Rehabilitation has been displaced by incapacitation as prison’s goal

Evidence

Extensive corporate investment in prisons has significantly raised the stakes for antiprison work. It means that serious antiprison activists must be willing to look much further in their analyses and organizing strategies than the actual institution of the prison. Prison reform rhetoric, which has always undergirded dominant critiques of the prison system, will not work in this new situation. If reform approaches have tended to bolster the permanence of the prison in the past, they certainly will not suffice to challenge the economic and political relationships that sustain the prison today. This means that in the era of the prison industrial complex, activists must pose hard questions about the relationship between global capitalism and the spread of U.S.-style prisons throughout the world. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 266 (#expands, via linked claim)

If we combine Howard’s emphasis on disciplined selfreflection with Bentham’s ideas regarding the technology of internalization designed to make surveillance and discipline the purview of the individual prisoner, we can begin to see how such a conception of the prison had far-reaching implications. The conditions of possibility for this new form of punishment were strongly anchored in a historical era during which the working class needed to be constituted as an army of self-disciplined individuals capable of performing the requisite industrial labor for a developing capitalist system. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 115 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Prisons preserve practices that society has largely abandoned as obsolete; Reform has been built into the prison since its origin; Prison reform rhetoric reinforces the prison’s permanence. (+3 more)

Related

• Reform rhetoric bolsters prison permanence and cannot meet corporate-era challenges (similarity 0.87)
• The penitentiary was framed as a progressive reform of its era. (similarity 0.86)
• Prison disciplined workers for industrial capitalism (similarity 0.86)
• Punishment is so corporatized that mainstream companies now stake themselves in its perpetuation (similarity 0.85)
• Prison reform rhetoric reinforces the prison’s permanence. (similarity 0.83)
• Reform has always been proposed as the remedy for the prison’s failure (similarity 0.82)
• Reform-centered frameworks marginalize decarceration strategies (similarity 0.82)
• Prisons proliferated while crime rates were falling due to corporate profit (similarity 0.81)
• Prison persists as a detestable solution no alternative replaces (similarity 0.80)
• Prison reform is an integral part of the prison’s functioning, not its antidote (similarity 0.80)
• Prison expresses bourgeois labor’s logic rather than rehabilitation’s aim (similarity 0.80)
• The prison’s failure, reform, and discipline form one simultaneous carceral system (similarity 0.79)
• Prison resists reform because it relays a broad network of disciplines and surveillances. (similarity 0.79)
• Systems of thought become prisons that are easily made, applied, and guarded (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Reform rhetoric bolsters prison permanence and cannot meet corporate-era challenges #expands (0.50) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 266
• Prison disciplined workers for industrial capitalism #complicates (0.40) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 115