Unequalled in pain

Abstract

Penological studies have time and time again emphasised that imprisonment has much in common with other sites of state detention and that the emergence some two centuries ago of themodern prison is intimately tied to a broader ‘confinement project’ (S. Cohen, 1985; Mathiesen, 1990). Many of the inherent harms of imprisonment are shared by different sites of confinement, and the boundaries between forms of incarceration have always been blurred and permeable: prisons hold recalcitrant mental health patients and foreign nationals; high-security hospitals and asylums hold the ‘criminally insane’; and immigration detention centres hold foreign national ex-prisoners and may be experienced like prisons. Influential arguments have also been made concerning the overlaps and convergences between themodern prison and other ‘institutions’, such as the monastery, nunnery, reformatory, workhouse, plantation, slavery, asylum, hospital, factory, school, army barracks, boot camp, concentration camp, immigration detention centre, Jim Crow regime and black ghetto (Rothman, 1971; Foucault, 1977; Melossi and Pavarini, 1981; S. Cohen, 1985; Dobash et al., 1986; Scott, 1996/2011; Wacquant, 2001; Scull, 2006; Bosworth, 2008; Alexander, 2011; A. Y. Davis, 2012; Ugelvik, 2012). Yet whilst identification of symbiotic intersections remains important, the danger is that prison can become conceptually indistinguishable from other forms of confinement. We must be careful not to ‘obfuscate or ignore’ (Scull, 2006: 201) the ideological and institutional differences between the separate sites of incarceration, for each have their own unique raison d’etre. Prisons are designed to deliberately create human suffering, hurt and injury.