Carceral state

The concept of a carceral archipelago (meaning a prison consisting of a series of islands) appears in social theorist Michel Foucault's work on surveillance systems and their technologies over modern societies and its practice of social control and discipline over its population in all areas of social life. Taken from his work Discipline and Punish (1975), modelled on the principle of and related to the nation state, and ideally employed on the idea of an incarceration system producing society's need for prisons, it employs physical boundaries to gain control of urban space. Foucault was referring to the Mettray Penal Colony when he introduced a possible socio-cultural nomenclature to be used, "It 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."

In the form of a carceral dystopia, public space is transformed into defendable space, with the installation of walls, gates, fences, surveillance cameras and security checkpoints. Such installations are meant to provide control over urban space. In these spaces, gatherings of strangers to the area are discouraged, and barricades of various forms can prevent people from entering or passing through.

Foucault's main feature in his work Discipline and Punish traces how it was possible that our society has become one in which surveillance and monitoring are permanent and constant features of our world. These contemporary forms of social control, punishment, surveillance and the prison system had unlikely origins: a whole series of accidents and unintentional consequences, and a transformation in the nature and understanding of punishment that took place around 18th-century Europe.

This is why the case of Robert-François Damiens is important. He was doubly 'unlucky' and 'unfortunate' – because both his gruesome punishment had become redundant and obsolete, because not long afterwards criminal punishment had become 'humane'. However, this 'humaneness' had its own rationale. According to Foucault, the very notion of the criminal had become political within the confines of political economy, the western legal system had been transformed from one of cruelty to one of repeating one's crimes over and over again, therefore producing the 'rational' professional criminal; criminals were punished differently (and less dramatically, rather ironically). The professional criminal had now been tied to the general specifics of the judiciary, giving the rather false impression that the working population were susceptible to criminal law breaking and anti-social behaviour. This wrong impression produced an explosion of different techniques at who it was primarily aimed at rather ironically, the working population from where the inexhaustible supply of the professional criminal, labour power and political power all came from this particular group and inevitably become an invaluable source of discipline and punishment to the rest of society. This doesn't mean to say, however, that society was split into a two-tiered society, one for punishment and one for the unpunished; what it does mean is that the intended recipients of the system of prison and punishment was primarily targeted at the disparate, atomised, poorer 'classes' not atomized as collective individuals, but as a group who had no effective organization, a counter organization meaning an organized super structure, such as the state for example, and were unable to fight back in any effective way.

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