Imprisonment became the primary punishment because it suited capitalist bourgeois ideology, not superior merit.

Evidence

The process through which imprisonment developed into the primary mode of stateinflicted punishment was very much related to the rise of capitalism and to the appearance of a new set of ideological conditions. These new conditions reflected the rise of the bourgeoisie as the social class whose interests and aspirations furthered new scientific, philosophical, cultural, and popular ideas. It is thus important to grasp the fact that the prison as we know it today did not make its appearance on the historical stage as the superior form of punishment for all times. It was simply—though we should not underestimate the complexity of this process—what made most sense at a particular moment in history. We should therefore question whether a system that was intimately related to a particular set of historical circumstances that prevailed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can lay absolute claim on the twenty-first century. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 107

Categorization

• XREF: Classic Marxist-materialist account of the prison’s origin; sets up Davis’s central obsolescence question. — connects to: A punishment form tied to early capitalism cannot claim eternal validity; Punishment follows politics, corporate profit, and media, not crime itself — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 295; The rise of imprisonment was historically novel, not a natural succession. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 191 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: The core question of the chapter — if the prison was historically contingent, why should it persist? — grounds the entire book’s argument.

Broader Connections

• A punishment form tied to early capitalism cannot claim eternal validity #expands (0.85)
• Punishment follows politics, corporate profit, and media, not crime itself #corroborates (0.75) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 295