They Died with Their Boots On: The Boot Camp and the Limits of Modern Penality (1995)

Introduction: Are We Postmodern? A number of scholars have begun to suggest that a significant rupture has occurred or is occurring in our practices of punishment and social control (Cohen, 1994; Feeley and Simon, 1992, 1994; Simon, 1993a; Brodeur, 1994; Garland, 1994; Nelken, 1994; Dumm, 1994).(2) At their broadest, these analyses amount to the claim that modernity in punishment, which has been predominant since the end of the 18th century (and has traces going back centuries further), is coming to an end. The term is deliberately tentative. It suggests that something is over, but does not describe what has begun.(3) As Jean-Paul Brodeur (1994: 3) points out, the question of postmodernity is really two questions. The first question is historical and it relates to fact: is the situation now or that shortly will be prevailing in the field of penal practice discontinuous with what we have been experiencing for the last two centuries or is it the consolidation of a program that was expressed over the last two centuries and is now becoming self-conscious and self-critical? The second question is theoretical. Is the sociology of modernity an adequate framework in which to consider the present developments in penology? Most of those engaged in the discussion of these questions share the sense that they cannot be resolved at the abstract level of theory. Terms like modern and postmodern are at best gross homogenizations of complex and contextually specific processes. They are useful primarily as grids that we use to make historical sense of practices and discourses that surround us.(4) To some, no doubt, this entire debate is rather peripheral. It does not help us answer the pressing questions of policy formation. Nor does it develop (yet, at any rate) novel purposes or approaches to exercising or abolishing the power to punish, which has been so central to state formation in Western societies. For the moment, the question of whether current forms of punishment are postmodern turns on evidence of longer-term historical change. The specific tendencies of contemporary punishment may not provide a clear indication.(5) For example, the rapid growth of imprisonment over the last two decades in the United States and to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom neither confirms nor denies the thesis that modern punishment is being fundamentally changed. Indeed, the growth of the system may indicate either the vigor of modern penal strategies or the dangerous distending of a system that is no longer functionally regulated by its internal processes or external environment. In short, we need to develop much richer middle-range accounts of penal strategies and practices before we can really answer questions about the fate of modern punishment. Still, awareness of these larger questions seems relevant for two reasons. First, our major ways of thinking and talking about punishment and social control are modern. Hence our ability to recognize change, and ultimately to discuss even conjunctural events, is to some extent dependent on the continued validity of this modern understanding. Second, students of punishment and modernity (Foucault, 1977; Elias, 1978; Garland, 1990) have seen punishment as a leading sector of the modernization process in society as a whole. The break-up of modern penal strategies and understandings, if it is indeed occurring, may be significant for the self-understanding of these societies more generally. The present article offers more grist for this mill by examining a new and remarkably popular penal innovation in the United States that offers hints to the robustness of penal modernity.(6) Penal boot camps, also known as shock incarceration programs, have proliferated rapidly since they were first introduced in Georgia and Oklahoma in 1983 (Osier, 1991: 35). As of 1993, programs of various specifications approximating the boot-camp model had been set up by 30 states, 10 local jurisdictions, and the federal government (MacKenzie, 1993). …