Carceral Archaism Through Nietzsche
By: Kate Blanchet
Tags: Angela Davis, Prison Abolition, Prison Industrial Complex, Prison Reform, Nietzsche

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

Following the publication of penal-related works authored by assorted anarchists & revolutionaries, in the likes of Angela Davis, Emma Goldman & Michelle Alexander, there has been much discussion regarding the validity of the various externalities & internalities concerning the status of the Western prison system. It has become all the more frequent for a growing number of individuals to publicly debate on the moral & financial implications that come with maintaining & reinforcing the world’s largest prison system. Extensions of this system, such as the carceral state, are central actors in perpetuating the federal state & capitalist’s everlasting seize on socio-political power. Mass incarceration enables the state to install contentious economic policies that would otherwise not be permissible in the face of strong resistance movements. While reform efforts may grant certain structures of mass incarceration to shift, & lead to a gradual decrease in prison population, a more fundamental & systemic transformation is necessary in order to facilitate an efficacious, rather than cosmetic, shift in the formal essence & practice of criminal justice.

The Genealogy of Punishment

To examine the origins of imprisonment, we may first refer to German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of punishment. Whereas many before & after him attempt to reconcile punishment through a study of purpose, a study he believes lacks efficacy, of multifarious, non-definitive conclusions, Nietzsche is more so concerned with the origin of punishment. There are various purposes that people may adduce as to why we might punish: as a means of rendering harmless, as recompense to the injured party for the harm done, as the expulsion of a degenerate element, as the making of a memory to inscribe a moral precept. Nietzsche questions which one of these, among others, is the true purpose of punishment, & what we arrive at from pondering this is that we have failed to understand what it is for a thing to have a purpose. Nietzsche speculates, with much authority to do so, as a scholar of philology, that the original relation involved in punishment is the relationship between creditor & debtor. In ancient times, if you went into debt you would plead things against your debt. Unlike modern, capitalist bankruptcy, if you went bankrupt you, as well as your family, became part of the debt, with the potentiality of being sold into slavery. Punishment, in a sense, is a way of repayment, of reestablishing equivalences. These establishments do not necessarily need be enshrined in law or court, this exchange may be mediated between individuals, a group or organized civilization. The significance is in that equivalences are being imposed or demanded. In fact, it would be a fallacy to transpose punishment for the sake of justice to its origin, for throughout the greater part of human history, punishment was not inflicted because one held the wrongdoer responsible for a deed. If you inspect ancient texts & discussions, you don’t actually remark the sentiment of intent, that a convict had a choice between performing a “good” or “evil” action, thus because they chose the latter, they must receive due punishment. Alternatively, we observe a sentiment of consequentialism, that an offense occurred & thus one must be punished. This sentiment does not act upon the presupposition that only the guilty should be punished, rather, just as parents punish their children from anger at some harm or injury, vented on the one who caused it, that affects, such as anger, are held in check & modified by the idea that every injury has its equivalent & can be paid back, if only through the suffering or pain of the culprit. Punishment enables the person who’s been angered to inflict pain or suffering upon whom is being punished, but only insofar as the dialectic of creditor-debtor is being exchanged. This idea of equivalence, between injury & pain, has already divulged in the contractual relation between creditor & debtor, which harps back to the fundamental forms of purchasing, selling, bartering, trading, trafficking, forms of primeval human activities. We are not only the animals of reason, disaffiliating ourselves from the rest, but are ones who impose measure, who exchange. This is the essence to which punishment is tied to.

Birth of the Penitentiary

The discussion then shifts to a matter of how this punishment instigated the formal practice of imprisonment. For this specific dialogue, we will focus on the particular emergence of the penitentiary prison. Against intuition, prisons as we know them are a relatively modern establishment, only emerging around 230 years ago encircling the period of the American & French Revolution. With the Enlightenment, sparked by philosophers as Locke, Kant, Hume, Rousseau & Spinoza, arising alongside these national revolutions, the notion of individual inalienable rights became the central dogma of western ideology. This was accompanied by the rise of industrialization, where labour began to be commodified & compensated with money i.e., wage labour. European prison reformers in this age of industrialisation had the objective of achieving isolated incarceration as the primary mode of punishment, as opposed to capital & corporal punishment being the approaches one took to pay for a crime. These ideas were largely drawn from enlightenment era thinkers & protestant penal reformers, who saw the prior mode of punishment, public execution, stoning, etc. to be distasteful & cruel. For those such as Alexis de Tocqueville & Gustave de Beaumont, it was believed that imprisonment was a time for religious self-reflection & self-reform, that modes of isolated incarcerations, solicitly, solitary confinement, brought a form of moral renewal. Unlike the traditional jail house, functioning as more of a holding tank for debtors, vagrancy, accused & convicted criminals & witnesses held for trial, the prison was a new facility designed to punish convicted criminals for long term confinement, a place where a debtor could recompense his creditor through means of personal suffering. Early prison models, such as the panopticon model, operated on the notion that this could only be realised when prisoners were under constant surveillance. This prison model made its way to the United States, where it evolved a labour component, but the solitary confinement aspect remained. This application of labour meant that incarceration was a cardinal method to capitalise on unpaid labour. Incarceration became the most effective way to strip someone of their individual rights, their legal standing in society & their sole method of wealth accumulation. This also indicated that since prisoners had no ownership over their labour, prisons could very easily exploit it via a process known as convict leasing. The Convict Leasing System was one of forced penal labour that had prisoners leased out to individuals or companies to work either land or public projects, like railroads. It is with this system which first exemplifies the amalgamation of incarceral practices & race.

Introduction of Identity

When prisons were first established in the states, historian Adam Jay Hirsch noted that prison regulations were very similar to those of slave codes, in that both enslaved people & prisoners were deprived of virtually all civil & legal rights. The Black Codes evolved from slave codes, & criminalised such behaviours as vagrancy, absence from work & breach of job contracts, all frequent propensities exhibited by newly freed slaves without economic guidance. These were all specific provisions to target the actions of newly freed black people. This was done with the 13th amendment in mind, for it abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime”. Thus, chattel slavery was replaced with a new type of slavery known as the Convict Lease System. This formal abolition of slavery created a labour vaccum in the south, how were southern whites supposed to maintain the economy that priorly enslaved Africans built? The Convict Lease System provided a means for former slave masters to extrapolate labour out of the new socioeconomic structures. The Black Codes criminalised many recurrent behaviours of newly freed black people, so they could very easily & arbitrarily be thrown into prison to be exploited as free labour, through convict leasing. Caveat being, convict leasing was often crueller than slavery, as tenants had no incentive to keep prisoners alive; they could always go erroneously arrest and imprison more black people. Next, we must address the various fashions in which both men’s & women’s prison practices are gendered, first through how male & female criminality has been perceived historically. Masculine criminality has been deemed more presumed than feminine criminality, provoking the assumption that this feminine criminality is a much more threatening & dangerous anomaly. Deviant men are constructed as criminal, whereas deviant women are more often constructed as insane or deranged. These assumptions have very tangible implications for the modes of punishment administered at men’s & women’s prisons. For instance, psychiatric drugs are utilised at a much higher rate in women’s prisons versus men’s, & women experience sexual assault at a substantially higher rate. On the other hand, men receive death sentences & executions at a much higher rate than women. This is not necessarily to compare which prison experience is worse, rather to indicate & identify that the conditions within the prison system are deplorable, coupled with the gendered dimension of prison practices making reform that much more impractical.

The Prison Industrial Complex

In present-day, these symptomatic practices can be observed, most evidently, within the construction of the Prison Industrial Complex, a term that has developed as a sort of ideological currency. The Prison Industrial Complex is a concept used to delineate the set of relationships linking prisons, the government, private companies and the media to each other. These prison populations have been steadily rising & at alarming rates. It has been argued, by Davis in particular, that this ever-increasing prison population is more so driven by ideologies of racism & profit, than increasing crime rates. Prisons have come to occupy the vacuum abandoned by transnational corporations who migrate to the third world, seemingly on the grounds of which they function as an economic catalyst. One of the most developed sectors of the construction industry is that of prison construction. Observe the role architects play in creating these new institutions, the extent to which prisons have been privatised, to which private corporations have taken residence to take advantage of prison labour, because it’s near as cheap as labour of the third world. There’s a sense in which prisons are becoming an integral part of the economy. Thus, there are stakes at play exclusive of the battle of crime, that maintain the system’s expansion. It acquires its own momentum, which if we fail to intervene an inertia will carry us through a millennium of ever-increasing incarceration. It’s an ideology that would rather see an influx of incarceration than efficacious, criminal praxis. Nordic “prisons”, which function more so as rehabilitation centres than that of its Western adoption, perform significantly better in terms of recidivism, mental & psychological health of the resident & reintroducing criminals back into civil society, & yet the West is determined to maintain structures of critical punishment, maintained through the very ideology of our prison industrial complex of wanting to inflict severe punishment & pain upon criminals, despite institutions of rehabilitation & retribution being substantially more effective. A wanting, a desire, that ties all the way back to punishment’s origins.

The Will to Power / What is to be Done?

I previously discussed how assigning purpose to punishment is both deceptive & illusory, yet what we may do is posit the underlying drive of our creation of purpose. The reason we are not able to pin-point a transcendent, universal purpose of punishment is due to our purposes being radically altered over time. Purposes haven’t remained constant in what they were supposed to attain because it’s not the punishment itself, it’s not the purpose itself that dictated it, it was a will to power that determined it. It’s an active force, a pleasure of being allowed to vent his power freely upon one who is powerless. Forcing hierarchy upon oneself & another, to impose pain for the very pleasure induced by the action, what we would call in some respects sadism, the enjoyment of violation, of transgression. In punishing the debtor, the creditor participates in the right of the masters. The interrelationships within the prison system function as a sort of prosaic example. The corrupt police officer asserting their authority on the suspect. The prison guard demonstrating their force upon the inmate. The everyday citizen exerting their moral superiority over the deviant criminal. All with their own respective “reasonings’’, all with a fundamental appetite for, whether it be of the material or ego, quenching power. However, if we have any desire to minimize this drive within judicial practice, we must not let it occupy a system that rewards it. For us to see a reduction in its infiltration of our justice system we must adopt a philosophy where profit is not the derivative of power. However, in order to do successfully, we must experience a radical shift on an institutional level. The complex is so well entangled & implanted with ideologies “of the past” that we so eagerly maintain that a mere reform in conditions does not suffice or satisfy our end objective. These reforms will continue to drag along the ill-willed baggage of its predecessor. We cannot be blinded by naivety & simplicity in suspecting our reforms would look like those of elsewhere, elsewhere lacking the centuries of ideological development particular to the West. It requires complete abolition & reconstruction of the central pillars giving foundation to our prison system. New pillars, tenets, not rooted in the grounds of punishment, but at the nexus of rehabilitation, recidivism & retribution.

Literary References —

Angela Davis: Are Prisons Obsolete?

Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals

Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow

Emma Goldman: Prisons a Social Crime & Failure

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The House of the Dead