US, we have a resistance to link the cultural and psycho-social to the economic (even as we live in one of the periods of increasing wealth differentials in US history, with very evident psycho-social consequences). So, we have jettisoned the economic underpinnings and registers of psycho-social dynamics and focused on the cultural, as though this is all that mattered. The point being that in as much as historical materialism has been abandoned (nay, demonized, infantilized and made unpatriotic) for more profitable and fashionable theoretical postures, we have become increasingly incapable of dealing with the pressing issue of why imprisonment has become both a preferred and highly profitable way to punish persons, and citizens.

The second point, about the misunderstanding of the foundational work of Rusche and Kirchheimer is also well made. Yet, I would say that their work has remained an underground classic. Or perhaps, I should say, that a whole discipline has grown around and after their text. They are the ones that made it possible for us to think of punishment as unrelated to crime, and imprisonment as a mechanism of capital extraction. And while their work has reverberated quietly, though consistently, I think it is Davis that has sought to bring their work to a new level, when she called for a critical penology, i.e. a science of punishment that is separate and distinct from “criminology.”

On the third point, there is indeed incredible wonderful work outside philosophy, in the social sciences, political science, even in legal studies and constitutional theory. Let me direct your attention briefly to some of this incredibly original, up to date, well researched work. See for instance Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind’s Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment (New Press, 2003): http://www.thenewpress.com/index.php?option=com_title&task=view_title&metaproductid=1122, a book which I used in a seminar for Freshman entitled “The Global Prison Industrial Complex.” But also look at the summer 2007 special issue of Social Research, Vol 74, No. 2.: http://www.socres.org/vol74/issue742.html. As someone who has been influenced by Christian Parenti’s work as well, I am also glad to note that his Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis is coming out in a second and revised edition, see: http://www.versobooks.com/books/nopqrs/nopq-titles/parenti_c_prisons.shtml.

We do not lack outstanding, hair raising, social analyses about the imprisonment crisis in our society. What we do lack is a systematic philosophical analysis about what this says about bodies, race, temporality, work in the age of deindustrialization, and a culture that is puritanically punitive, and in which human rights are under threat, barely half a century after their securing.

Finally, and to the fourth point, I would agree that while minority voices are underrepresented in the academia, and ex-prisoners are even less of a resources to future generations in our schools, I think that we have a particular duty to overcome such dearth and absence. Lately I have been thinking a lot about the Wheather Underground, for several reasons: 1. Their exemplary moral outrage and courage, 2. The way they went from Port Huron Document to their split from SDS in 69-70 over the inefficacy of mass mobilization, as war in Vietnam escalated, 3. Their romantic, unabashed and principled solidarity with the Black Panthers (They simply and unequivocally supported the BP, even as they, in turn, for tactical reasons, denounced the Weatherman (sic), 4. Their solidarity with Cuba, and international, third world socialism; 5. Their countercultural experimentalism; and 6. Their stamina, smartness, and ability to elude for 10 years the brutal and repressive FBI. Some of these people are out there, believe or not: Marc Rudd, for instance, according to wikepedia:

became an instructor of mathematics at Central New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was interviewed in the 2002 documentary, The Weather Underground, and stated that while he believes the group's motivation, to end the Vietnam War, was justified, and that while its Marxist-inspired understanding of the history of United States imperialism was correct, the violent actions performed in pursuit of the goal of its overthrow were wrong.
Mark Rudd has now retired from teaching, and is traveling around the country engaging and supporting the newly reborn Students for a Democratic Society movement. Rudd along with Brian Kelly of Pace SDS have helped establish ties between the new SDS and the the Tent State University movement.

And then there is Bill Ayer, whose name was supposed to brand Barack Obama’s with some sort of evil curse. Here is what we can find about him with a couple of key-strokes. And I would encourage you to look up Bernadine Dohrm. And I am only highlighting the one’s that I am most familiar with, though not necessarily the ones that captured most my moral and pedagogical attention, and imagination, such as Laura Whitehorn and Naomi Esther Jaffe.

Ayers is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education. His interests include teaching for social justice, urban educational reform, narrative and interpretive research, children in trouble with the law, and related issues.[13]
He began his career in primary education while an undergraduate, teaching at the Children’s Community School (CCS), a project founded by a group of students and based on the Summerhill method of education.[14] After leaving the underground, he earned an M.Ed from Bank Street College in Early Childhood Education (1984), an M.Ed from Teachers College, Columbia University in Early Childhood Education (1987) and an Ed.D from Columbia University in Curriculum and Instruction (1987).[13]
He has edited and written many books and articles on education theory, policy and practice, and has appeared on many panels and symposia.
Works
• Education: An American Problem. Bill Ayers, Radical Education Project, 1968, ASIN B0007H31HU
• Hot town: Summer in the City: I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more, Bill Ayers, Students for a Democratic Society, 1969, ASIN B0007I3CMI
• Good Preschool Teachers, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0807729472
• The Good Preschool Teacher: Six Teachers Reflect on Their Lives, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0807729465
• To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0807732625
• To Become a Teacher: Making a Difference in Children's Lives, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0807734551
• City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row, William Ayers (Editor) and Patricia Ford (Editor), New Press, 1996, ISBN 978-1565843288
• A Kind and Just Parent, William Ayers, Beacon Press, 1997, ISBN 978-0807044025
• A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation, Maxine Greene (Editor), William Ayers (Editor), Janet L. Miller (Editor), Teachers College Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0807737217
• Teaching for Social Justice: A Democracy and Education Reader, William Ayers (Editor), Jean Ann Hunt (Editor), Therese Quinn (Editor), 1998, ISBN 978-1565844209
• Teacher Lore: Learning from Our Own Experience, William H. Schubert (Editor) and William C. Ayers (Editor), Educator's International Press, 1999, ISBN 978-1891928031
• Teaching from the Inside Out: The Eight-Fold Path to Creative Teaching and Living, Sue Sommers (Author), William Ayers (Foreword), Authority Press, 2000, ISBN 978-1929059027
• A Simple Justice: The Challenge of Small Schools, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0807739631
• Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment, William Ayers (Editor), Rick Ayers (Editor), Bernardine Dohrn (Editor), Jesse L. Jackson (Author), New Press, 2001, ISBN 978-1565846661
• A School of Our Own: Parents, Power, and Community at the East Harlem Block Schools, Tom Roderick (Author), William Ayers (Author), Teachers College Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0807741573
• Refusing Racism: White Allies and the Struggle for Civil Rights, Cynthia Stokes Brown (Author), William Ayers (Editor), Therese Quinn (Editor), Teachers College Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0807742044
• On the Side of the Child: Summerhill Revisited, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0807744000
• Fugitive Days: A Memoir, Bill Ayers, Beacon Press, 2001, ISBN 0807071242 (Penguin, 2003, ISBN 978-0142002551)
• Teaching the Personal and the Political: Essays on Hope and Justice, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0807744611
• Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom, William Ayers, Beacon Press, 2004, ISBN 978-080703269-5
• Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiques of the Weather Underground 1970-1974, Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones, Seven Stories Press, 2006, ISBN 978-1583227268
• Handbook of Social Justice in Education, William C. Ayers, Routledge, June 2008, ISBN 978-0805859270
• City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row, Ruby Dee (Foreword), Jeff Chang (Afterword), William Ayers (Editor), Billings, Gloria Ladson (Editor), Gregory Michie (Editor), Pedro Noguera (Editor), New Press, August 2008, ISBN 978-1595583383.

We have a living generation of ex-prisoners of the American prison industrial complex, whose insights, work, and inspiration, we have yet to document, process and translate into philosophical insights. In my next post, I will address Rebecca Gordon's also extremely insightful and perspicacious post.

[Eduardo Mendieta]

Rebecca, thanks for the correction on the licenses. I am pretty confident I read that in an article or book, and simply accepted it without verifying. You are absolutely right that there are a myriad of ways in which both Federal and State government continue to punish ex-prisoners even after they have paid their debt to society. I am glad that you point out the relationship between the civil rights legislation and the turn towards imprisonment. I tried to make that point in a recent article on Wacquant, entitled “penalized spaces” (here is a link to the PDF: www.geog.umontreal.ca/.../Références%20par%20thème%202008/Dimension%20sociale/Ghetto%20as%20prison.pdf). This is a point that Glenn C. Loury also makes in his Boston essay: http://bostonreview.net/BR32.4/article_loury.php. During the seventies, after the Civil Rights massive demonstrations, the rise of the Student Movement, Black Power, Weatherman Underground, etc. the consensus developed in Washington that the US was suffering from what at the time was called by members of the Trilateral Commission, a “deficit of governance,” i.e. that there was too much permissiveness and too much democracy. It is evident that the government became more punitive, and pursued a series of undercover operations on citizens (Conintelpro, for example). Indeed, we have to look at what happened after Warren retired from the Supreme Court, and the Chief Justice was taken by Burger and then Rehnquist: the process of the legal constraint of police violence began to be eroded and rolled back. At the same time, during the seventies, under David Rockefeller we began a process of criminalization of drug offenses that along with the criminalization of political engagement, created more penalized offenses. Indeed, I agree with Rebecca that the “race to incarcerate” was part and parcel of a response to the Civil Rights movement. I recommend that you check out this wonderful review of recent literature on the uses of imprisonment as a means of political repression: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070827/lazare.

Rebecca is also right to point out that Davis and I depart from Foucault in the belief that the public visibility of violating bodies, the spectacle of torture and racialized violence, the pageantry of lawless power remain indispensable dimensions of US style governance. Angela Y. Davis has argued in a number of places about the continuity between the plantation flogging, the public lynching, and the police beatings of African Americans and persons of color in general. I more specifically have argued about the psycho-social dimension of the interdependence between public lynchings and the “visible invisibility” of the Ghetto as Prison/Prison as Ghetto. Is there a correlation between the popularity of cop programs on television, and cable networks, and the need to maintain a level of public violence against “racialized bodies”? I guess that is a rhetorical question. I don’t watch television, but when I am away at a conference, or traveling and get to flip through channels, I am always shocked by the casualness, relish (???), with which cops are shown running over blacks trying to get away from them with the police cars, or simply using excessive violence to arrest them. In our book of conversations, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture and Empire(http://www.sevenstories.com/Book/?GCOI=58322100336630), Davis and I link the excessive, racialized, surplus violence in the US to the violence against so-called enemy combatants in Afghanistan and Iraq.

[Andrew Valls]

I have enjoyed watching this discussion develop, and have learned a great deal from it and from Eduardo Mendieta's essay. I tend to come at things from a different theoretical perspective than the one that I think has dominated the discussion, so I thought I would add a couple of points and raise some questions that I think have been neglected so far.

As one who unabashedly calls himself a liberal (in both the philosophical and political senses), I have no trouble agreeing with much of what Mendieta says (or implies), and with much of what seems to be the taken-for-granted consensus of this discussion: in terms of the sheer numbers and the racial and ethnic composition, the current state of incarceration in the United States is a grave injustice. The most up-to-date data on this that I know of is the Pew Center's report, released in February of this year, "One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008." As the title implies one in a hundred American adults are now in prison or jail. We have more prisoners than any other country in the world, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the population. And as for its racial and ethnic disparities, the figures for incarcerated black men is one in 21 and for Hispanic men it's one in 54.

We would all, I assume, condemn this state of affairs. But on what basis do we condemn it? The condemnation asserts a normative judgment, one that should be supported through normative argument. In short, to call it an injustice, and to urge change, we need a standard of justice—a theory of justice, perhaps—from which to work.

This, I believe, is something that Foucault does not give us, but someone like John Rawls does. You may or may not agree with the thrust of Rawls's philosophy, but at least it provides a place to start in thinking about the question, by what standard of justice do we condemn a given aspect of our society as unjust? The answer that Rawls provides, roughly, is that we should judge the "basic structure" of society from the point of view of the least well off. It would seem that Rawls would be highly relevant to these discussions since the least well off in our society are likely to find themselves in prison.

Now Rawls may be a very poor historian or social theorist, but that is no reason to dismiss his ideas as "ideological," and I worry about the dismissiveness of the label. Hence when Mendieta refers to Glenn Loury's recent work, he seems to approve of it despite its use of "dead-end philosophical ideologies like that of Rawls." To the contrary, I would suggest that one cannot read Loury's recent lectures (available on his website at Brown University) and not be impressed by the rigor of his arguments and the force of his conclusions. The power of Loury's conclusions, I submit, rests in large part on his use of the analytical tools of mainstream (ideological?) economics to show how "criminal" behavior is not a reflection of the character of the individuals in question but rather that behavior may be a rational response to their circumstances. "[W]e are not looking down into the souls or at the predetermined qualities of groups when we observe these disparate patterns of behavior," he says (Lecture II, 13). Loury urges that we, as members of a society with a history of racial injustice that is intimately related to current inequalities and incarceration rates, must accept collective responsibility for the conditions that give rise to "deviant" behaviors.

One other work in this area that I would recommend is Tommie Shelby's recent article, "Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto" (Philosophy and Public Affairs, 35, 2, 2007). Shelby uses Rawls to show that, from the point of view of the least well off in this society, the rules of the game, so to speak, are patently unfair. He then encourages us to see "crime" as a refusal to play by those rules.

Well, I did not mean for this to become a brief for Rawls. The main point is that history and social theory can only take us so far. If we are to have any hope of convincing our fellow citizens to take (or support) action aimed at addressing the injustices embedded in our "corrections" system, we must appeal to considerations, arguments, and values that will have some traction. Those values, I suggest, are likely to be liberal values.

In any case, I propose that there be a sort of division of labor in this effort. We need the history and social theory of Foucault, Davis, and Mendieta. But we also need clear normative arguments about why the current state of affairs is an injustice—because most of our fellow citizens, if they think of it at all, do not think of it as such! They need to be convinced, and efforts such as Loury's recent lectures are a great place to start.

And if our arguments are to have any chance of success, then the language that we choose to describe our position(s) must be both accurate and strategically informed—and this leads me to a worry about the phrase "prison abolitionism." I believe that this phrase is unfortunate, both because it is inaccurate in describing the position to which it refers, and it is unnecessarily provocative, and counter-productively so. To take the latter point first, most people, on hearing the phrase, are likely to think, how can we abolish prisons? What would we do with dangerous, violent people who cannot constrained by less coercive means? The phrase immediately makes opponents of those who could potentially be allies.

Second, and more important, the phrase mis-describes what its advocates are saying. If you look, for example, at Angela Davis's book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, she repeatedly says that what she wants to do is not abolish prisons but to reduce the rates of incarceration and the kinds of crimes that make one liable to imprisonment. She wants to create "new institutions that lay claim to the space now occupied by the prison [that] can eventually start to crowd out the prison so that that it would inhabit increasingly smaller areas of our social and psychic landscape" (107-8). She wants "the consistent reduction in the numbers of people who are sent to prison—with the ultimate aim of dismantling the prison system as the dominant mode of punishment" (110). Notice, here, that even when discussing the "ultimate aim," Davis says that the goal is not the abolition of prisons but their demotion, so to speak, as our primary recourse to "crime."

Davis has some very sensible proposals for reducing incarceration rates: decriminalization of drug use, greater reliance on models of restorative justice, etc. In substance, her conclusions do not differ all that much from the Pew report I referred to earlier. It calls for states to "broaden[] the mix of sanctions in their correctional toolbox" (21). The Pew report grounds much of its reasoning on considerations of cost, while I would prefer to emphasize considerations of justice, but no matter: the authors of the Pew report and members of the prison abolition movement are natural allies. Both are concerned with the scale of incarceration and the racial and ethnic disparities.

I understand that the phrase "prison abolition" is intended to invoke the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century, and I was fascinated by Davis's account (drawing on the research of others) of the similarities between the slave plantation and the post-bellum Southern prison. But whatever the historical connections between slavery and prisons, substantively they are quite distinct. This is borne out by the observation that, while calling her position "abolitionism" Davis nevertheless calls for the reduction, not elimination, of the role of prisons in our society. It is hard to imagine nineteenth century abolitionists calling for the reduction, not the abolition, of slavery.

I don't know if others will find these remarks helpful or interesting. In any case, thanks to all of you, especially Ron and Eduardo, for this discussion.

[Eduardo Mendieta]

Andrew, thank for the insightful and challenging post. Incidentally, I do hope that Jeffrey Paris jumps in, as he is actually writing a major work on Rawls, interestingly enough from the standpoint of a Foucauldian genealogical perspective. I am glad that you bring up Rawls and argue that if our pleas on favor of the victims of the gargantuan prison industrial complex are to have any traction, they should be articulated in the language that most average US citizens understand, i.e. liberalism. This is an important point. I am not so convinced that most average US citizens are liberals, mostly because we have so many different and divergent notions of what liberal means. Mostly, however, because the US polity over the last century has produced, deliberately, a rather apolitical, or depoliticized type of citizenry, one that I would describe as credit card liberal, or laisse fair liberal. That over the last three decades Republicans have ruled the White House on a politics of getting government off your backs is irrefutable proof that our contemporary notion of liberalism is less political and more economic. The President of the US that gave Rawls the Presidential Medal, a rare thing for a philosopher in the US, was none of the republican presidents, but Clinton, someone who also was not strong on political liberalism, even if he is generations ahead from Reagan and the Bush dynasty. What I am getting around is the following: liberalism, especially the kind that has become dominant in contemporary US, is one of the main culprits, or catalysts, in the rise of the prison crisis. Many sociologist have show, with careful studies, how the argument about community safety, and rights of citizens, economic cost and benefit analysis, have weighted in favor of sacrificing particular sections of the citizenry. I am thinking of Gottschalk, and many of the authors in the Social Research special issue on Prison from 2007: (http://socialresearch.metapress.com/app/home/issue.asp?referrer=parent&backto=journal,4,25;homemainpublications,1,1;)
Let us assume, for the moment, that in a generous philosophical-political reading ‘political liberalism,’ means: primacy of individual rights, commitment to legal procedure, subordination of the economic to the political, and that a bill of rights is both explicit and when not explicit, there are enough norms to guide us in their elaboration, and finally, that it is the task of a rule of law state to secure and preserve those rights. The state, in this picture, has the primary function of protecting individual bearers of these hypothetical rights. Yet, everything about the rise of the prison industrial complex has to do precisely with these very assumptions. This is why in my essay I try to articulate the ways in which mass imprisonment is more than just a political machine that violates rights, or subordinates them to the rights of the larger group, or engages in some sort of utilitarian Benthamite calculus. Prisons are also machines that produces many, many, positive effects that are essential to the very functioning of the entire liberal system. I talk about surplus violence, about the psycho-social contract that is cathexed in the visible making invisible of certain types of citizens, and most important, I talk about the embedded dimensions of prisons in the very racial history of the US. I would put it this way: Rawls’ minimin principle actually occludes the very economic-political productivity of imprisonment. It is not that blacks and minority prisoners are the least well off –though they are---it is that they have been so rendered by a system that benefits politically, economically, socially, racially, socio-psychically from their mass incarceration. In a cynical reading of Rawls that I would not endorse, one nonetheless could say: the least well off of our society should be sacrificed for the supposed benefit of the larger community, especially because they do not have political resources by means to which to halt their own sacrifice. Come to think of it, I think this is what Derrick Bell had in mind when he dreamt up the story of the “Space Traders” who offered the president of the US wealth in exchange for its Black Citizens. We all know how Bell ends the story.

I like to say in defense of Davis’ use of “abolitionism” that the point is to precisely underscore the racial and racist dimension of contemporary prisons in the US…that prisons cannot perform a viable social function (and whether they can do at all is another question) until they have been de-coupled or uncoupled from their racist uses and dimensions. Secondly, Davis, et. al, refer to themselves as neo-Abolitionist because they have a long historical memory in which the contemporary prison system is linked to a long history of the exclusion of Black and minorities from US society, a history that goes through the ghetto, lynching, Black Laws, to the imprisonment of the slave plantation. In this sense, Abolitionisms means that we have an unfinished agenda that goes back to the end of the Civil War. I will make sure to read Shelby’s article, by the way.

[Andrew Valls]

Thanks, Eduardo, for your generous response to my post. Your points are well taken: one cannot assume that most Americans are liberals, for there is too much evidence to the contrary; and the language of liberalism is too often appropriated for illiberal ends. Public support for mass incarceration is an example of both of these observations. I also agree that the racial make-up of our prisons is a reflection of our unfinished reckoning with race—and hence is indeed a continuation of the struggle that began with the abolitionist movement. Here again I find Loury's analysis helpful. In answer to the question, how can Americans consent to the caging of so many of their fellow citizens? Loury answers that the stereotypic prisoner is black, and that blacks are THEM, not one of US. There is no sense among many Americans that, "There but for the grace of god go I." When white kids shoot up a high school, there is much hand-wringing about what is wrong with our kids? What are we doing wrong? When the subject is 'black crime," the question becomes, what is wrong with them? It is hard to be optimistic about the prospects for overturning this basic mindset. Derrick Bell's "racial realism," his view that racism is essentially permanent, seems all too plausible.

In light of this, maybe the Pew Center report had the right strategy: focus on cost rather than on race or justice. Focus on the mentally ill, who need treatment rather than imprisonment. Focus on the nonviolent offenders who are nevertheless serving long sentences. Focus on the large numbers in prison for technical violations of their parole or probation.

Again, though, it is hard to be optimistic—and maybe it is true that liberalism performs an ideological function in support of all of this. If liberalism supports capitalism (in some form) then it may very well be complicit in the unholy alliance between corporations whose profit motive is to maximize the number of prisoners, politicians who wish to appear tough on crime, and voters eager to secure their rights—even at the expense of others'. Not to mention media corporations that give more attention to crime even as its rate declines—leaving the impression on viewers that it is rising rather than falling. The incarceration rates in the United States certainly lend credence to the view that there is something authoritarian in Western liberalism—since the U.S. locks up its citizens at higher rates than the most authoritarian of governments. I would want to argue that all of this is a distortion of liberalism, rather than its true implications, yet it would be hard to deny that the language of liberalism is all too easily put in the service of authoritarian ends. This is a point that, I think, has been driven home by your article and the subsequent discussion.

I will look for Jeffrey Price's work, and check out that issue of Social Research. Thanks again for a really interesting and challenging exchange!

[Jeffrey Paris]

I'm glad to see the conversation continuing in such a nuanced fashion, thanks in large part to Andrew's contributions and Eduardo's carefully thought-out response. In particular, if folks passed over it, I want to emphasize the importance of Eduardo's argument that so-called "liberalism" (though we should really be referring to something like "postmodern capitalism," instead) requires as its complement the redistribution of surplus violence across certain swaths of the population, a little recognized point by those who believe to the contrary that liberalism is fundamentally a violence free conception of state-organized transactional relationships. But for now, I'll put aside the question of liberalism and ideology, addressing them in a separate post that I hope I can get to soon.

For the moment, and perhaps of more immediate interest to readers, is the question: What is the purpose of prison abolitionism, if it has the potentially pernicious effect of alienating "supporters" of prison reform? Andrew writes that the phrase "prison abolition" is both inaccurate and "immediately makes opponents of those who could potentially be allies."

By "inaccurate", Andrew means at least that Davis does not really support the abolition of prisons herself, but only their delimitation. I would caution Andrew not to reverse "goals" and "means" in Davis's argument, as when he writes that "the goal is not the abolition of prisons but their demotion." To the contrary, decarceration (in the sense of scaling back imprisonment via alterations to mandatory minimums, drug sentencing, repeat offender laws, excarceration and diversionary programs, good time regulations, parole violations, etc., many of which are perhaps best described in Michael Jacobsen's "Downsizing Prisons," NYU Press, 2005) appears in her work as (1) a means of demonstrating and practicing alternative institutions that serve the communities within which offenders are being produced; (2) a figure of proof to skeptics that imprisonment is not a catch-all solution to social ills; and (3) a moral obligation to the hundreds of thousands of men and women who are most directly harmed by the psychic, sexual, and economic abuses of imprisonment. But she is quite clear (what is it about "ultimate aim" that isn't clear?) that punishment via imprisonment is an institution that must be dismantled, even if it cannot be dismantled independently of transforming other networked institutions regulating the social distribution of resources. Put simply, less imprisonment is both a final and a mediate good.

So, how far is it from "less imprisonment" to "no imprisonment"? One of the great contributions of social theorists like Foucault and Davis (and Wacquant as well, though I'll come to him in a minute) is that they denude the myth that imprisonment is a historical absolute. Ask your students when the prison as a mechanism of punishment developed, and you'll find that most believe it stretches back to antiquity -- just as they believe that "race" is a biological feature and that "slavery" has been practiced by every civilization in history. When Davis or others refer to "abolition," they do not mean the cancellation of all forms of restraint of transgressors, but rather the elimination of the system of imprisonment. Abolitionists may differ in the techniques they think will succeed the prison in maintaining social harmony, and some may see a role for segregation/isolation/exile techniques.

Do you remember in Marge Piercy's "Woman on the Edge of Time" when Consuela asks a representative of the utopian collective where the prisons are, and is told that there are none? Rather, offenders that cannot be reintegrated into the community -- typically murderers -- are branded and exiled, to seek their fortunes in other communities. Those who repeat their grave offense even once are executed. The reason? While execution is not seen as morally justified, the harm that is done to *those who are compelled to serve as their watchers* outweighs the harm done to repeat offenders. So, in this book at least, Piercy offers an abolitionist picture, which retains an exilic and potentially executionist component. (Some similar thoughts can be had of More's "Utopia," as recently described in Keally McBride's "Punishment and Political Order," Univ. of Michigan Press, 2007). The point is that all abolitionist views require imaginative and even plural and contested approaches to community protection, even while they all seek as an absolute criterion the end of the system of imprisonment. (As a side note, perhaps more discussion on the difference between a "system of imprisonment" and the "restraint of malefactors" needs to happen.)

Finally, let me also second Eduardo's response to the objection that Andrew gives to Davis's invocation of "abolition" as a tie-in to slavery. Eduardo writes that neo-abolitionism looks to the the "long history of the exclusion of Black and minorities from US society," which is correct (and Davis spends significantly more time on the development of Black Codes and convict-lease than she does on the plantation-prison connection, while Wacquant focuses on the shift from ghetto to hyper-ghetto). The question is not whether prisons and plantations are "substantively distinct," as Andrew has it, a point which is after all rather obvious and uncontroversial. Instead, the question must be whether they are "functionally distinct." As Wacquant has argued, what we should be looking for is functional equivalency and structural homology. To be functionally equivalent, two institutions must serve the same purpose (in his words, "coercive confinement of a stigmatized population") and to be structrually homologous, they must comfort the same types of social relations and patterns of authority (a long list here, including the reproduction of class and labor exploitation via the desocialization of wage labor, the regeneration of racialized, semi-permeable boundary zones to sustain hierarchies and dispossession, the organization of a surveillance apparatus simultaneous to the creation of a "population" as an object of biopolitics, as described so beautifully in Foucault's recently released "Security, Territory, Population," CdF lectures of 1977-78, etc.).

As a coda, in my work teaching in prisons the last few years, specifically at San Quentin, I have yet to find any single inmate who is a self-identified "abolitionist." They know too much about the damaged psyches, the violent potentials, the greed and manipulation and tendencies to thwart their own success, that have been inculcated in their fellow inmates. In their words, there's "no way" they "ever" want these guys in the next cell on the streets with their sisters and daughters. But they also typically understand that imprisonment is not an individualized relationship between state, victim, and criminal, but rather a "system" that produces criminalized bodies to bear the violence and stigma and wage destructuring required by postmodern capitalism, and that it needs dismantling. And so they are abolitionist in Davis's sense. Abolitionism, it seems, is not a singular analysis, but a goal that can be striven for by a huge variety of otherwise contentious groups of people. It is also a vantage point that makes possible efficacious critique of contemporary social relations.

[Ronald Sundstrom]

This discussion has been a pleasure to read and has added several items to my summer reading list. I share many of the discussants worries about the efficacy of liberal approaches to the problems with mass incarceration. Likewise, I share with Andrew at least an initial tendency to think these issues through liberal frameworks. This tendency makes sense, again at least initially, because of a widespread desire to be in conversation with dominant traditions of political theory and structure. Further, liberal theory can be used to identify the moral wrongs and injustices of mass incarceration: it provides a normative background by which to make such claims (here, I share Andrew's criticism of the Foucauldian approach).

I am grateful for Jeff's defense and explanation of Davis' abolitionism. Some version of her view of prison abolitionism, as Andrew hinted, may be wedded to Rawlsian and other liberal approaches to social justice.

All the same there are many good reasons left to be skeptical about broad liberal (especially U.S. and neoliberal) approaches to this problem. Those problems were nicely summarized in the preceding comments. A facet of this problem is on veiw in Loury's discussion, in his second Tanner lecture, of his frustration over the libertarian language of absolute conceptions individual responsibility and the assumption of absolute non-responsibility for others.

Whether, in the end, such approaches lead to "dead ends" depends on the specific policies they give rise to, and how they address the various elements of the problem of mass incarceration. A major element of the mass incarceration is race and racialization. I'll take up this issue and Jeff's response to Andrew in a later post.

[Keally McBride]

Thank you all, I need to jump in belatedly and from a slightly different perspective as I am a political theorist by both training and proclivity.

In response to comments about liberalism, I wholeheartedly agree, and think it helpful to distinguish between the philosophical justification for incarceration a la Bentham which is of course not at all bloodless, and the practical support for the current incarceration debacle that comes from the cultures of (non)citizenship and capitalist zero-sum calculations that exist in our current political system (and others such as Britain, increasingly in France etc.).

There is another impulse behind incarceration though, which was more democratic, genuinely democratic in fact. This is grossly unfashionable to bring up at this point, because there is no vestige of this impulse left. Tom Dumm's book Democracy and Punishment and the fourth chapter in my book Punishment and Political Order, looks at the idea of incarceration as stemming from a state and social group that believed in transforming citizens into genuinely virtuous folks. Dumm traces how they realized their ambitions were too much, and "behavior" was the most that could be expected. Recently I have started to connect how this tradition of the penitentiary drew much inspiration from Loyola's asceticism. In effect, can we think of the prison as a monstrous outgrowth of a desire for personal transformation--a vestige of a tradition that wanted to free the soul from the body in order to create virtue? And of course, as this society (and its social imaginaries--thanks Ron) is now gone, the prison then started to interface with the mechanistic and behaviorist culture that replaced that one.

I started to think about all of these things after compiling a list of all the great philosophical works that have been composed in prisons. Angela Davis also remarked that she felt "free" in prison in a new way, as did Emma Goldman. How can we account for these moments of clarity, oppositionality and grace within what is a monstrous machine designed to rob inmates of dignity and freedom?

[Andrew Dilts]

Wow. what an amazing thread. It's very rare to get to see such smart things being said on the internet. I'm a huge fan of literally every person on here, and most of you were already heavily footnoted in my dissertation.

I only want to add something small following on Jeffrey's point about security, territory, population, and the other post-Discipline and Punish work, especially regarding the question of liberalism and neo-liberalism. If you haven't already rushed out to get the new translation of Birth of Biopolitics (Naissance de la biopolitique), you should do so now and skip straight to the March 14, 21, and 28 lectures for Foucault's presentation of the Chicago School's work on crime and punishment, with particular attention there to Gary Becker's work (which completely revolutionized mainstream criminology). The crux here is that the heart of the american neo-liberal program of expanding economic analysis and the market form to all social and political spheres is a re-invocation of homo œconomicus as the organizing figure of not just all life, but especially criminology. In these lectures, Foucault is extremely interested in this new version of homo œconomicus as an "entrepreneur of the self", which turns out to be a direct refutation of the figure of the delinquent which was "fabricated" as the "twin" of the penitentiary and the use of psychiatric testimony in courts (see the first few lectures of Abnormal for this). This is the famous figure that Becker invokes to explain how there is no anthropological difference between a murder and a traffic violation from the standpoint of the agent. Ron is right to be concerned here about the liberal/neoliberal/libertarian language that is now mainstream even in left-leaning criminology (for the love your soul, NEVER go to an American Society of Criminology meeting), because the primary feature of this kind of conception of the criminal is that they become radically responsible for their actions (just as a market investor takes on both the positive and negative risks of their investments).

Foucault was particularly attentive to this the neo-liberal homo œconomicus and seemed to be looking at precisely the right place to see what direction american criminal justice policy would pursue (even if it routinely and consistently failed to live up to its own rational choice ideology). It has to be always remembered that it was much of the political left who fought for the sentencing guidelines that completely redefined prison terms in the 70's and 80's, and which played no small part in the rise of mass incarceration (Michael Tonry's "Malign Neglect" does a nice job keeping us honest about just who came up with the war on drugs, after all).

The problem, of course, is that neo-liberalism, like the liberalism of Bentham and Beccaria before it, sees itself as a reformatory movement (Both Gary Becker and Judith Shklar, interestingly, compared themselves explicitly to Beccaria in their writings) and a totalizing theory of politics (especially Rawls' anti-agonistic version in Political Liberalism and Becker et. al's refusal to see a world of politics outside of the market form). The position which is inevitably taken up is something like, "The problem isn't with (neo)liberalism, it's that we just aren't being liberal enough! do it right and everything will work out!" What is so easily missed are the foundational and continuing exclusions which must be take place in order to bring this liberal utopia into existence. And in the context of liberal theories of punishment and the a frank and forthright genealogy of US practices, this seems to play out in a persistently raced, gendered, and sexualized exclusions in bodily (incarceration), political, (disenfranchisement being only the most visible), and philosophical forms (I'm thinking here of the excellent work in Nancy Tuana's recent edited volume on epistemologies of ignorance). The thing is that these exclusions, to pick up on Keally's point, while having occurred in a democratic context, haven't been distributed democratically. That is, in so far as there is potentially some necessary set of sacrifices or burdens that are necessary for the functioning of liberal ideology, those burdens are always carried by the same folks. Danielle Allen makes this point better than anyone in "Talking to Strangers", I think, but it remains true: the burdens of democratic exclusion, of criminal 'justice', aren't negotiated equally, nor even fairly.

And this, I think, has always been a part of liberal theory, but a part that liberal thinkers have conveniently ignored. No wonder Bonnie Honig can level such a damning criticism against Rawls: all he has to say about punishment is that there are just some "bad characters" out that cannot be avoided (see "Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics", 1993 Cornell UP). No wonder that Locke's foundation of civil society rests on the right to execute the law of nature, i.e. to punish a thief with death (excessive? nope, not when property = life and thieves = murderers and the very concept of proportionality has no binding meaning). Punishment confounds us (and gets routinely turned into just a question about justification) because we (philosophers) ignore the criminalized other who has been (and continues to be) sacrificed.

Which is why this thread is so damned exciting! Maybe we're finally getting past that particular disavowal.

[John705]

Very nice site!