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Human Studies
Published in: Human Studies 4/2007

01-12-2007 | Commentary

Scholar’s Symposium: The Work of Angela Y. Davis

Decarceration and the Philosophies of Mass Imprisonment

Author: Jeffrey Paris

Published in: Human Studies | Issue 4/2007

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The prison system in the U.S. has come under increasing scrutiny and even broad criticism over the past few years, as incarceration rates have soared and scandals find their way into major national dailies.1 Much of the work (Dyer 2000; Parenti 1999; Coyle et al. 2003; Mauer 1999; Herivel and Wright 2003) that has been done by figures and organizations critical of prison growth, inadequate health care and other services, construction industry and corporate profit, new policing methods and discriminatory sentencing procedures, etc., has been outstanding and one can only wish that such criticisms had greater purchase on the legal, political and economic decision-making bodies in the U.S. In what follows, I will depend heavily on, and even presuppose, these analyses. However, this essay is not meant to contribute to these analyses in a specific or concrete way; what I have noticed in my study of prison-related literature is a dearth of what might count as a “philosophical” analysis of prisons, or a philosophical investigation into the strengths and weaknesses of existing critical models of the prison. Surely, the phenomenal growth of individual prisons and the substantially increasing effect that the prison system has on every social institution today is worthy of a philosophical account and critique. In the following text, I will therefore offer the lineaments of a philosophical analysis of the prison institution, with particular focus on the U.S. Moreover, this analysis of three major thinkers of imprisonment—Michel Foucault, Angela Davis, and Loïc Wacquant—is undertaken with the goal of defending the position that decarceration and/or prison abolition are the only serious responses to the prison crisis today. …
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Footnotes
1
Most recently, for example, the L.A. Times published a major piece on the health care system in the California State Prisons in May 2005, at the same time the California Supreme Court found the state negligent in health care and in danger of contempt. From October 2 to October 6, 2005, the New York Times published a series critical of prison sentencing called “No Way Out: Dashed Hopes” on its front page.
 
2
For a “critical theory of the prison,” see Mendieta (2004).
 
3
For a good, early analysis of Foucault’s framework, see Sheridan (1980). Sheridan correctly notes that “the condition of possibility of intelligibility of power is to be found not in some primary, central point, in a single source of sovereignty from which secondary forms emanate …. [Neither is it to be found] in terms of causality, of events at one level causing or explaining events at another, but rather in a series of aims and objectives” (pp. 183, 184). For a comprehensive resource on Foucault’s work on power, see Foucault (2001).
 
4
As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1944/1972) wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Men were given their individuality as unique in each case, different to all others, so that it might all the more surely be made the same as any other” (p. 13).
 
5
To put it in a succinct and first-person way: my students at a private, Jesuit University are simply overwhelmed by the relevance of Foucault to their everyday lives, their ideals, hopes, visions, normative conceptions of self and other, and (though there are exceptions to this) their experiences in family, school, and extra-curricular activities. But my students at San Quentin Prison (where I teach ethics and general philosophy in the only on-site degree-granting college program in a California prison) find his analysis absolutely irrelevant. The differences, here, are well worth another paper entirely, but let me just point out that Foucault underemphasizes the role that corporal punishment plays in the prison, via specific and not generalized forms of violence, humiliation, subjection, and deprivation. Foucault tries not to do so (see, e.g., his claim that there remains “a trace of ‘torture’ in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice” (1975/1977, p. 16), and the critique of this claim by Joy James (1996) in her essay “Erasing the Spectacle of Racialized State Violence”), yet it is obvious that the effects of these practices play little role in his more general analysis. But in reality, prisons remain sites, not of docility and normative re-personalization, but of frustration, resistance, and spiritual and emotional hunger.
 
6
“California has the third-largest penal system in the world, following China and the U.S. as a whole …. An emergent ‘prison–industrial complex’ increasingly rivals agribusiness as the dominant force in the life of rural California and competes with land developers as the chief seducer of legislators in Sacramento. It has become a monster that threatens to overpower and devour its creators, and its uncontrollable growth ought to rattle a national consciousness now complacent at the thought of a permanent prison class” (Davis 1995, p. 229).
 
7
As Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939/1968) wrote, “The bond, transparent or not, that is supposed to exist between crime and punishment prevents any insight into the independent significance of the history of penal systems. It must be broken” (p. 5).
 
8
For instance, in Harsh Justice, James Q. Whitman (2004) argues that America’s harsh and degrading criminal justice system is a consequence of our ideology of a non-hierarchical social system and our distrust of state power. While this may be a part of a fuller explanation, it needs to be complemented by more material analyses such as can be found in David Garland’s (2002) The Culture of Control.
 
9
Indeed, her contribution extends beyond that of many other writings on the prison–industrial complex, since it includes additional features inherent in the existing system of incarceration and hearkens back to other, substantive critical theories of society. In addition to capital extraction, disenfranchisement, and the symbiotic relationship with the military–industrial complex, she also addresses the psycho-social racial contract (or what Charles Mills (1997) has called a Herrenvolk ethic in which punishment is redirected toward racialized others); the role of ritualistic violence to cleanse the present order; the sexualization and gender structures of the prison; and the development of surplus repression (a term originated by Herbert Marcuse) that leads a citizenry to think of prisons as both inevitable and desirable (Mendieta 2006; Davis and Mendieta 2005, pp. 49–76).
 
10
One important recent text that effectively addresses the warehouse design of contemporary U.S. incarceration facilities is John Irwin’s (2005) The Warehouse Prison: Disposal of the New Dangerous Class.
 
11
When I put this question to Professor Wacquant, he shared my concern that the contradiction had indeed been temporarily deterred, but also indicated the increased likelihood that external conditions forcing change may have a greater impact on the current “peculiar institution.” One important aspect is the decline in U.S. hegemony, which will continue to cause more rapid transformations in U.S. economics, politics, and culture, a decline to which the U.S. is responding by making a bad situation worse. For analyses of economic, political, and cultural conditions of what Giovanni Arrighi (2005) has called “hegemony unraveling,” see also Santos (2004); Maldonado-Torres (2005); and Wallerstein (2004).
 
12
See, for instance, my defense of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis (Paris 2006).
 
Literature
Abbott, J. (1981). In the belly of the beast: Letters from prison. New York: Vintage.
Arrighi, G. (2005). Hegemony unravelling-2 [electronic version]. New Left Review, 33, 83–116.
Castel, R. (1994). “Problematization” and reading history. In J. Goldstein (Ed.), Foucault and the writing of history. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Cole, D. (1999). No equal justice: Race and class in the American criminal justice system. New York: The New Press.
Coyle, A., Campbell, A., & Neufeld, R. (Eds.). (2003). Capitalist punishment: Prison privatization and human rights. Atlanta & London: Clarity Press & Zed Books.
Davis, M. (1995). Hell factories in the field: A prison–industrial complex. The Nation, 260(7), 229.
Davis, A. Y. (2003). Are prisons obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press.
Davis, A. Y., & Mendieta, E. (2005). Abolition democracy: Beyond empire, prisons, and torture. New York: Seven Stories Press.
Dyer, J. (2000). The perpetual prisoner machine: How America profits from crime. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Foucault, M. (1975/1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage.
Foucault, M. (2001). Power: Essential works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume III. In J. D. Faubion Ed., & R. Hurley et al. Trans.). New York: The New Press.
Garland, D. (2002). The culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Goldstein, J. (Ed.). (1994). Foucault and the writing of history. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Herivel, T., & Wright, P. (Eds.). (2003). Prison nation: The warehousing of America’s poor. New York: Routledge.
Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (1944/1972). Dialectic of enlightenment (J. Cumming Trans.). New York: Continuum.
Irwin, J. (2005). The warehouse prison: Disposal of the new dangerous class. Los Angeles: Roxbury.
James, J. (1996). Resisting state violence. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Maldonado-Torres, N. (2005). Decolonization and the new identitarian logics after September 11: Eurocentrism and Americanism against the new barbarian threats. Radical Philosophy Review, 8(1), 35–68.
Mauer, M. (1999). Race to incarcerate. New York: The New Press.
Mendieta, E. (2004). Plantations, ghettos, prisons: US racial geographies. Philosophy & Geography, 7(1), 43–60.CrossRef
Mendieta, E. (2006). Prisons, torture, race: On Angela Y. Davis’s abolitionism. Philosophy Today, 50(Supplement), 77–82.
Mills, C. (1997). The racial contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Parenti, C. (1999). Lockdown America: Police and prisons in the age of crisis. London: Verso Press.
Parenti, C. (2003). Privatized problems: For-profit incarceration in trouble. In A. Coyle, A. Campbell, & R. Neufeld (Eds.), Capitalist punishment: Prison privatization and human rights (pp. 30–38). Atlanta & London: Clarity Press & Zed Books.
Paris, J. (2006). American power and the philosophy of world-systems analysis. Socialism & Democracy, 20(2), 103–120.CrossRef
Rusche, G., & Kirchheimer, O. (1939/1968). Punishment and social structure. New York: Russell & Russell.
Sheridan, A. (1980). Foucault: The will to truth. London: Tavistock Press.
Wacquant, L. (2002a). From slavery to mass incarceration: Rethinking the “race question” in the U.S. [electronic version]. New Left Review, 13, 41–60.
Wallerstein, I. (2004). The decline of American power. New York: The New Press.
Whitman, J. Q. (2004). Harsh justice: Criminal punishment and the widening divide between America and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wood, P. J. (2003). The rise of the prison industrial complex in the United States. In A. Coyle, A. Campbell, & R. Neufeld (Eds.), Capitalist punishment: Prison privatization and human rights (pp. 16–29). Atlanta & London: Clarity Press & Zed Books.
Metadata
Title
Scholar’s Symposium: The Work of Angela Y. Davis
Decarceration and the Philosophies of Mass Imprisonment
Author
Jeffrey Paris
Publication date
01-12-2007
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Human Studies / Issue 4/2007
Print ISSN: 0163-8548
Electronic ISSN: 1572-851X
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9064-7

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