Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

"Yes, Discipline and Punish is more theoretical and abstract than a lot of abolitionist writing, and Foucault is of course not just attacking the prison system, but other social systems of domination and control that he thinks are attendant to it. He has large ambitions here in critiquing a central feature of modern social life, one that some people now call the carceral system or carceral ways of responding to others and controlling others. The way I think of it is that incarceration is the broad category of institutional confinement. We’re not talking about just locking people up in buildings; we’re talking about an institution that’s hierarchically structured, with strict rules of order, and uses surveillance and control of people’s movements and communication inside and outside the carceral facility. A carceral facility can be used for a variety of purposes. Sometimes it’s used to punish. But other times, it’s at least ostensibly being used for psychiatric treatment, or for rehabilitation, or for detention. Sometimes it’s used in the context of war, when trying to deal with prisoners of war, sometimes for a quarantine, when there’s a serious threat to public health. “Anybody who wants to be an abolitionist now must make gun control part of their position” You’ve got this broader system of confinement that’s a highly structured, hierarchical system with a lot of surveillance. This has the effect, so Foucault says, of not only directing and restricting the movements of those inside, but it can also restructure their souls, making them more docile, easier to control, more inclined to submit to authority, and the like. When he’s talking about a carceral system, I think he’s talking about that broader practice, though when I—and many others—talk about prison, we’re talking about a carceral system when it’s being used to punish, incapacitate, or rehabilitate those who are responsible for committing crimes. Both are deeply cruel. One is more brutal and more of a spectacle, a public spectacle; whereas the other is seemingly clinical and humane, though it functions similarly and does its damage less on the body and more on the mind. It’s cruel in a different way."