Penal labour’s real purpose is power relations, not production or skills
Evidence
What, then, is the use of penal labour? Not profit; nor even the formation of a useful skill; but the constitution of a power relation, an empty economic form, a schema of individual submission and of adjustment to a production apparatus. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 371
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘empty economic form’ foreclosing any productive rationale strongly parallels how Oceania’s surveillance apparatus serves discipline, not efficiency — a key support for the reader’s thesis. — connects to: Prison wages act as a fiction measuring moral transformation, not production — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 370; Penal labour reshapes convicts mechanistically into docile, regularized workers — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 370; Prison disciplined workers for industrial capitalism — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 115
Related
- Prison wages act as a fiction measuring moral transformation, not production (similarity 0.85)
- Penal labour reshapes convicts mechanistically into docile, regularized workers (similarity 0.85)
- Systems of punishment correlate strictly with systems of production (similarity 0.80)
- The carceral regime extracts knowledge that converts punishment into a productive operation. (similarity 0.80)
- Ghent’s penal house reframed punishment as the economic reconstruction of the lazy into workers (similarity 0.80)
- Prison expresses bourgeois labor’s logic rather than rehabilitation’s aim (similarity 0.79)
- The rise of the prison institutionalized the power to punish (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Penal labour reshapes convicts mechanistically into docile, regularized workers
#expands(0.90) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 370 - Prison wages act as a fiction measuring moral transformation, not production
#corroborates(0.85) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 370 - Prison disciplined workers for industrial capitalism
#corroborates(0.80) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 115