Systems of thought become prisons that are easily made, applied, and guarded

Evidence

One must not, therefore, regard the prison, its ‘failure’ and its more or less successful reform as three successive stages. One should think rather of a simultaneous system that historically has been superimposed on the juridical deprivation of liberty; a fourfold system comprising: the additional, disciplinary element of the prison – the element of ‘super-power’; the production of an objectivity, a technique, a penitentiary ‘rationality’ – the element of auxiliary knowledge; the de facto reintroduction, if not actual increase, of a criminality that the prison ought to destroy – the element of inverted efficiency; lastly, the repetition of a ‘reform’ that is isomorphic, despite its ‘idealism’, with the disciplinary functioning of the prison – the element of utopian duplication. It is this complex ensemble that constitutes the ‘carceral system’, not only the institution of the prison, with its walls, its staff, its regulations and its violence. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 418 (#expands, via linked claim)

Davis develops abolitionist argument in clear, accessible prose, drawing on her own activist and scholarly experience. For AI-equity readers, Are Prisons Obsolete? is essential context for any work on carceral technology, predictive policing, and the prison-industrial-AI complex. — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 2601 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Abolitionist analysis exposes the prison-industrial-AI complex as one system — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 2601; The prison’s failure, reform, and discipline form one simultaneous carceral system — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 418

Related

• Abolitionist analysis exposes the prison-industrial-AI complex as one system (similarity 0.88)
• The prison’s failure, reform, and discipline form one simultaneous carceral system (similarity 0.85)
• Prison abolition has a long history but remains culturally unthinkable (similarity 0.82)
• The penitentiary was framed as a progressive reform of its era. (similarity 0.80)
• Abolition requires a continuum of alternatives, not prisonlike substitutes (similarity 0.80)
• Military and prison industrial complexes are symbiotic, sharing technologies (similarity 0.79)
• The prison’s disciplinary excess over legal detention was present from its birth (similarity 0.79)
• Rehabilitation has been displaced by incapacitation as prison’s goal (similarity 0.79)
• Reform has always been proposed as the remedy for the prison’s failure (similarity 0.79)
• Imprisonment became the primary punishment because it suited capitalist bourgeois ideology, not superior merit. (similarity 0.78)
• The carceral state and its machine learning extensions continue older technologies of dispossession. (similarity 0.78)
• Prison disciplined workers for industrial capitalism (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The prison’s failure, reform, and discipline form one simultaneous carceral system #expands (0.75) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 418
• Abolitionist analysis exposes the prison-industrial-AI complex as one system #expands (0.72) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 2601