prison systems and general entities,

so I thought I'd take you on a journey through what I've found.

At the end I would like you to celebrate with me the fact that I can now leave

this disgusting, horrible, painful, dangerous system behind me;

and we'll all go out and have a drink and celebrate the fact that we,

ourselves, actually can leave it behind unlike some.

Fyodor Dostoevsky once said that one can measure

the degree of civilization in society by entering its prisons.

While this may be true, I think that in all senses

we see prison as separate from society, parallel to society,

not a product of that society but a neighbouring entity.

This is partly a product of the nature of the modern imprisonment paradigm:

a delineation of walls, barricades,

halted access in circumscription of its structures,

its necessary opaque methods of administration.

The anatomy of a prison system comes into existence

or is defined by its separation from its surroundings;

it's cut off from the external.

At the same time, these institutions we wish to understand

and the system as a totality, house what is seen by the general public

as an alternative population, a branch of humanity that has transgressed

whatever that society has placed into the paradigm of legal activity.

This perception aids us in divorcing the prison system

and the whole concept of the imprisonment system from our daily lives too.

Few problematic consequences arise, I think, from this.

First off, it has become very hard to criticize the prison system.

You are less likely to see the root causes and consequences of social issues

and the effect of social pressures on the people

who ultimately become inmates in the prison system

if you don't see the prison system as a product of a certain kind of society.

It's not independently involved,

and yet we quietly slip into the habit of this impression.

More specifically, and as I want to argue, all attempts at social criticism

of the method of imprisonment need to flow from an understanding

of the historical precedence that came to produce the prison.

This is rarely done academically and never in mainstream media.

This notion of separation also allows for the methods of the prison system

to be transferred to a general society whilst maintaining a certain doublethink

that these methods are not being used.

Ever-increasing and ever-powerful surveillance

is quite an embedded part of life now,

and yet it goes unnoticed by many because we are 'outside the prison',

therefore we must be free.

Comparisons of the school system with a prison are met with a priori cynicism

and are mostly made half jokingly by students who are only quietly aware

that the school system much more closely resembles the coercive organization

of prison than people would comfortably admit.

But, the reinforcer is there: You are not in a prison, you are outside;

and even though you may be in another social institution,

the logic and methods of the prison system

in your life are made to appear non-overlapping.

You should be thankful that you are not in prison.

This is a powerful enforcer against critical engagement with prison as well.

The 3rd and final effect of dividing up prison and society I want to dwell on

concerns the reform movement towards prison.

While it may seem an odd thing to say,

the debate against prisons' various failings or successes

is automatically framed as an argument for increasing its abilities.

The demand for reform, improvements, inspections, accountability

are all impulses of the same core values that gave birth to the prison itself.

Thus we easily slip into solving the problems of prisons

with a debate framed within the assumptions of creating more imprisonment,

in a sense that the attributes of surveillance, structured administration

and the demand for improvement and tracking of a subject that we see in the prison

are all reasserted on the prison itself, magnifying it more.

Let's give prison the context we need in order to understand it.

What came before the practice of the prison?

What happened to people caught in transgressions of the law in pre-carceral days?

What were the development pressures of imprisonment,

and how have they continued up to the present day?

What does it actually mean, in social terms,

to be living in a society that makes use of a prison system?

In his book 'Discipline and Punish | The birth of the Prison'

Michel Foucault recalls a famous case of public execution in 1757

of a regicide named Robert-François Damiens.

On the 1st of March, 1757,

Damiens the regicide was condemned to make the 'Amende Honorable'

before the main door of the church of Paris, where he was to be taken

and conveyed in a cart wearing nothing but a shirt,

holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds.

Then, in said cart, to the place de Grève

where on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn

from his breasts, arms, thighs and cleaved with red-hot pincers,

his right hand holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide,

burnt with sulphur; and on those places where the flesh will be torn away

poured molten-lead, boiling oil,

burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together,

and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses,

and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes

and the ashes thrown to the wind.

The account covers in detail the final moments of this goring.

Then the executioner, his sleeves rolled up, took the steel pincers

which had been especially made for the occasion

and were about a foot-and-a-half long,

pulled first the calf of the right leg,

then of the thigh, and from there, the two fleshy parts of the right arm,

then, at the breasts.

Though a strong, sturdy fellow, the executioner found it so difficult

to tear away the pieces of flesh that he set about the same spot

two or three times, twisting the pincers as he did so;

and what he took away formed at each part a wound about the size

of a 6-pound crown piece.

Stories like the one of Damiens are extremely common

for this time period and for the hundreds to thousands of years before it.

Indeed, in the pre-modern era we often find stories

of the beheaded, treasonous characters from history

having their heads placed on London Bridge's entrance.

The stories of Henry VIII, his misadventures towards his wives,

the methods by which Guy Fawkes was placed on the rack

and then ultimately hanged: These are common to our historical understandings.

I think it is with seemingly great relief

that many parts of the world have now abandoned public torture and execution.

On the face of it, this has been a humane move,

informed by design, not to see wanton, visceral bloodshed

performed by the State on its own people

in those societies that have abandoned either the death penalty

or any other overt public torture or execution.

However, before we move away from staged state violence,

the following points need to be made which help us understand this transition.

Public executions are just that: public.

As a spectacle, the event consists of a singular criminal

or defined set of criminals usually raised on a stage for better viewing,

surrounded by gazes of the onlookers.

In fact, there are historical precedence of crowds of expectant onlookers

rioting because a certain execution was held in private

or organized with limited or obstructed viewing.

Such was the expectation of the public to have a visible event.

Events were also explicitly ordered for

and performed by agents of the state.

The hanged man is not an aggressor so much as the showman for the crowd

and an employee of the state.

As is particularly the case with treason, the crimes that have been committed

are seen as against the monarch or the head of state.

The violence retribution that takes place is at once the expunging of the crime,

often symbolically as with Damiens whose hand held the knife

with which the attempted murder of the king was made.

It's also a reassertion of the power of the monarch or state head,

which has been undermined by the transgression of one of the laws

that the monarch has made, and which defines the power

to which the serfs are indeed subject.

The sovereign's power is acted out physically on the subjects

and the gaze of the onlookers at once empowers the event as theatrical,

noteworthy and central, whilst one would think

also forming a strong negative reinforcement to the witnesses.

This is what happens if you disobey the laws of the land.

To move away from this kind of punishment

to an organization of corrective institutionalization and surveillance

is often considered as one driven by the enlightenment

or a new set of human-based values and understandings towards human behaviour

or the nature of what we call 'evil'.

It is seen predominantly as the melioration

of the viciousness of the punitive mechanisms of the social order,

a more humane form of interaction between society and the criminal individual.

Indeed, the move from torture to punishment and imprisonment

as the main corrective function occurred in Europe in under 80 years,

making it a very speedy and almost sudden move in the force of punishment.

It demonstrates that large changes in the social organization can happen,

but in this case the move was not driven predominantly

by these values at all, but by something else.

The morphing of societal methods of treating transgressions occurred in tandem with

the development of an economy more closely founded

on the ideas of private property and ownership.

A reorganization of power occurred that relocated the point of application of power

from the body whose physicality was tied up in a more agricultural

and labour-based economy to what people often term as 'the soul'

or the more inner light of the delinquent products of that society.

Theft and other property-related crimes belong to the physical,

but once more ideological crimes come into play, like an up-tick

in the amount of fraud that occurs as a market-based economy

and a monetary paradigm begin to dominate, the more the power becomes effective

if it is relocated to the behavioural

rather than the physical side of the human being.

Consequently, we see the following:

The gallows are largely replaced by handcuffs,

and the public spectacle that was overt, punitive violence

and state termination of bodies has now been replaced by

an inverted spectacle that is worth noting.

Where once the lone criminal was gazed upon by a multitude,

by and by the institutional form of correction

has inverted this model into the modern recognizable prison organization:

a multitude of prisoners, all confined, separated, a crowd of individuals

rather than a throng surrounding a central, all-seeing tower

which allows constant supervision of the inmates,

but whose watching eye is itself not identifiable.

It is unseen, invisible. Indeed, as Foucault himself put it:

"Visibility is a trap."

This then was the invention of the 'Panopticon'

by a cheerful chap called Jeremy Bentham (there he is),

a structured excluding building that would house always-visible criminals;

and although the Panopticon is most famous for its central tower

and often round nature of the buildings,

actually over time surveillance has become digital,

and as such the ever-present centre can now be aided by CCTV

and similar measures rather than the need for direct line of sight.

So, even though today's prisons look rather different to this model of operation,

we can see how surveillance is the thing that has most empowered itself

in our punitive measures; and we can also see

that those measures are totalising, born of a central tower,

now morphed into a hi-tech control room.

No longer are the crowd watching the criminal.

A crowd of criminals is now being watched, isolated independently by cells

and the larger layout of the prison;

and yet made uniform by literally, uniforms,

shared rules and statuses.

They can be both entirely separated from the world in solitary confinement,

and yet have every move and behaviour inspected and supervised.

In fact, the word 'super-vision' has its roots in literally overseeing;

those two meanings of regulating an event

as well as having complete views of it are preserved in the modern phrase.

Such a system is always defended (especially by politicians)

as something that works in reducing crime and making society safer.

Indeed, the inbuilt, psychological effect of locking up human delinquents

is to bestow an ill-conceived feeling of being protected from them,

and indeed this feeling of needing protection itself becomes an engine