Punishing for a Living: More on the Cementing of Prisons

IN A WORLD WITHOUT PRISONS, JULIA SUDBURY TIES THE FATE OF THE marginalized masses--a growing transnational body with linked miseries--to our resistance against intersecting military, penal, and imperial projects of dominant neoliberal regimes. She builds on the critical analysis of neoliberalism by positioning prisons and penal regimes as important counterparts to military aggression in its global diffusion and hegemony. Identifying the prison as a structural linchpin in the establishment, rationalization, and maintenance of global processes of dominance and exclusion gives clarification and momentum to calls for prison abolition. The essay throws especially valuable light on transnational qualities of the prison-industrial complex and its attendant punishment boom. This is represented in the push by U.S.-based leaders in the private prison industry to claim more and more of the global market for criminal social control, a supply and demand fomented by the spread of exclusionary penal logics of social regulation (i.e., the use of prisons to purge dishonored and superfluous beings), and restructuring requirements of world economic institutions. This penal effort buttresses military interventions seeking to establish control over economic and political interests in Latin America and elsewhere, including the imposition of limits on self-determination, no matter the contradiction, and the suppression of inspired resistance. It is in this crucible of economic and political repression that militarism and the expansion of empire spins a web of mass criminalization, creating the societal conditions and actual bodies prerequisite to an imprisonment boom. Penal warehouses for people of African descent, immigrants, indigenous people and the global poor increasingly dot the global village because, Sudbury argues, they are central to the new world order. This is a compelling cartography of synergies between incarceration and militarism, its most vivid illustrations coming through the experiences of Latin American, African, and Caribbean women trapped in this web of repression, characteristic of the modern capitalist world system. The essay leaves a well-marked trail for intellectual and political work to follow in charting our way out of a world overrun with prisons. Yet, in doing so, we must be mindful of the challenge to appreciate the multitude of forces at work in the creation and maintenance of this social problem, and to avoid a sort of reductionism that has marred critical analyses of punishment before. Indeed, while recognizing their indispensable contributions, scholars have cautioned against rigid applications of conflict theory to explain the development of punishment as a social institution. For example, although Rusche and Kirchheimer's early Marxist-revisionist history, Punishment and Social Structure (1939), represents a breakthrough in the sociological analysis of criminal social control, the study has been rightly criticized for overstating the role of economic forces in shaping penal regimes and overlooking other streams of influence, such as the ascendance of penal administrations, whose officials and bureaucracies also shape the direction and endurance of penal policy (Garland, 1990). Sudbury's essay does well to avoid such gross oversights. While increasing our understanding of how dominant economic and political interests contribute to the development of a modern penal logic, as well as the proliferation of prisons, we can lose sight of more proximate or intermediate mechanisms related to how industrialized punishment works. For example, in the expanding apparatus of the prison-industrial complex, we find not only the swelling ranks of criminalized people, removed to prisons and otherwise disappeared from civil society through more and less visible punishments, but also a growing segment of workers employed in industries of social control. Sudbury touches on this in her discussion of the role powerful correctional officer unions have played in encouraging the punishment boom, as an example of non-corporate influences behind the expansion of the prison-industrial complex. …

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