On the Aftermath of The Prison and the Factory: From genealogy to abolition?

The Prison and the Factory between Marx and Foucault

According to the first discussant, Johann Koehler, the central question seems to have to do with the relationship of The Prison and the Factory to the Marxist tradition on the one hand (including in this especially Rusche and Kirchheimer’s Punishment and Social Structure (1939)), and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) on the other. Significantly, he premises his essay with a quote by Foucault, taken from Didier Eribon’s biography, where Foucault, finally losing patience with a young militant who had asked him to speak about Marx in a study group, had a sort of temper tantrum, “Don’t talk to me about Marx anymore! I never want to hear anything about that man again. Ask someone whose job it is. Someone paid to do it. Ask the Marxist functionaries. Me, I’ve had enough of Marx” (Foucault, cited in Eribon, 1989: 266). On the other hand, the recent publication of the lectures on The Punitive Society (Foucault, 1973) that many see as preparatory to Discipline and Punish has again put forth the idea of a possible vicinity of Foucault to Marx-inspired narratives of the time, such as E.P. Thompson or Louis Althusser (Althusser, 1970; Elden, 2015; Hay et al., 1975; Melossi, 2018; Thompson, 1975).

Bernard Harcourt’s (2013: 283–289) warning against such reading, in the commentary to The Punitive Society, has greater efficacy in emphasizing Foucault’s unquestionable distaste for a certain scholastic Marxism of Communist Parties’ professional cadres than against Marx’s thinking itself. The kind of catechistic Marxism, in other words, organized around the rather un-Marxian idea of “the State,” so important instead to the political Marxism of both Social-Democratic and Leninist parties. The Marxism of the “architectural metaphor” of structure/superstructure, the Marxism of the State as the “site of capitalist power,” and the conspiratorial Marxism where political necessity had also important theoretical consequences.

As I tried to show in my new Introduction to The Prison and the Factory (Melossi, 2018), ours was a rather different tradition of Marxist thinking, one that had developed within the New Left, both in Europe and in North America, for which the idea of class struggle—and specifically of class struggle within the very institutions of society, what Rudi Dutschke had called a “a long march through the institutions” (Bergmann et al., 1968) or Mario Savio, speaking on the steps of Sproul Hall in Berkeley, had called, years before, “stopping the machine” (Rosenfeld, 2012: 217)—was the idea of a force driving social and historical change.

In this sense, I like Koehler’s idea of The Prison and the Factory as easing transition, so to speak, from Marxism to Foucault. I basically think that both Foucault’s and our Marxism were deeply embedded in a Zeitgeist where a sense, at the same time, of a continuously unfinished struggle and of a hopelessness in the realization of any future Utopia went hand in hand.

About the “history” of the Prison and the Factory

In the second short review essay, Rubin asks questions about The Prison and the Factory’s “radicalism” and “revisionism.” I have never had much taste for the term “radicalism” (a term very much owing to an Anglo-American tradition that was not even used, at the time, especially in Continental Europe). It is certainly true, however, that The Prison and the Factory was part of a certain “revisionist” history, together with Foucault (1975), with Goffman (1961), with Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939), which was very critical of the previous “Whig History” of institutions and of prisons in particular, a history much taken by a kind of progressive “Enlightenment” narrative where, since the notorious medieval “dark ages,” a continuous improvement in penal conditions would take humanity to the 19th century prison institutions, institutions of order, hygiene, and resocialization.

Already Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939: 8–23) had very much criticized this view, when they had defended the rather humane practices of the early Middle Ages that, preoccupied with a rather sparse offer of labor, had developed pecuniary punishments rather than corporal or capital punishments. A view inspired to a Whig History where the role of politicians, reformers, and enlightened prison wardens loomed large, a “history of good intentions” (McKelvey, 1936). It is also true that the kind of history that we privileged was instead indirectly influenced by the approach, in those years increasingly important, of the French School of the Annales, an approach, as also in the case of E.P. Thompson, of “history from below.” ¹

Both The Prison and the Factory and Discipline and Punish however loved structures—no matter how post-structuralist especially the latter would be defined—and so, whether reformers and prison guardians could be labelled as mean or beneficent people was certainly not our main preoccupation. As good Marxists, we thought that one should distinguish carefully between individuals and the roles that they occupy. It was the machine that should be destroyed and changed. If individuals were taken in the middle of that, it was supposed to be sine ira et studio; it had nothing to do with whether they were good or bad people, but with their function. We therefore did indeed define ourselves as “radicals”—and here I have to contradict myself—but in the sense in which the young Marx (1844) had defined radicalism, “to be radical is to take things by the root” (p. 119).

Another question Rubin asks is, I think, rather central to the whole discussion of The Prison and the Factory. Rubin claims that when you look at it, prisons really preceded the first factories, at least in North America, and so it would be problematic to think of prisons as somewhat developed out of factories. I do not think however that this was what we were trying to suggest. What we were trying to suggest was that the very idea of the prison was born together with the factory in the workhouse, the workhouse in other terms as a sort of Ur-Factory and Ur-Prison at the same time. Central to this concept is, in my opinion, the role of Quakers and in particular of William Penn when in his penal reform of 1681, part of the broader “holy experiment” of Pennsylvania, he established the clearest and most explicit link between the workhouses and the modern penitentiaries (later invented by Americans) when he had decreed that “all Prisons shall be workhouses for felons, Thiefs, vagrants, and Loose, abusive, and Idle persons, whereof one shall be in every county” (quoted in Dumm, 1987: 79). Penn had very probably learned of the workhouses during his travels to the Netherlands and Northern Germany a few years before (Lewis, 1922: 10; Seidensticker, 1878). As I write in my 2018 Introduction, we should not think of the relationship of the prison and the factory in the manner of prisons as sort of vocational schools geared to producing an industrial proletariat. At times they may have been also that, but I think their most important function has always been a symbolic function. Prison is a symbol of that subordination to the will of gods and kings and masters which was seen at the time as necessary to any well-ordered society (Melossi and Pavarini, 1977: 40–50).

Beyond the prison, beyond penality?

It may well be very difficult, then, to get rid of such a symbol, given that it would be tantamount to getting rid of subordination itself, and that does not seem to loom on the horizon. However, as Anjuli Verma reminds us, does that symbol have to be prison? Why prison? She focuses on something that I wrote, in the new Introduction, but on which I did not focus enough at all, that if we discovered that the prison institution was historically created at a certain point in time and for such and such reasons, then from that it follows that very institution can be “de-created,” destroyed, canceled, abolished with the same historical facility. Here however, we may discover an interesting, politically interesting, divarication between what is the elites’ view on prisons and what may instead be a more popular view of the same.

One in fact of the many very insightful pieces of wisdom that Durkheim has left us on what he called “repressive sanctions” (Durkheim, 1893, 1895) is that passage in The Division of Labor—further developed then in the discussion on the “pathology” of social facts in The Rules—where Durkheim tells us essentially that the sufferance of the offender is a necessary element in the reconstitution of collective consciousness that punishment is after all about. Now, this may of course have to do with punishments even more terrible than imprisonment, such as corporal or capital punishments, but it does not necessarily have to do with imprisonment, does it?

We may consider imprisonment today as a rather brutal form of punishment (contrary to Durkheim’s times, when it was seen as a form of “progress” in punishment, according to the Whiggish history mentioned above!) but the very form of imprisonment as a punishment is very much linked to a historical age, the age of the closed, total institutions related to the period of primitive accumulation—a period progressively expanding worldwide together with the enlarged reproduction of capitalism. That very specific form, however, is neither necessary to the expression of moral indignation that, according to Durkheim, would be the substance of punishment, nor, if we consider the matter attentively, to the affirmation of subordination in the larger society. Or better, it is a rather gross, primitive, cumbersome version of such pedagogy of subordination.

It would not be difficult to imagine, in fact, alternative forms of such pedagogy having to do with more sophisticated manners of maintaining social control and enforcing social order, from surveillance techniques to urban design, from methods of crowd handling to subliminal forms of mind control, from GPS tagging to experiments in behaviorism (see numerous examples of such manners in Zuboff 2019). Of course, none of these alternative techniques would necessarily be better than imprisonment, indeed some of them may have us even more concerned.

The point is however that imprisonment is in no way necessary, it is just the form of punishment and control which we have become historically accustomed to, the one, in particular, which is reserved to the lower classes of society. In other words, from the fact that the main substance of imprisonment lies in subordination does not follow that the lesson of subordination has to be taught only through imprisonment. It could produce many other outcomes.

Furthermore, we should never forget that penality is in constant pursuit of two quite different goals, on the one hand the control of deviancy and “social defense,” as the Positivists called it, but, on the other, the symbolism of crime punished, as Durkheim taught us (Melossi, 2008). The two goals might have very little in common. In fact, at times they may be at loggerheads with each other. It seems to me that, by forgetting the “naturality” of imprisonment and emphasizing its very historical roots we may open ourselves to consideration of what actually are the goals that the criminal justice system supposedly intends to reach, goals that, at that point, may appear to be very poorly served by imprisonment!

It is not necessarily the case that we shall be completely happy with what we may end up discovering as possible alternatives to imprisonment, or even to penality generally—what Enrico Ferri (1880) used to call “the penal substitutes”—but at least we shall have made ourselves available to such discoveries. If that were just the one result of having 40 years ago, together with my good friend Massimo Pavarini, belabored at length on the pages of The Prison and the Factory, I would personally be quite satisfied with that labor.

I thank Anjuli for having pointed out that possibility. It will be up to her, and the other promising young scholars of her generation, such as Johann and Ashley, to carry that further, toward a definitive overcoming of imprisonment and perhaps also—who knows?—of penality!