The Carceral Polis: Political Theory of the American Prison

Establishing the separation of carceral powers through a new department of provisions

Carceral Tyranny

I’ve been doing work recently to demystify and elucidate the tyranny embedded in American carceral network. I propose a new idea that the U.S. prison system is not simply an infrastructural wing of the U.S. political system. It has consolidated itself into its own insulated polis, acting with a de-facto sovereign capacity of a city-state. Therefore in order to enact real change one needs to think not just historically, materially, culturally, or socially, but politically. Tyranny can be seen embedded in the structures of governance that dominate the carceral apparatus.

The prison apparatus is not only responsible for security and detainment, but for provisions such as food, water, housing amenities, healthcare, and human resources. Here lies the first contradiction, the occupational bodies deigned to provide provisions are directly downstream from larger bodies rooted in a historical ethos of punishment, ‘correction,’ detainment, and security. The carceral network also includes its own slave-labor based economy, quasi-legal adjudication systems, surveillance systems, and political structures.

These carceral organs of the larger network are intermarried and provide each other with legitimacy, currency, and power. For example, the American Corrections Association (ACA) supposedly provides certifications for the liberal and reformative nature of prisons denoted by a set of conditions. If a prison is ACA certified, you’re supposed to imagine that it’s ‘good’ (e.g. zoo’s with AZA certifications).

This has been a mainstay in many such industries since the bureaucratisation turn of the 1950’s. Yet, the ACA is a correctional association not only by name but also interwoven into the fabric of its structure. It is filled with ex-wardens and prison staff, moreover it needs to actually certify prisons in order to receive its pay check which creates a dependency on the very structures it is intended to fairly audit.

The corruption in action has been demonstrated by their validations of Geo Group and Core-Civic, private prisons known at the time of certification for overt human rights violations. Their yearly report into prisons conduct is handed upwards through the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to the Department of Justice (DOJ) at the top of the network. A recent 2022 report was reviewed by the DOJ and determined to be hastily and lazily put together, although no consequences were administered.

The central figure in the establishment of normative prison dominance is the Department of Corrections (DOC). While they are surrounded by structures such as the ACA, BOP, and DOJ, they alone impose and sustain their will through human action. All other organisations around them become mere bureaucratic mirages amorally connected to the will and design of the DOC, the only organ which can express carceral power directly. The DOC represents carceral productivity and the other organisations coalesce themselves in order to gorge in the administered systems of production for economic growth.

Here lies the tyranny of the Department of Corrections, the instrumental center of the carceral polis segregated in all meaningful ways from society. It imposes its will unilaterally through systems of discretion, coercion, and silence. In this case, silence itself becomes a form of carceral violence. The violence has changed over the years to bear a liberal aesthetic, but the harsh reality of illiberal dominance is hardly more felt than ever.

A friend of Mark Twain and prominent writer, Charles Dudley Warner, denoted the sharp decrease in prisoner morale as structures became increasingly clinical, clean, and bureaucratic. Prisoners continue to serve indeterminate sentences, their lives at the will of a 5 minute parole hearing (a great source of prisoner stress, anxiety, and frustration), all while prisoners continue to establish their own political ecosystem through violence, status, and the perpetuation of criminal psychologies.

Toward a New Solution: The Department of Provisions

In my work I posit a normative solution grounded in marxist history and humanist political theory, one that looks at the carceral polis and aims to restructure its political power in light of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (what has provided us with what we call the separation of powers) and Hannah Arendt’s spirit of revolution, natality, and sustained human action. The framework recognises the contradiction of the DOC, a system of economic growth through detainment rooted in a history of labor and punishment expected to handle systems of care and provision simultaneously.

Therefore, my solution stems from the natality of a new counter system of governance that begins with a board locally elected which is to be called the Department of Provisions. This department is locally founded with the recognition that the carceral polis, despite having an insulated governmental structure, does not (and should not) have an insulated population (despite its efforts). Through this recognition it aims to integrate the carceral polis into local political society through transparent and democratic systems of care and liberal reform which establish positive social relations for reintegration.

Prisons are revolving doors and local populations should be actively concerned about the state of prisoners upon release, who in the present moment are thrust back into a liberal environment with no resources and thus often confounded by the expression of liberal principles. They have instead spent their time in a social system characterised by a hierarchies established by violent anarchism between themselves and the juxtaposition of complete subservience to the DOC. It is in the economic, security, and sustainability interests of local people to benefit from the masses of those constantly released instead of incurring further harm and loss of their population. Current rates of recidivism and mass incarceration demonstrate the social failure of prisons, but they also establish their bloated economic success and carceral legitimacy.

A Department of Provisions (DOP) with a locally elected board would rival the interests of the Department of Collections. It would be instituted by a constitution of care and the minimisation of incarceration and recidivism. This board would then hire several occupational bodies which would represent the DOP through sustained human action operating within prisons themselves alongside DOC workers. These would include counsellors, social workers, human resource agents, legal advisors, etc. Any such roles currently existing under the DOC would thereby be abolished and reinstated under the ethos, constitution, and structure of the DOP.

DOP workers would be responsible for proliferating care-based liberal reform and strategies/resources for community reintegration. They would continually check the measures of the DOC and the ongoing state of prison affairs through constant human awareness, rather than the ongoing systems of intermittent verification which are perniciously corrupted.

The DOC and DOP could repress each other at times, but the existence of each would be better suited for establishing mutual systems of productivity. This is to say that the separations of power operates better when you have a multiplicity of positive powers that check each other through production rather than limit each other through repression. The DOC would produce systems of security (now with knowledge of DOP power) and the DOP would produce systems of care and reform (with knowledge of DOC security limits). The resulting apparatus aims to balance two kinds of productive power in a system of governance which increases transparency, fairness, liberal reformative and humanistic virtues, and erodes the bloat, violence, and tyranny of the Department of Corrections. It aims to deflate the overarching prison industrial complex while improving local social and economic relations.