Prisoner work-based self-organization could overpower formal carceral authority completely.

Evidence

What was disturbing the inspectors’ tranquility was not the collapse of order, but the appearance of an alternative order. Inside the prison were two societies: the official society of the Board, which sought to control every moment of the inmates’ lives and was enforced (irregularly) by means of starvation, leg irons, and solitary cells; and a counter-society consisting of the autonomous activity of the inmates, who had established, on the foundation of their work and the social relations grown up around it, an authority powerful enough to organize the division of tasks inside the prison, exercise control over the flow of raw materials and finished products through the walls, incorporate lower-level prison officials as accomplices, nullify the hated informer system, and, in short, give the Walnut Street Jail the appearance of “anything on earth but a prison.” — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 155

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Coercive punishment requires a power that encloses the punished individual completely — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 208; Complex societies institutionalize power to make coercion possible. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 597; Institutions must attribute inmates’ conduct to personal will to make them manageably self-directing. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1135

Broader Connections

• Institutions must attribute inmates’ conduct to personal will to make them manageably self-directing. #complicates (0.78) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1135
• Complex societies institutionalize power to make coercion possible. #qualifies (0.74) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 597
• Coercive punishment requires a power that encloses the punished individual completely #qualifies (0.72) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 208