"Factories of Exclusion": The Politics of Prisons in the Era of Globalization
Maybe nothing can save us tonight,
not love or religion
or the needle that comes to us
in sleep and flowers in our veins.
.…Maybe nothing changes
and maybe not even blood
splashed across this concrete
would make a difference, would buy
our way back. Maybe there’s no currency
they’ll take, no promise
they’ll believe. Maybe not even
death can get us out this time,
and maybe it’s finally too late
for us, brother, maybe what remains
is just a little static on your radio
a music that plays on the far side
of these bars, something we confuse
for church bells, a child singing,
a shadow that steps to meet us in the dark.
--from “Vivaldi on the Far Side of the Bars” by M.A. Jones
Written in Arizona State Prison, Buckeye, Arizona 1982.1
Introduction: Public Enemy Number 2,256,947…and Counting
The statistics are becoming all too familiar, but remain shocking nonetheless. The prison population of the United States has increased in real numbers from 196,000 inmates in 1972 to approximately 2.2 million today. Over five times as many U.S. citizens are now locked up compared to thirty years ago. 2 When pretrial supervision, jail, probation, and parole are taken into account, the number of Americans under the control of correctional systems has been estimated at around 7 million (Austin, p. 434). The U.S. has become the world leader in imprisonment, holding over 20% of the incarcerated population of the entire planet—and this figure does not include tens of thousands currently being held as a result of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, some in undisclosed sites without charges or trial, as part of the new “war on terror.”3 America’s strategy of crime management through mass incarceration is now being globalized under the auspices of U.S. imperialism.
Several converging factors explain the recent explosion of the domestic prison population; these include changes in sentencing practice, increased policing of drug-related crimes, heightened racial profiling, and the rise in the likelihood that a conviction will result in a prison term, as opposed to a non-custodial punishment. Tough on crime policies which yielded longer sentences and mandatory minimum sentencing continued to prey on voter fears throughout the nineties. Surveys of prison populations clearly demonstrate that the prison population is composed largely of people from underprivileged backgrounds. And many studies demonstrate a direct correlation between the vogue for prison building and the decline of the social safety nets provided by the welfare state, with the result that jails and prisons have become holding tanks for the mentally ill, the homeless, the addicted.4 A recent report finds that the most punitive states are those with the least commitment to welfare, housing, and job programs, while those with more extensive welfare nets have dramatically lower rates of incarceration. Its authors conclude that the contraction of welfare programs and the expansion of penal institutions “reflects the emergence of an alternative mode of governance that is replacing, to varying degrees, the modernist strategy based on rehabilitation and welfarism.”5
If poverty is a key factor in determining the likelihood of a prison sentence, race and ethnicity play an even more definitive role. Half of the people now held in U.S. prisons are African-American, a percentage far out of line with their presence in the U.S. general population (about 13%). 43% of the fast-rising female prison population are African American; 12% are Latina. Numerous criminological studies show that African-American and Hispanic males are subject to racial profiling. They are also sent to prison at a far higher rate than whites for similar offenses, and in particular for non-violent offenses.6 A significant number are incarcerated for drug offenses under the strict laws passed in the ongoing ‘war on drugs.’ Whereas in 1980, one of every 16 state prison inmates was incarcerated for a drug offense, by 1995, one in every four state prisoners was a drug offender. There are marked disparities in the actual amount of time served by African-Americans and whites for similar offenses.7 If current trends continue, a shocking 29% of African-American males born today can expect to spend time in prison.8 In certain neighborhoods, imprisonment has become not an exception but a rite of passage.
In the last few decades the goal of rehabilitating prisoners has largely been abandoned in favor of more punitive attitudes. Funding for prison libraries, Pell Grants for prisoners to obtain college credit, and job training programs have been eliminated on the federal level and cut back by most states. In the U.S. this political reversal began in the eighties with the election of Ronald Reagan, one of whose first acts as president was to eliminate legal aid for the poor. The impact of the new punitive attitudes and the rejection of penal welfarism has been dramatic: longer incarceration with no job training, education, and rehabilitative services becomes an increasingly life-defining condition. 9 When prisoners do return to the outside world, in addition to the stigma of ex-con status and parole, in some states they are permanently disenfranchised and live out their lives as non-citizens. Nearly five million Americans cannot currently vote because they have been convicted of a felony. In Atlanta, Georgia, one in seven black males cannot vote due to felonies; in the states of Florida and Mississippi, nearly one-third of the states’ black male population cannot vote.
One could perhaps make a utilitaritarian argument that the enormous expense of building and maintaining so many high-tech cages could be justified if crime has actually been prevented and law-abiding citizens made significantly safer; however, the fear of crime and sense of insecurity remains endemic (despite falling crime rates in many categories of crime). Meanwhile, the homicide rate in the U.S. continues to outstrip that of Western Europe by four to one. When it comes to violent crime, voters are not getting what they are paying for, as Americans are hardly free to walk the streets of many cities (this is especially marked if one compares the safety of our cities to those in Europe or Japan). Many criminologists agree that prisons have not been particularly effective in combating crime, especially in its most feared forms.10 We have managed to obtain the worst of both worlds: a population at high risk of violent crime—particularly rape, homicide, and aggravated assault--alongside an extremely expensive but largely ineffectual solution which targets the poor and members of racial minorities, criminalizing them in large numbers for non-violent offenses.
How then did things come to such a pass? This essay will briefly sketch out a history of the prison and the penal philosophies which have justified its existence, leading up to the current moment. I assume that mass incarceration has been America’s response to the economic and social disruptions of late capitalism: prisons that once put socially deviant bodies to work are now being used to contain the dispossessed domestic labor force that global capitalism has rendered superfluous. Crime has been conceptualized as a form of domestic terrorism primarily committed by an alien element, rather than the predictable result of these economic and social disruptions. Mass incarceration as a political strategy builds upon the long and ugly history of American racism and the popularity of ‘punish-the-poor’ policies which have spurred the dismantling of the welfare state. A nation already inured to protracted sentencing and the mass warehousing of large percentages of its own population has unsuprisingly not resisted the idea of infinite detention of foreign nationals and “enemy combatants.” Much of the apparatus and justification being utilized in the current war on terror was already well in place before September 11.
In the New Penal Colony
While the following is overly schematic, my goal is to trace some general connections between the characteristic approaches to legal punishment and the labor needs of particular periods. In order to narrow my focus, I am limiting this historical trajectory to a brief discussion of three modes of punishment: 1) transportation; 2) the penitentiary; and 3) the contemporary correctional facility. In the English-speaking world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the advent of the prison in its current form, the usual aim of punishment was not to reform an offender but either to shame him into acceptable behavior or to get rid of him or her altogether. Non-capital offenses were typically dealt with through the banishment or transportation of the criminal, through fines or restitution paid to the victim, or through various means of public shaming, such as pillories or the stocks. Transportation to the colonies was, when possible, the preferred method, as it solved both the problem of ridding the metropole of undesirables and provided desperately-needed labor for the undeveloped lands first of the Americans and later, of Australia. These undesirables included Irish political agitators as well as the urban poor newly displaced from privatized rural lands. In the West Indian colonies and parts of North America, the bulk of the labor problem was of course ‘solved’ by the massive importation of kidnapped Africans and the infamous institution of chattel slavery was organized into an early form of large-scale, factory model agricultural production.
Transportation of convicts to North America ended with the American Revolution, and by the 1830’s New South Wales, then the largest penal colony in the world, also began to balk at its status as a receptacle for English cast-offs. Another solution had to be found to the growing problem of what were known as “the dangerous classes.” The early penitentiaries, the pet schemes of enlightenment thinkers like Jeremy Bentham and humanitarian penal reformers like John Howard, Benjamin Rush, and Elizabeth Fry, had been proposed as rational, progressive approaches to crime and punishment. The concept of segregating offenders from the public and from each other quickly supplanted the carnivalesque festivals which had grown up around the spectacles of stocks, chain gangs, and executions. Once perceived as necessary displays of state power, changing mores now saw vulgarity and disruptions to public order. Instead of the gruesome image of the gallows, the awe-inspiring image of the prison building itself, in all its massive solemnity, was expected to deter potential criminals. Prisons were therefore among the most elaborate and expensive construction projects of the new United States; usually built with civic pride in the center of a city or town, open to tourists and visitors, and promoted as visible signs of modernity and civilization.
Bentham’s ingenious (but unbuilt) model prison, the Panopticon, allowed for the isolation of the criminalized person from the larger public while constant surveillance and efficient regulation monitored his every move. The principle of continuous separation sought to ensure that inmates were insulated from bad influences and had ample time to reflect upon their misdeeds. Bentham assumed that learning the value of work, self-discipline, and the submission to authority would eventually allow the criminal to re-enter society as a more productive and godly citizen. An often overlooked element of Foucault’s seminal account of the panoptic system in the nineteenth century was its role in reinforcing the work ethic in the age of industrialization. From their inception modern prisons and workhouses were used to train domestic labor forces and to exact compliance from those who resisted the harsh rhythms of the new industrial factories. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century saw new laws passed to punish vagrants, trespassers, poachers, outliers, and those without visible means of support. Therefore, as Zygmunt Bauman stresses, the prison had an integral role to play in a time when independent artisans and craftsmen were resisting the regimes of industrial capitalism. Bauman reads Bentham’s Pantopticon as representative of the widespread efforts of the time to resolve the problems confronted by “pioneers of the routine, monotonous, mechanical rhythm of modern industrial labour….all kinds of panoptical-style houses of confinement were first and foremost factories of discipline—more precisely, factories of disciplined labour” (p. 29).
While the basic architecture of the modern prison has not changed very much since the nineteenth century, the fundamental philosophy behind these prison-machines certainly has. The contemporary super-maximum security facility, or Supermax, is designed to facilitate lockdowns and solitary confinement; like the panopticon, to promote isolation without privacy. Thus at first glance it looks like an updated and more technologically sophisticated version of Bentham’s design. However, a significant change has taken place in its primary social function, a distinction Bauman captures in his reconfiguration of the role of the prison from a factory of discipline to a factory of exclusion. Whereas ‘discipline factories’ produced docile bodies for industrial projects and sought to ensure that the work ethic was disseminated, by force if necessary, to all segments of the population, ‘exclusion factories’ operate first and foremost to quarantine a targeted group. As long as the body of the prisoner is removed from sight and is perceived to be the object of punitive action on the part of the state, the exclusion factory has attained its goal.
A key distinction between the regime of exclusion and the regime of discipline lies in the conception of the inmate as a productive or potentially productive human being. The penal philosophy behind the nineteenth-century prison explicitly assumed that prisoners were at least theoretically reformable, and that they were as valuable in terms of labor-power as any other population. ‘Criminals’ and ‘delinquents’ were often constructed as those who presumably could work but did not. A culture under the sway of the Protestant work ethic generally attributed redemptive capacities to work that applied across the board—nineteenth-century prisons therefore ranged from highly organized work camps to clusters of solitary cells where inmates carried out useful tasks on an individual basis. This liberal belief in redemption or rehabilitation continued well into the twentieth century before giving way to the politics of exclusion. As Bauman explains, “The whole point of the Panopticon, the paramount purpose of the constant surveillance, was to make sure that the inmates go through certain motions, follow certain routines, do certain things. But what the inmates of the Pelican Bay prison [a California supermax] do inside their solitary cells does not matter at all” (p. 32).”
The prison as warehouse is a political response to postmodern de-industrialization and to the heightened volatility of late capitalism. With the gradual move from an economic ethos based on production to one based on consumption, labor as a punishment and as a (hypothetical) vehicle to redemption has become obsolete. A domestic reserve labor force is no longer as necessary. And, once relatively privileged vis a vis the rest of the world, the position of the working classes in the U.S. has seriously eroded as manufacturing has been exported to the global ‘South.’ Newly decentralized arrangements of production continue to push companies and states to ‘restructure’ and downsize; in general the economic pressure is toward a smaller, better trained, and more flexible domestic force with an ever-widening range of jobs and services outsourced to developing countries. This now familiar story has been vividly dramatized in documentaries like Michael Moore’s Roger and Me and theorized by numerous works such as Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, both of which highlight the criminalization of poverty in the wake of deindustrialization (although neither example registers the full extent of contemporary mass incarceration.) The effect of capital migration has been, as David Harvey writes, “to make the violence and creative destruction of uneven geographical development just as widely felt in the traditional heartlands of capital as elsewhere” (p. 70).
In a globalized economy characterized by chronic, long term-unemployment in the “first world” and a seemingly endless reserve army of labor in the “third,” there is literally no workplace awaiting first world prisoners upon release. In the past few years, increased militarization has provided a partial alleviation of this unemployment situation, and it is always possible that a draft may yet be reinstated. Yet what needs to be emphasized is the shift this new de-industrialized economy has produced on the logic and purpose of incarceration. As Bauman points out, “confinement is neither a school for employment nor the second best, forcible method to augment the ranks of productive labour when the ordinary and preferred, ‘voluntary’ methods fail….It is, rather…an alternative to employment; a way to dispose of, incapacitate or remove out of sight a considerable chunk of the population who are not needed as producers and for whom there is no work ‘to be taken back to’”(p. 31).
Prisons have become oblivion machines, designed to cordon off non-productive groups or groups which have been made ‘redundant’; to segregate them from the social body and erase them from the national consciousness. In this sense there has been a harking back to the politics of banishment more typical of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the racialized nature of the U.S. prison population makes them apartheid machines as well. Drawing historical parallels between the earlier patterns of segregation and ghettoization of African-American populations to their present rate of incarceration, Loic Wacquant traces the ways in which the new factories of exclusion update an old racial theme.11 Further, he argues that prisons serve to muffle and contain resentment when it erupts beyond tolerable bounds. Reading prison riots as displaced versions of the large-scale ghetto uprisings of the nineteen–sixties, he notes that prison riots represent much more isolated and limited outbursts, and are rarely reported in the mass media. Not only are prisons functioning to marginalize populations that new economic arrangements are making redundant, but, as Wacquant points out, they effectively conceal and contain signs of ongoing African-American revolt.
Another significant disappearance is the true level of unemployment in the U.S. as prisons shift the underemployed and the unemployed out of sight. Mass incarceration has meant that the social and economic damage inflicted by de-industrialization is systematically underreported. Our comparatively low unemployment figures are frequently used to demonstrate the health of the U.S. economy and its superiority next to the ‘stagnant’ welfare states of Western Europe. However, these low numbers misrepresent the real rate of unemployment since prisons absorb so many of those who would otherwise be counted. According to David Downes, this factor alone has reduced the official figure for male unemployment an astonishing “30-40 percent since the early 1990’s.” For the inner city areas depleted of manufacturing jobs and, increasingly, all economic activity, the statistical distortion caused by mass incarceration has been even more dramatic.12 As filmmaker Ashley Hunt sums up the contemporary situation, the tenuous version of the welfare state which developed in the U.S. in the nineteen-sixties and seventies has been dismantled in favor of a different set of priorities--“the War on Poverty has been transformed into other Wars: the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, the War on Immigrants and the War on Terrorism. These new wars are paid for with the same money from yesterday’s War on Poverty, but they confront the dangers of inequality with systems of control, and target our daily struggles for justice with criminalization, militarization, and prisons.”13
What Is To Be Done?
What is to be done? Difficult though it will be to shift public misconceptions of prisons and incarcerated people, that is the immediate task. A major step toward the reversal of mass incarceration is the understanding of criminalization as an ideological process of scapegoating and segregating particular populations rather than as a fixed identity and an unredeemable moral condition. Criminalization needs to be contextualized: after all, a significant number of currently incarcerated U.S. citizens would not have been imprisoned as recently as twenty-five years ago. Poverty and joblessness (it should go without saying) should not equal criminalization. The other major step is bringing the excluded back into view, and back into the social polity.
The nature and success of oblivion factories means that prisons and prisoners have literally ‘disappeared’ from the public consciousness. For many United Statesians, prisons and their inhabitants have been entirely displaced from our field of vision. The huge nineteenth-century penitentiaries and reformatories have for the most part been torn down, occasionally lingering on as quaint relics of a more barbarous past. Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary is now a tourist attraction. Ohio’s Mansfield Reformatory has ironically taken on a new life as the set for Hollywood prison films. The massive Ohio Penitentiary, for example, which once commandeered the heart of the state’s capital city, became a civic embarrassment by the early nineties and was razed to the ground at the end of the decade (a campaign by historical preservationists failed to save the old prison, the site of the country’s most devastating prison fire in the 1930’s). Now a 1000-car parking lot adjacent to a new hockey stadium has erased every trace of the vast stone complex. Today’s “correctional facilities” merge discreetly into other institutional environments in cities or, more typically, are hidden away in remote rural areas.14 Geographically distant from the majority of the population, actual prisoners are never seen, their existence easy to forget unless one has personal connections with them. In a mass-mediated culture particularly attuned to visual stimuli, such invisibility equals non-personhood. The prison as a workplace and as a social institution has now been literally decentered from our cultural sensibility even as it has taken up a vastly expanded, structurally rooted, and perhaps more permanent place within it. Without attempting to revive any nostalgia for the penitentiary, unquestionably the site of many horrors, at least it stood as a stark reminder of the actions being taken by the state in the name of justice.
If, as Angela Davis insists, the ideological work of the prison-industrial complex is its promise to “relieve us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of late capitalism,” then refusing to forget this ‘disappeared’ population is, in the present conjuncture, itself a political gesture.15 Clearly other voices desperately need to be heard amidst the proliferation of messages that engender a segregated culture of fear and that seek to reassure us of the efficacy, rationality, and stability of the modern prison system. There is still time to dismantle the prison-industrial complex (indeed, the currently straitened finances of state budgets are providing an opportune moment for pressure and reform). Mass incarceration is a costly and self-defeating response to the economic unevenness and social inequality left in the wake of globalization. While the onslaughts of a globalized economy may be beyond our national control, this particular policy approach to these onslaughts is not. Mass incarceration is not inevitable, but one political choice among many. Imprisonment on such a scale is simply not a viable option for any nation that claims to take the concept of democracy seriously.
Yellow Springs, Ohio
2006
Works Cited and Suggested Further Reading
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Beckett, Katherine. Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American
Politics. Oxford University Press, 1997.
Beckett, Katherine, and Bruce Western. “Governing Social Marginality: Welfare,
Incarceration, and the Transformation of State Policy.” In Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences. Ed. David Garland. London: Sage Publications, 2001.
Bauman, Zygmunt. “Social Uses of Law and Order.” In Criminology and Social Theory.
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Davis, Angela. “Race and Criminalization: Black Americans and the Punishment
Industry”; “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and the Convict Lease System,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Blackwell, 1998.
Davis, Angela, and Avery F. Gordon. “Globalism and the Prison-Industrial Complex:
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Wacquant, Loic. “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh.” In
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