Prison design deliberately provokes distrust to block prisoner solidarity
Evidence
For example, the structure of prisons and the behavior of prison guards often provoke distrust between prisoners. Among the most obvious devices, setting up the cells so that any one prisoner cannot see any other but every one of them can hear the noise of every other creates tensions and hostility between individual prisoners. They can become virtual enemies rather than allies who might pose a common front against the guards of the system. Some of what critics think of as unnecessarily punitive and insulting treatment is functional in provoking interprisoner distrust and hence in blocking group mobilization. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 487
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Pivotal for the reader’s thesis: removing visual monitoring (cell design where prisoners cannot see each other) is exactly what Saramago’s blindness does wholesale — and Hardin shows this structured blindness is itself a control tactic, not mere deprivation.
- ADDENDUM: Directly supports the grafting-of-observation-onto-social-order thesis: visibility here is literally the substrate of either trust or coordinated resistance, echoing the same theme.