The Panopticon, an architectural project developed by Jeremy Bentham Essay Example For Students

The Panopticon, an architectural project developed by Jeremy Bentham Essay Because its your money youre spending. The opportunities for savings, however, present potential dangers for inmates who must endure the possibility of compromised operating costs, or more explicitly, abuse at the hands of prison employees. ~~~ The emergence of privately run and operated prisons is a championing of free market capitalism. As the discourses of profit and loss emerge in those of the proper modes of incarceration, the processes, functions, and goals of a business become the model of the prison institutions success. As prison businesses are seen as viable investments and marked as ethical societal gestures, as I will discuss below, the act of disciplining an imprisoned population mutates into a simple monetary transaction between the state and private entrepreneurs. Prisoners are no more than raw materials to be profited off of in a scenario that paints them as owing their lifeblood to a society they have purposely and maliciously acted against. This transaction should be examined closely, for it reorients Foucaults discussion of the ways in which disciplinary practices produce the very delinquency they are stationed to oversee. The noticeable shift, however, is that current disciplining practices, specifically the privately run penal apparatus, are positioned quite literally to produce both markets and a demand for illegality itself. Capital ventures are, of course, grounded in antagonism fueled by competition. However, competition cannot properly earn a profit if it does not continuously increase its productive power. Consequently, prison industries are faced with the objective of expanding their own market shares (against one another), which thereby presses upon the demand for additional crime and criminal behavior. Therefore, the separation and distribution of inmates and their labor serve the goals of profit, guarded by a specific class in what is ultimately the production of crime and the sale of discipline. One might ask how this development becomes reasonable. The rhetoric fueling privatization argues the inherent benefit of turning prison institutions into viable businesses is first and foremost the termination of wasteful taxation. The burden on taxpayers left with the bill for the punishment of a class of dispossessed individuals is duly unfair, and social body therefore has the right to make use of inmates in ways that set this imbalance right. Today, the journal Crime and Punishment in America states, prison inmates are a huge drain on tax payers, despite the millions of available hours of healthy, prime-age labor they represent. Prisoners, on this account, must first be viewed as potential work hours wasted and second as opportunities to produce excess funds for their governments. The National center for Policy Analysis, a conservative government think-tank, echoes a similar sentiment: it is Time to put prisoners to work. They ought to earn their keep claims the center, So-called prison industries can help control costs, reduce recidivism rates and restore public faith in the justice system. If renewing public support for the justice system is not a worthy enough goal then the celebration of independent market freedoms will suffice. For the most explicit argument on behalf of privatization interfaces the noble principles of free market economy upon the treatment of crime; it simply states that economic theory ought to determine our decisions about prison operation. Economic theory implies that if there were a formal market to buy, sell and rent prison cells, the problems of funding and efficiently allocating prison space would decrease. And there are numerous unexploited opportunities to reduce the net costs of prisons by creating factories behind bars, having prisoners earn their keep and compensating victims. The most promising ways to control taxpayers costs include privatizing prison construction and operation. Short of full privatization, government-operated correctional facilities could be corporatized and operated like private businesses. Internal to the popularity of free market principles in the theorizing and practice of prison operation, lies the attraction of inmate work. Hundreds of thousands of American prisoners work in prison industries, a term that defines several specific but connected enterprises: Federal and state prisons that employ inmates to manufacture goods for sale to both the government and the open market, and private firms that are contracted to hire prisoners for various services or labor. The value of hard labor has a long and animated history; its mythological powers have historically promised virtue, single-mindedness, and a regimented morality. Idleness, it has long been thought, poisons a mans mind. World hunger EssayWith perhaps the exception of slavery, never in the history of corporate investment has this body produced such an extensive capital venture. While privatization is justified by the urgency of budgetary concernswe no longer can afford to feed and house the massive number of people we are sending off to our prisonsits organization must be understood to provide the means to simultaneously profit from the inculcation of docility and the production of crime. Wrapped in this exigence is the assumption that there is no asylum from the assault of crime on society, it is a problem of bad people incapableor perhaps unwillingto live within the bounds of lawful probity. The truths that continue to be circulated in order for privatization to gain momentum are that we need additional cells to eradicate the rampant crime in our cities, that penality is the proper response to illegality, that there exists a dangerous class whose cultural pathology must be neutralized; and, that prison is the means by which that objective is secured. As incarceration takes on an economic function, the control of the prison labor force and the penal apparatus that supports it will eclipse not only inventive policies that take as their starting point the current economic and social disenfranchisement of African Americans (and others), but also thenearly absentissue of true prison rehabilitation. Measures that genuinely reduce crime, recidivism rates, and enable imprisoned citizens to recover their dignity, self-respect and capacity to live well will not be productive investments under these circumstances. Officials in the business of privatization are confident in the continuing volume of incoming inmates today: I dont think we have to worry about running out of product, a warden working for CCA recently remarked. But what are the possibilities for the future? We need only imagine a slowdown in the amount of bodies serviced by the criminal justice system to surmise the worst: lobbying mechanisms designed to push for legislation that might antagonize the demand for additional product. It is here we see most clearly capitalist market forces dominating the panoptic principle. Corporate institutions whose national and global powers are the primary factors in production, trade, and retail operation are changing the modes and characteristics of discipline and regulation. This discipline serves to distributes bodies, practices, and relations in ways that enable the further accumulation of capital. The domain in which this total control is articulated is the geography of commercethe sale, quite literally, of the politically invested body. Foucault has argued that the economic success of this country is due to the coordination of just these two processes: he accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital cannot be separated; it would not have been possible to solve the problem of the accumulation of men without the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and using them The orderly utilization of a collection of men has ensured the power of a ruling class and the asymmetrical flow of profits from their disciplined labor. That such conditions thrive in the United States is testament to the exploitation of a specific class and the successful coercion of men by the minute and detailed disciplinary measures of the panoptic society. The private corporation, as it assumes the direct control of the prison institution, further concretizes a contract between the subject, discipline, and capital. It removes an insulation that makes plain the relationship between political division and monetary regulation. Ultimately the growing prominence of the private corporation as the custodial mechanism of disciplinary control signals transformations in the carceral system. In short, those transformations threaten to heighten the threshold of tolerance to both penal control and the commodification of the delinquent body.