Penal labour reshapes convicts mechanistically into docile, regularized workers

Evidence

Penal labour must be seen as the very machinery that transforms the violent, agitated, unreflective convict into a part that plays its role with perfect regularity. The prison is not a workshop; it is, it must be of itself, a machine whose convict-workers are both the cogs and the products; it ‘occupies them continually, with the sole aim of filling their moments. When the body is agitated, when the mind applies itself to a particular object, importunate ideas depart, calm is born once again in the soul’ — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 370

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the internalized panopticon thesis — mechanical regularity of work substitutes for surveillance, and connects to the reader’s Orwell analysis of self-policing bodies. — connects to: Bentham sorts convicts into labor classes ranked by transferable skill — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 187; Penal labour’s real purpose is power relations, not production or skills — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 371; The prison disciplined convicts into an industrial labor force (+4 more)

Related

• Ghent’s penal house reframed punishment as the economic reconstruction of the lazy into workers (similarity 0.88)
• Penal labour’s real purpose is power relations, not production or skills (similarity 0.85)
• Prison expresses bourgeois labor’s logic rather than rehabilitation’s aim (similarity 0.83)
• Prison disciplined workers for industrial capitalism (similarity 0.82)
• Imprisonment emerged with capitalism’s need for disciplined manpower (similarity 0.81)
• The carceral regime extracts knowledge that converts punishment into a productive operation. (similarity 0.79)
• Prison integrated correctional transformation into legal detention from the start (similarity 0.79)
• Penalties target the inmate’s transformation, not the exchange value of the crime (similarity 0.79)
• The penitentiary apparatus substitutes the delinquent for the offender. (similarity 0.79)
• The penal apparatus morally reeducated the poor into legalism (similarity 0.79)
• Bentham sorts convicts into labor classes ranked by transferable skill (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The prison disciplined convicts into an industrial labor force #corroborates (0.95)
• Prison disciplined workers for industrial capitalism #expands (0.88) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 115
• Ghent’s penal house reframed punishment as the economic reconstruction of the lazy into workers #corroborates (0.82) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 198