Name: Ben McLeish - Prison, Punishment and Profit | Z-Day 2012 [ The Zeitgeist Movement ]
Uploaded: 2017-08-09T11:00:13.000Z
Duration: 38 min 6 s
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Before that I'd spent the last year researching

so I thought I'd take you on a journey through what I've found.

At the end I would like you to celebrate with me the fact that I can now leave

this disgusting, horrible, painful, dangerous system behind me;

and we'll all go out and have a drink and celebrate the fact that we,

ourselves, actually can leave it behind unlike some.

Fyodor Dostoevsky once said that one can measure

the degree of civilization in society by entering its prisons.

While this may be true, I think that in all senses

we see prison as separate from society, parallel to society,

not a product of that society but a neighbouring entity.

This is partly a product of the nature of the modern imprisonment paradigm:

halted access in circumscription of its structures,

its necessary opaque methods of administration.

The anatomy of a prison system comes into existence

or is defined by its separation from its surroundings;

At the same time, these institutions we wish to understand

and the system as a totality, house what is seen by the general public

as an alternative population, a branch of humanity that has transgressed

whatever that society has placed into the paradigm of legal activity.

This perception aids us in divorcing the prison system

and the whole concept of the imprisonment system from our daily lives too.

Few problematic consequences arise, I think, from this.

First off, it has become very hard to criticize the prison system.

You are less likely to see the root causes and consequences of social issues

and the effect of social pressures on the people

who ultimately become inmates in the prison system

if you don't see the prison system as a product of a certain kind of society.

and yet we quietly slip into the habit of this impression.

More specifically, and as I want to argue, all attempts at social criticism

of the method of imprisonment need to flow from an understanding

of the historical precedence that came to produce the prison.

This is rarely done academically and never in mainstream media.

This notion of separation also allows for the methods of the prison system

to be transferred to a general society whilst maintaining a certain doublethink

Ever-increasing and ever-powerful surveillance

and yet it goes unnoticed by many because we are 'outside the prison',

Comparisons of the school system with a prison are met with a priori cynicism

and are mostly made half jokingly by students who are only quietly aware

that the school system much more closely resembles the coercive organization

of prison than people would comfortably admit.

But, the reinforcer is there: You are not in a prison, you are outside;

and even though you may be in another social institution,

the logic and methods of the prison system

in your life are made to appear non-overlapping.

You should be thankful that you are not in prison.

This is a powerful enforcer against critical engagement with prison as well.

The 3rd and final effect of dividing up prison and society I want to dwell on

concerns the reform movement towards prison.

the debate against prisons' various failings or successes

is automatically framed as an argument for increasing its abilities.

The demand for reform, improvements, inspections, accountability

are all impulses of the same core values that gave birth to the prison itself.

Thus we easily slip into solving the problems of prisons

with a debate framed within the assumptions of creating more imprisonment,

in a sense that the attributes of surveillance, structured administration

and the demand for improvement and tracking of a subject that we see in the prison

are all reasserted on the prison itself, magnifying it more.

Let's give prison the context we need in order to understand it.

What came before the practice of the prison?

What happened to people caught in transgressions of the law in pre-carceral days?

What were the development pressures of imprisonment,

and how have they continued up to the present day?

What does it actually mean, in social terms,

to be living in a society that makes use of a prison system?

In his book 'Discipline and Punish | The birth of the Prison'

Michel Foucault recalls a famous case of public execution in 1757

of a regicide named Robert-François Damiens.

Damiens the regicide was condemned to make the 'Amende Honorable'

before the main door of the church of Paris, where he was to be taken

and conveyed in a cart wearing nothing but a shirt,

holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds.

Then, in said cart, to the place de Grève

where on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn

from his breasts, arms, thighs and cleaved with red-hot pincers,

his right hand holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide,

burnt with sulphur; and on those places where the flesh will be torn away

burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together,

and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses,

and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes

The account covers in detail the final moments of this goring.

Then the executioner, his sleeves rolled up, took the steel pincers

which had been especially made for the occasion

then of the thigh, and from there, the two fleshy parts of the right arm,

Though a strong, sturdy fellow, the executioner found it so difficult

to tear away the pieces of flesh that he set about the same spot

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Ben McLeish - Prison, Punishment and Profit | Z-Day 2012 [ The Zeitgeist Movement ]

literally

applause

physical

structure