Penal reformatories doubled as recruitment pipelines for colonial settlement

Evidence

For Foucault, Mettay was part of a “carceral archipelago” that was “beyond the frontiers of criminal law.” But it was really a carceral archipelago of empire that connected penal colonies to agricultural relief and to reformatories. It connected strategies of confinement from metropole to colony and across the imperial world. Mettray’s inmates were called colon (a term that could mean “member of a colony” but also “settler”), and not only because they were nested within an enclosure and were to subsist by their own agricultural labor. Mettray’s inmates were part of a much broader set of midcentury projects designed in part to provide colonists for Algeria and other French possessions overseas. Here was social engineering on both macro-and micro-imperial scale, an overarching solution to multiple social and political problems that promised to avert a repeat of the revolutions of 1848. It was also a solution that averted the state’s obligation for social welfare just at the very moment when public assistance was on the docket across Europe and poor relief threatened to be reassigned from private to state coffers. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 762

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the reader’s colonial archival focus connecting metropolitan confinement strategies to imperial expansion; the “carceral archipelago of empire” concept could connect to broader settler-colonial and carceral studies literatures.
• QUESTION: The welfare-averting function — colonies solving the poor-relief expense problem — is worth chasing further across other European cases.