The Political Economy of Punishment Today

Visions, Debates and Challenges

Dario Melossi, Máximo Sozzo, José Brandariz García, Dario Melossi, Máximo Sozzo, José Brandariz García, Dario Melossi, Máximo Sozzo, José A Brandariz García

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781134872855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the last fifteen years, the analytical field of punishment and society has witnessed an increase of research developing the connection between economic processes and the evolution of penality from different standpoints, focusing particularly on the increase of rates of incarceration in relation to the transformations of neoliberal capitalism.

Bringing together leading researchers from diverse geographical contexts, this book reframes the theoretical field of the political economy of punishment, analysing penality within the current economic situation and connecting contemporary penal changes with political and cultural processes. It challenges the traditional and common sense understanding of imprisonment as 'exclusion' and posits a more promising concept of imprisonment as a 'differential' or 'subordinate' form of 'inclusion'.

This groundbreaking book will be a key text for scholars who are working in the field of punishment and society as well as reaching a broader audience within law, sociology, economics, criminology and criminal justice studies.

Chapter 1

Between struggles and discipline

Marx and Foucault on penality and the critique of political economy

Dario Melossi

What follows is a reconstruction of the conceptual genesis of The Prison and the Factory¹ and some of its aftermath. When, around 1974, Massimo Pavarini and I, our law degrees fresh in our pockets, decided to approach the issue of the origins of imprisonment, we seemed to have in front of us two possible venues of exploration. One we had found mentioned in Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946: pp. 23, 235) and we had then retrieved it in British libraries during a ‘grand tour’ of the British Critical Criminology scene: Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer’s Punishment and Social Structure ([1939] 2003).² However, as I later happened to suggest (Melossi 2003), I found Rusche’s emphasis on the importance of the labour market a good example of ‘economism’ but not really of ‘Marxism’, as I will try to show in the remainder of this chapter. The other one was the one that we took (and, in my opinion, that Foucault took) and that was the importance of, and the emphasis on, the issue of discipline.

Political economy of punishment: class struggle and discipline

Much in accordance with the times that surrounded us and that we lived in, we located the site of class struggle in the factory, about the extraction of ‘surplus value’. According to a view, essentially to be found in the first volume of Capital, at the end of the day, the value of production has to be greater than the cost of the various factors of production. This very simple and rather banal statement is at the heart of the idea of class struggle. The government of production is in fact in the hands of capital on one hand and of workers’ resistance on the other. In terms of the history of imprisonment, one could not underestimate therefore the crucial importance of the institution of the ‘workhouse’ (Sellin 1944). The workhouse, which early seventeenth-century Dutch people called the Rasphuis, would in fact be central as a link with the future penitentiary, through William Penn and the Quakers especially.³ Central also as prefiguration of the new prison institution, because of the fame and notoriety of the Rasphuis. Central, especially, in the relationship between penality and capitalism. What other institution could better represent in fact the Weberian ‘elective affinity’ (Howe 1978) of capitalism and the new form of penality? A new form of penality that could be taken to instantiate the ‘spirit of capitalism’ itself, a stand-in for the ‘Protestant ethic’ (Weber [1904–1905] 1958). Indeed, one could claim that the very ‘invention’ of capitalism took place in the invention of the workhouse. ‘The penal question’ has in fact always been close to social innovators’ hearts, and both reformers and revolutionaries alike have been taken in a love-hate relationship with the prison, in which they found, perhaps, the Utopia of society they wanted, especially the Utopia of ‘the new Man’ they wanted to mould.

So, from the Workhouse to the Penitentiary. Then, about one century later, from the Penitentiary to the Panopticon, later celebrated in Foucault’s pages. Jeremy Bentham wrote on the frontispiece of The Panopticon that ‘The Panopticon … [is an] … inspection-house: containing the idea of a new principle of construction applicable to any sort of establishment, in which persons of any description are to be kept under inspection’ ([1787] 1971, p. 40). He goes on to exemplify that the principle is therefore applicable to ‘penitentiary-houses, prisons, houses of industry, work-houses, poor-houses, manufactories, mad-houses, lazarettos, hospitals and schools’ (Ibid.). In The Prison and the Factory (Melossi [1977] 1981, pp. 42–46), I called this panoply of institutions ‘ancillary’ to ‘the factory’, in the sense that they were crucial to constituting, and reproducing the social discipline demanded by a capitalist mode of production.

According to Marx’s reconstruction, in fact, once the labourer has entered the not so metaphoric gates of the sphere of production, it is within those gates that, like by miracle, the sale of his or her labour power eventually gives more, to the capitalist, than what the latter has anticipated for the various costs of production. This difference, which is at the basis of the capitalist’s profit, can come into being, however, only if the ‘freedom’ of the sphere of circulation turns into the kind of (temporary) servitude of the ‘sphere of production’. In fact, the capitalist will be a full-title capitalist only if, having bought the worker’s labour power, he will be able, as every good proprietor, to use and enjoy his property as he likes, and therefore to impose that discipline of production that only warrants the difference which makes his profit. Because one has to note that, in a most ‘unfortunate’ manner, the labour power, which is the merchandise the capitalist has bought, comes with a human being attached, often behaving in ways that are different from those predicted and demanded by the capitalist. This struggle between a human being, the labourer, and the labourer as mere carrier of labour power, is the substance of ‘class struggle’. This is the reason why it is silly to say, as it is often said, that Marx’s theory is ‘based on the economy’. Rather, it is, as the subtitle to Capital reads, a ‘critique of political economy’ which locates the core of the matter in the conflict between capital and labour about exploitation. It is about a political/power struggle (which Marx called ‘class struggle’) over the management of human resources. The society that is ruled by capital is therefore organized around the constitution and maintenance of ‘discipline’, a discipline that permeates all the fundamental social institutions. It does not seem to be quite correct therefore to state that the ‘Marxist theses’ on penality ‘do not depend upon specifically Marxist arguments such as the theory of surplus value’ (Garland 1990, p. 130) because the concept of ‘discipline’ could not be more strictly linked to the concept of surplus value, which is indeed the core of Marxian theory. It is in fact only if the discipline ‘in the sphere of production’ warrants the extraction of surplus value that a capitalist system can indeed even exist as such. Whether or not one agrees with the general validity of such a view – and that is an altogether different question – there is however no doubt that the connection between ‘ancillary’ institutions, and the sphere of production, as institutions of reproduction of that disciplined labour power which is necessary to produce surplus value, is the very clear theoretical linkage between Marx, our work in The Prison and the Factory, and, I claim in the next section, Foucault’s.⁴

The destructuration of authority: struggles

What happened since the 1970s was the destructuration of this system of authority – it was not by chance that many among the most successful movements in the late 1960s called themselves ‘antiauthoritarian’ – a system of authority that many misunderstood to be one and the same with ‘capitalism’ (what one could probably call the most consequential quid pro quo of my generation). Destructuration, in other words, not only of the centrality of discipline in the organization of a ‘panoptic’ society but, also, of a homogeneous, mass, organized, disciplined, working class. As Rosa Luxemburg had already quite incredibly divined in her invective against the ‘discipline’ of the factory and especially of the Russian social-democratic party under Lenin’s guidance (Luxemburg [1904] 1961), such discipline had been bred within the factory (and in fact what happened in the Left after the 1960s and 1970s was also the destructuration of all that). In the 1970s, this set of social arrangements went into deep crisis, or at least appeared to go into crisis. Maybe we started ‘seeing’ the crisis of authority in the ‘total institutions’ exactly because the society that had fed them, and that had fed on them, entered into such a deep crisis.

The role of struggles in this work of material but also conceptual deconstruction can be hardly minimized. Struggles developed, at the same time, within factories, prisons and in all ‘ancillary institutions’ (mental hospitals being the most classical example (Goffman 1961, Basaglia 1968)). Suddenly, we realized that these institutions were not eternal, would not last forever, that, as they were born, they could go. The ‘critique of institutions’ – echoing perhaps what the German student leader Rudi Dutschke (Bergmann et al. 1968) had prophetically called ‘the long march through the institutions’ – could not have existed apart from such struggles. David Garland (2014) has reminded us that this was indeed the case about Michel Foucault’s concept of a ‘history of the present’ in Discipline and Punish:

That punishment in general and the prison in particular belong to a political technology of the body is a lesson that I have learnt not so much from history as from the present. In recent years, prison revolts have occurred throughout the world. There was certainly something paradoxical about their aims, their slogans and the way they took place. They were revolts against an entire state of physical misery that is over a century old: against cold, suffocation and overcrowding, against decrepit walls, hunger, physical maltreatment. But they were also revolts against model prisons, tranquillizers, isolation, the medical or educational services […]. In fact, they were revolts, at the level of the body, against the very body of the prison. What was at issue was not whether the prison environment was too harsh or too aseptic, too primitive or too efficient, but its very materiality as an instrument and vector of power it is this whole technology of power over the body that the technology of the ‘soul’ – that of the educationalists, psychologists and psychiatrists – fails either to conceal or to compensate, for the simple reason that it is one of its tools. I would like to write the history of this prison, with all the political investments of the body that it gathers together in its closed architecture. Why? Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the present.

(Foucault [1975] 1977, pp. 30–31)

This long fragment, and especially its close, is very significant in order to understand the endeavour that Foucault had set for himself, by writing a book about the birth of the prison.⁵ In such connection, one contribution by Foucault that seems particularly relevant, is an interview with John Simon, a professor of French and comparative literature at SUNY Buffalo, who had received Foucault in the United States and who helped him organize a visit to Attica a few months after the famous revolt. He then interviewed Foucault in April 1972 (then originally published in Telos (Foucault 1974)). The revolt at the Attica penitentiary in the State of New York, probably the (politically) most important prison revolt in the history of the United States, generated great impact for its media diffusion, but also for the level of violence in its resolution.⁶ That interview is very interesting because Foucault gave his impressions after visiting Attica, noting also its ‘modern’ aspects, such as the uses of psychiatry, the various forms of therapy, the aseptic character, etc. In fact, there where Foucault writes of a revolt that was also ‘against model prisons, tranquillizers, isolation, the medical or educational services’ he seems to quote almost verbatim from the interview with Simon, which, after all, had taken place only a couple of years before.⁷

The destructuration of authority: Marx and Foucault

Foucault’s relationship with the Marxist tradition and Marx more specifically is quite problematic. Some have claimed that in the 1972–1973 course of lectures at the Collège de France leading up to the writing of Discipline and Punish, and now collected in a volume called The Punitive Society (Foucault [1973] 2015), the influence of Marx over Foucault’s analysis would show more clearly (Elden 2015, p. 161; Harcourt [2013] 2015, pp. 283–289). However, it seems to me that, to the one open to see it, Discipline and Punish would also lend itself to such an interpretation. In the crucial pages on ‘Panopticism’, closing the central section of the volume on ‘Discipline’, Foucault claimed that ‘the two processes – the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital – cannot be separated’ (Foucault [1975] 1977, p. 221). Moreover, development of technology and development of disciplinary techniques were intimately related, according to this very passage. Foucault includes here in parenthesis one of his very rare citations to a classic text, Marx’s discussion, in Chapter XIII of the first Volume of Capital, on ‘Co-operation’. In this chapter, Marx makes the point – essential to the concept of surplus value – that, at this stage of development in the history of capitalism (i.e. before the introduction of complex machinery), labour, after being purchased and assembled together by the capitalist, was forcibly organized by the capitalist’s very physical authority, who co-ordinated the production process with his eye, his voice an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Series editor foreword
• Acknowledgements
• The political economy of punishment today: an introduction
• 1 Between struggles and discipline: Marx and Foucault on penality and the critique of political economy
• 2 The renaissance of the political economy of punishment from a comparative perspective
• 3 For and against the political economy of punishment: thoughts on Bourdieu and punishment
• 4 Do economic depressions reduce the use of fines? Revisiting Rusche and Kirchheimer’s Punishment and Social Structure
• 5 From one recession to another: the lessons of a long-term political economy of punishment. The example of Belgium (1830–2014)
• 6 Political economy of punishment in Australia
• 7 Punishment in a hybrid political economy: the Italian case (1970–2010)
• 8 ‘A return to Gulags’? Explaining trends in post-Soviet prison rates
• 9 Inclusion’s dark side: the political economy of irregular migration in Greece
• 10 Reflections on Spanish policies of migration control: a political economic reading on the punishment of migrants
• Index