Carceral Regime Research Articles

Safe as Houses

The Colonie Agricole Pénitentiaire de Mettray was an important signpost in the development of modern disciplinary space. The writings of Jean Genet act as a set of burglar’s tools, opening up new ways of understanding not only Mettray but also the modern world—Foucault’s carceral regime—in a larger sense. Modernity is seen to operate through a conceptual delamination that, in the end, is far more secure than the walls of any prison.

Punishment's “Square Deal”

In New York State, the years between 1917 and 1933 saw the dissolution of the remnants of the first great American prison system and the formation of a distinctive new penal order. In the long 1920s, mass cultural, associative, and psycho-medical penal practices finally eclipsed the industrial labor regime of the 19th century prison, while state officials ritually declared the death of the “barbaric old system” and the striking of a mutually advantageous “square deal” between convicts and keepers. Contrary to historiographical orthodoxy, innovative administrators and inspired reformers did not, by themselves, create this new carceral regime. Rather, the system emerged out of the sometimes bloody confrontations that transpired between convicts, guards, labor leaders, industrialists, prison wardens, reformers, and political leaders in the years following the abolition of convict leasing in 1894.

Thevet Revisits Guanabara

Thevet Revisits Guanabara

A Carceral Regime: Violence and Social Memory in Southwest China

In Yu Hua's story Nineteen Eighty-six, a high-school history teacher and amateur scholar of ancient techniques of state punishment returns to his hometown. Many years before, during the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards took him from his home, tortured him, and locked him up in a school office. He escaped into a world of insane hallucination and wandered the countryside for nearly two decades. In that time, his wife remarried and his daughter forgot him. On his return, he inflicts on himself in the town's streets the five punishments, which he had studied in texts from the Qin dynasty and before: mo (branding), yi (cutting off the nose), fei (severing the legs at the knees), gong (castration), and dapi (dismemberment). While he mutilates himself with hot irons, knives, saws, rocks, and cleavers, his wife, his daughter, and the other townspeople refuse to recognize him. Eventually, his howls of pain become a nuisance. A policeman declines to get involved, and a gang of youths bind the madman with a rope. next morning, his wife and daughter experience a sense of relief as they watch a sanitation worker cart off the bound corpse. A few months later, after spring turns to summer, two young girls inexplicably spot him in the streets again, clean and well groomed, toward them like a flea. His wife and daughter approach and he calls out after them, but they walk past as if they had never met: The madman kept hopping down the sidewalk, calling all the while for his 'little sister.' mother and daughter kept on walking down the street. They didn't look back. They moved forward with ease and grace (Yu 1987:80). Most scholarly treatments of the politics of memory and forgetting employ a well-worn conceptual vocabulary: inscription and erasure, commemoration and transmission, repression and return of the repressed. In reference to contemporary China, this vocabulary is used to elucidate tensions between a state determined

The Powers That Punish: Prison and Politics in the Era of the "Big House," 1920-1955

In a pathbreaking study of a major state prison, Michigan's Jackson State Penitentiary during the middle years of this century, Charles Bright addresses several aspects of the history and theory of punishment. The study is an institutional history of an American penitentiary, concerned with how a carceral regime was organized and maintained, how prisoners were treated and involved in the creation of a regime of order and how penal practices were explained and defended in public. In addition, it is a meditation upon punishment in modern society and a critical engagement with prevailing theories of punishment coming out of liberal, Marxist and post structuralist traditions. Deploying theory critically in a historic narrative, it applies new, relational theories of power to political institutions and practices. Finally, in studying the history of the Jackson prison, Bright provides a rich account, full of villains and a few heroes, of state politics in Michigan during a period of rapid transition between the 1920s to the 1950s.The book will be of direct relevance to criminologists and scholars of punishment, and to historians concerned with the history of punishment and prisons in the United States. It will also be useful to political scientists and historians concerned with exploring new approaches to the study of power and with the transformation of state politics in the 1930s and 1940s. Finally Bright tells a story which will fascinate students of modern Michigan history.Charles Bright is a historian and Lecturer at the Residential College of the University of Michigan.