Prisons & Their Role in Social Control

Ask anybody how prisons work in society and you will generally receive the same glib response: they protect society by removing 'criminal' and 'anti-social' elements, thereby making life safer for the rest of us.

Is this true? Is it the whole truth?

A closer examination of the role of prisons reveals that they do not simply act through the punishment that they inflict upon 'criminals', but that their system of control works on a far deeper and much more surreptitious level.

The common perception of prisons, as portrayed and purveyed by the media and so widely held in the public conciousness, is that they are full of 'dangerous criminals'; that to be sent there is to become vulnerable to attack, rape or even worse at the hands of these 'anti-social' elements.

Of course there are some dangerous, unpredictable people in prison: those whose point of disaffection has reached such a level of psychic destructiveness that they no longer care about cause and consquence. But, in truth, there are probably a greater number of people at 'liberty' in wider society who share similar attributes.

Prison is full of people just like you and me; oppressed by an apparently 'egalitarian' society that forces them to participate in a socially Darwinistic free-for-all in order to provide the needs dictated by the totality. The majority of crimes which are committed that lead to prison sentences are a product of society itself- whether it be the disaffected desperation of theft caused by the dehumanising cage of poverty, the existential alienation caused by the attempted escapism of drug addiction, or the cathartic explosion of violence caused when alcohol and pent-up frustration clash together on a Friday or Saturday.

However, these incarcerated people are just that- people: people with lives and families, faults and foibles. They just happen to be people who are sick of the constant pressure to accumulate property and money through the market relations of capital, and choose to either achieve this goal in their own way, or express their rage, whether conscious or unconscious, at being unable to do so.
A consumer society works through reification of lifestyle: you must buy in order to belong. If you do not buy because you will not, or because through no fault of your own, you cannot, you may feel that all you have left is either to steal, or refuse to pay in order to live up to this projected expectation, or you will store up your frustration to one day be released in violence and expression of anger.

Prison is full of people like this; people who have finally had enough of the formal routes of social hierarchy and have expressed their disaffection in the most direct way. They are not 'dangerous' or 'anti-social' elements.

Why then are they portrayed as such?

The perception of prisons and the role of prisons is just as, if not more, important than the part played by the prisons themselves. Think about it - look around you, read the media, watch the 'law and order' TV shows. How are 'criminals' portrayed in these? How are people with criminal records perceived?

They are the Other: that which we must fear; that which we must strive not to become. In this false dichotomy the need for authority and law is inherant. It exists to protect the 'haves' from the 'have-nots'.

By portraying those who cannot or will not subscribe to laws passed by those with power as untermensch to be avoided at all costs, the system ensures the tacit obedience of existing laws, and the unquestioning acceptance of news ones:

Do not break the law or you will be locked up with the Other.

Do not question the validity of law for it protects you from the Other.

Even though the Other is only yourself.

Thus are people conditioned to accept fear: fear of a non-existent Other, a fear that keeps them in line and persuades them that the relations of the totality act in the interests of the people, disguising the fact that the power of this shibboleth acts solely for its own perpetuation.

Not only then, is it the directly observable fact that prisons physically imprison 'criminals' that oppresses the human condition, but more importantly, it is also the indirectly observable fact that the perception of prisons psychologically imprisons society itself.

The very existence of prisons ensures that we all remain imprisoned.

Fire to the Prisons!

Fire to the State!