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🪵 The Threshold

Profitability, not severity, is the surest test of prisoner reformation

Properties2
tagsja-picks, xref, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@bentham_panopticon_1995, loc. 192

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Profitability, not severity, is the surest test of prisoner reformation

Evidence

But I neither see the great danger nor the great harm of a man’s liking his work too well; and how well soever he might have liked it elsewhere, I should still less apprehend his liking the thought of having it to do there. Supposing no sage regulations made by any body to nail them to this or that sort of work, the work they would naturally fall upon under the hands of a contractor would be that, whatever it might be, by which there was most money to be made; for the more the prisoner-workman got, the more the master could get out of him; so that upon that point I should have little fear of their not agreeing. Nor do I see why labour should be the less reforming for being profitable. On the contrary, among working men, especially among working men whom the discipline of the house would so effectually keep from all kinds of mischief, I must confess I know of no test of reformation so plain or so sure as the improved quantity and value of their work. … I see no sort of danger, that to the contractor there should be any one object upon earth dearer than the interest of the contractor; but I see some danger that there may be, now and then by accident, some other object rather dearer to the magistrate. — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 192

Categorization

  • XREF: Bentham’s contractor-self-interest argument parallels the incentive-design logic in the Milgrom law-merchant readings on reputation and private judges. — connects to: Penal reform succeeded by managing illegalities differentially, not eliminating them — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 144; Prison wages act as a fiction measuring moral transformation, not production — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 370; Penalties target the inmate’s transformation, not the exchange value of the crime — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 374 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

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