Inclusive Exclusion: Citizenship and the American Prisoner and Prison

Abstract

Agnes Czajka’s article, “Inclusive Exclusion: Citizenship and the American Prisoner and Prison,” considers the proliferation of prisons in the United States, particularly the increasing number of supermaximum security or “camp” prisons, as an example of “the normalization of a state of exception.” In her analysis, Czajka applies Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the camp as “a physical space that is opened when a state of exception becomes the rule.” While the incarcerated and the non-incarcerated form two distinct societies, they are nevertheless intricately entwined. In the case of the supermax prison, however, the degree of exclusion is higher than in standard prisons. Prisoners are isolated from society and each other, reduced to “bare life” in solitary confinement, and their treatment is beyond the scrutiny of social and judicial review. The use of surveillance technology allows for an extraordinary degree of exclusion from human contact: prisoners exist “outside the rubric of citizenship.”