Why prison? Posing the question

Abstract

The question why prison? has never been more pertinent or compelling than it is today. Rates of penal incarceration in many countries around the world have reached record levels and the combined world prison population recently surpassed Ten Million. 1 When such enormous figures are presented to us it can be difficult to conceptualise what the data actually means, but if all the people imprisoned in just three nations – the United States of America (USA), China and Russia – were to stand next to each other the resulting line would stretch across the surface of the planet. Notwithstanding a few notable exceptions the global data are clear and decisive: penal incarceration has risen and continues to rise at an alarmingly fast pace (Walmsley, 2012). For Dario Melossi (2011:50) global penal excess at the beginning of the twenty-first century is tantamount to a “great internment”. Such phraseology immediately brings to mind a possible connection between the current penal incarceration binge and the emergence of the great confinement in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1939/2003; Foucault, 1967). It also begs parallels with the emergence in the eighteenth century of a centralised bureaucratic state with the mandate to manage rising economic inequality and manifestations of class struggle. The mission of the new sites of state detention was unequivocal: to survey, classify, regulate and control unwanted and unwelcome populations (Rothman, 1971; Foucault, 1977; Ignatieff, 1978; Melossi and Pavarini, 1981; Cohen, 1985; Scull, 1993). As Thomas Mathiesen (1990:14, emphasis in original) maintained some twenty or more years ago, the rapid and spectacular growth of penal incarceration since the early 1970s may indicate a new third stage in the development of imprisonment, this time in response to a perceived ‘need for discipline in given segments and groups of the population’. Perhaps then we should not be surprised that prisons everywhere are bursting at the seams with the poor, marginalised and socially deprived.