Carceral archipelago

Foucault first used the phrase "carceral archipelago" to describe the penal institution at Mettray, France. Foucault said that Mettray was the "most famous of a whole series of institutions which, well beyond the frontiers of criminal law, constituted what one might call the carceral archipelago." The book described the Russian Gulag's vast network of dozens of camps and hundreds of labour colonies scattered across the Soviet Union. The Gulag Archipelago, written between 1958 and 1968, was first published in English in 1974 and was based on Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a prisoner. It has been described as the book that "brought down an empire", the most powerful indictment of a "political regime...in modern times", and "a head-on challenge to the Soviet state." ==Discipline and Punish==

Foucault was writing Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison in the early 1970s, against the backdrop of prison revolts "throughout the world" that protested a century-old system of cold, suffocation, overcrowding, hunger, physical maltreatment, so-called "model prisons", tranquilizers, and isolation. A year after the GIP folded, Foucault published Discipline and Punish, in which he examined the evolution of the penal system, away from corporal and capital punishment, into the modern carceral system that began in Europe and the United States around the end of the 18th century. His biographer Didier Eribon described Discipline and Punish as "perhaps the finest" of Foucault's works. In the chapter on "Science and Knowledge", he suggested that 'disciplines' could be called "groups of statements that borrow their organization from scientific models" that once they were accepted, became "institutionalized, transmitted, and sometimes taught as sciences." He goes on to challenge these disciplines—which he also does in Discipline and Punish—asking "[C]ould one not say that archaeology describes disciplines that are not really sciences, while epistemology describes sciences that have been formed on the basis of (or in spite of) existing disciplines?" wrote that Foucault's "great confinement" In The London Hanged, Linebaugh described how the population in London had become criminalized in the 18th century—"People were so impoverished, they had to steal to survive." As the meaning of property changed, property laws were rewritten. ==From a culture of spectacle to a carceral society==

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traced the genealogy of contemporary forms of the penal or carceral system, from the eighteenth century until the mid-1970s in the Western world. Foucault opened Discipline and Punish with a detailed description of the execution of the French citizen, Robert-François Damiens in 1757 as punishment for regicide in a public display of drawing and quartering. Servan described how a "true politician" guides citizens by forming a "chain of ideas" on [crime and punishment] that is "strongly linked" with the "stable point of reason" securing the "end of the chain." and Léon Faucher. In his book House of Young Prisoners, Faucher prescribed "strict discipline, exact rules, surveillance and rehabilitation". From the late 18th century through the early decades of the 19th century, modern criminal codes were implemented in Europe and North America. By 1838, with the publication of Leon Faucher's book on prison reform, society had transitioned—the public execution was replaced by the "timetable". Foucault said, "Were I to fix the date of completion of the carceral system... [t]he date I would choose would be 22 January 1840, the date of the official opening of Mettray. Or better still, perhaps, that glorious day, unremarked and unrecorded, when a child in Mettray remarked as he lay dying: 'What a pity I left the colony so soon.'" Pierre François Lacenaire (1803 – 1836), and a 13-year-old charged with vagabondage who was sentenced to two years in a reformatory. In contemporary US political science studies, poststructuralists use "biopower" to denote social and political power over life. ==The carceral state==

In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s prisoner coalitions — including the Chicano Movement and Black Power organizations — in American prisons protested together under the banner of "slaves of the state". Their legal challenge to prison conditions was successful. In response, the state introduced a "new prison regime" with paramilitary equipment and practices, the increased use of privatized prisons, "massive prison building programs", and new levels of punishment, such as "23-hour cell isolation". Author Robert Chase called this the "'Sunbelt' militarized carceral state approach that became exemplary of national prison trends." In his 1994 review of Crime control as industry, Andrew Rutherford described Christie as a criminologist of "international renown", who has written prolifically about punishment and the role of law for decades. Rutherford said that Christie "exemplified the enlightened humanist tradition" and called for criminal law with a "minimalist intervention". Rutherford said that Christie's writing had become much "darker" by 1993, as he warned of the "rapaciously devouring crime control industry" particularly in the United States. In a reference to Foucault's "Great Confinement" in Discipline and Punish, Christie says that these "new great confinements" are part of an "unparalleled escalation of prison populations" with "combat-style probation officers", and "widespread privatization" of prisons. In The Prison and the Gallows she made reference to Foucault's "carceral archipelago". She described how "a tenacious carceral state has sprouted in the shadows of mass imprisonment and has been extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It includes not only the country’s vast archipelago of jails and prisons, but also the far-reaching and growing penal punishments and controls that lies in the never-never land between the prison gate and full citizenship. As it sunders families and communities and radically reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship, the carceral state poses a formidable political and social challenge." She said that until the carceral turn in the social sciences in the late 1990s, "mass imprisonment was largely an invisible issue in the United States". By 2014, there was widespread criticism of mass incarceration but very modest reform. According to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a geographer, whose 2007 book entitled, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, in 2007, California had the largest prison-population in the United States. Gilmore, who co-founded Critical Resistance (an U.S.-based prison-abolition group), links carceral policies to economic and social factors. Brett Story, who wrote and directed the 2017 feature documentary The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, also wrote the book Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America. In Prison Land, Story says that carceral space "stretches into the ordinary—where people gather in "courtrooms and in mess halls, in visiting centers, at public defenders' offices, and on visitors' buses that take care givers to and from "prison visiting centers that dot the carceral landscape." Both Gilmore and Gottschalk are "established in their fields"; Geographer Anne Bonds investigated how social and criminal justice policies had become "increasingly punitive" as class and race inequalities became more entrenched. She argued that discourse on the poor obscures how poverty is produced or increased because of the "neoliberal restructuring of rural economies and governance". By 2017, the concept of a penal or carceral state - with varying definitions and parameters - had become widely used in "punishment and criminal justice literature". According to a 2017 article in Theoretical criminology, the carceral state is far from being a "single, unified, and actor-less state responsible for punishment". the phrases "carceral state", "mass incarceration", and "prison-industrial complex" are sometimes interchanged and are frequently used by scholars in the field without providing clear definitions of their meaning. They describe the "brutal history of extreme state punishment" in the United States that has led to an exponential increase in the number of incarcerated individuals in the United States since the mid-1970s. the United States has imprisoned more of its citizens than any other Western democracy. Its prison population represents 25 percent of global incarceration. According to Berger, while there is much disagreement about the definition of the term "carceral state", analyses of the topic all agree "that the United States has a lot of people in prison, that a disproportionate number of them are people of color, that police exert too much power with too much weaponry, and that the country's prison system is held together by an overriding investment in harsh and degrading punishment." For geographers Stefano Bloch and Enrique Olivares-Pelayo and sociologists Loïc Wacquant, Robert Weide, and Patrick Lopez-Aguado, the Carceral State maintains racial segregation as part of enforcing prison control. == See also ==