Are Prisons Obsolete?

Davis uses Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison both as her epigraph and as evidence in her Chapter 3 argument. Foucault’s book is a seminal theoretical text about prison systems that tracks the development of imprisonment as punishment, arguing that prisons were not only a humane reform of corporal punishment, but were one of many institutions that acted as vehicles to discipline the public. Davis draws on Foucault’s text for examples of pre-penitentiary punishments, especially its shocking description of corporal punishment in which a man was tortured, “drawn and quartered, his body burned, and the ashes tossed into the wind” (41). Davis’s argument in this chapter mirrors Foucault’s overarching argument: She finds that penitentiaries were conceived as a civilized reform but have developed over time to be houses of surveillance and control for undesirable populations.

The author lists three major historical movements—the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation, and industrial capitalism—that occurred concurrently and produced the ideological foundation for penitentiaries as punishment. The Enlightenment was an era of scientific and philosophical inquiry that championed man’s use of reason and developed new understandings of individuality. Davis cites France’s “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite” (43) and the US’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident: all men are created equal” (43-44) as codification of this new understanding, because both refer to freedom and equality as human rights. This concept allowed imprisonment to become a valid punishment, as man’s freedom could be taken away as a penalty for breaking the law. The Protestant Reformation advocated for individual connections to God, which was evident in the penitentiary’s goal of solitary spiritual education. Davis records religious groups as the main proponents of prison reform, as they viewed “imprisonment as a purgatory, as a forced withdrawal from the distractions of the senses into silent and solitary confrontation with the self” (53). Industrial capitalism and the advent of wage labor calculated work in terms of time, which imprisonment reflected in its use of time-based sentences. Using Marxist theory, Davis notes that the penitentiary emerged at a time when “the working class needed to be constituted as an army of self-disciplined individuals capable of performing the requisite industrial labor” (46). These three movements compounded on one another at a precise historical time to produce the penitentiary. Because the penitentiary is so historically specific, however, Davis argues that imprisonment isn’t the best form of justice for modern society.

Davis names two influential reformists whose theories were implemented in early prison systems. John Howard wrote The State of Prisons, which described incarceration as “an occasion for self-reflection and self-reform” (46). The Penitentiary Act of 1799 cites Howards in its approval of prison construction and implementation of isolation, labor, and religious instruction in institutions. Davis emphasizes that Howard was a scientific man as much as he was religious, as evident in his desire to make a “statistical description of a social problem” (53) that was the historical penal system. Howard systematically visited every prison in England, finding ways to implement new rules of cleanliness, routine, and organization to optimize rehabilitation. Between 1787 and 1791, Jeremey Bentham wrote and publicized letters about the panopticon structure which influenced the architectural design of penitentiaries. In his design, “prisoners were to be housed in single cells on circular tiers, all facing a multi-level guard tower” (46), but they wouldn’t know when they were being watched; this would force prisoner obedience continuously. Bentham believed that “prisoners could only internalize productive labor habits if they were under constant surveillance” (46), exposing the implicit purpose of prisons as institutions of discipline. Davis notes that panopticon structures were attempted in England and Pittsburg in 1816 and 1826, but the programs of all other penitentiaries infused into their programs the ideals of isolation, surveillance, and obedience that the panopticon structure promoted.

The author exposes the adverse effects of inmates spending most of their time in isolation, using excerpts from critics in the era of early penitentiaries and modern reports on supermax isolation programs. Davis cites Charles Dickens’s travelogue American Notes from 1842, in which he expresses concern that isolation in penitentiaries produces an “immense amount of torture and agony” (48) is even more damaging than corporal punishment because it is the “slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain” that “no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature” (48). Dickens asserts that such punishments would not rehabilitate inmates; it would make them less likely to reenter society normally. Davis immediately follows this excerpt with a similar statement from the 1997 Human Rights Watch report on supermax prisons, illustrating that opinions on isolation punishment have stayed much the same for more than 150 years. The report states that unlike early penitentiaries, modern supermaxes have “no pretense that rights are respected” (50), as they are explicit about how “all references to individual rehabilitation have disappeared” (49). This section of comparison connects to the theme of prison outdatedness. Davis calls supermaxes a reintroduction of archaic practices in the modern day that reveals just how wretched the practices continue to be, especially with state-of-the-art 21st-century technology.

Davis discusses inmate education programs and emphasizes how the cuts to education programs in the modern era have made prisons more repressive. Prison literature written by convicts, Davis argues, has been instrumental to the antiprison cause of decarceration, as many writers found the “emancipatory potential” (55) of learning and creative writing. She uses the examples of Robert Burns’s I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, the writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the writings of Malcolm X to illustrate the transformative experience of education behind bars—and to express the usefulness of these texts to critiques of the prison system. Prisoners, Davis states, understood the importance of education for dealing with the personal and structural issues that impact their lives. The Attica prisoner rebellion of 1971 cited “more realistic rehabilitation programs, and better education programs” (57) in their demands for better treatment, and this movement was instrumental to expanding education in prisons. Some colleges, like Marist College, developed partnerships with prisons so that convicts could receive post-secondary education and graduate with useful degrees. However, education, Davis argues, is in direct conflict with the goals of the prison industrial complex, which wants prisoners to be docile and controllable. Davis claims that the 1994 cuts to education funding in prisons indicate an “official disregard today for rehabilitative strategies, particularly those that encourage individual prisoners to acquire autonomy of the mind” (57).