Biz diri diri gömülenlerdik,yaşayan ölülerdik. Tecrit bizim mezarımızdı ve orada bir seans sırasında tıkırdayan ruhlar gibi fırsat bulduğumuzda yumruklarımızla konuşuyorduk.
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Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.
Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
How could the prison not be immediately accepted when, by locking up, retraining and rendering docile, it merely reproduces, with a little more emphasis, all the mechanisms that are to be found in the social body? The prison is like a rather disciplined barracks, a strict school, a dark workshop, but not qualitatively different.
‘Alone in his cell, the convict is handed over to himself; in the silence of his passions and of the world that surrounds him, he descends into his conscience, he questions it and feels awakening within him the moral feeling that never entirely perishes in the heart of man’
(Journal des économistes, II, 1842)
‘The convicts are … another people within the same people; with its own habits, instincts, morals’ (Marquet-Wasselot, 9).
There are three types of convict;
there are those who are endowed ‘with intellectual resources above the average of intelligence that we have established’, but who have been perverted either by the ‘tendencies of their organization’ and a ‘native predisposition. Those that belong to this category require isolation day and night and solitary exercise.
The second category is made up of ‘vicious, stupid or passive convicts, who have been led into evil by indifference to either shame or honour, through cowardice. The regime suitable to them is not so much that of punishment as of education. Isolation at night, work in common during the day, conversations permitted provided they are conducted aloud.
Lastly, there are the ‘inept or incapable convicts’, who are ‘rendered incapable, by an incomplete organization, of any occupation requiring considered effort and consistent will, having neither enough education to know their social duties, nor enough intelligence to understand this fact or to struggle against their personal instincts, are led to evil by their very incapacity. For these, solitude would merely encourage their inertia; they must therefore live in common, but in such a way as to form small groups, constantly stimulated by collective operations, and subjected to rigid surveillance’.
(Ferrus, 182ff and 278ff).
‘The feeling of injustice that a prisoner has is one of the causes that may make his character untamable. When he sees himself exposed in this way to suffering, which the law has neither ordered nor envisaged, he becomes habitually angry against everything around him; he sees every agent of authority as an executioner; he no longer thinks that he was guilty: he accuses justice itself’
(Bigot Préameneu).
‘One inveighs against the slave-trade. But are not our prisoners sold, like the slaves, by entrepreneurs and bought by manufacturers … Is this how we teach our prisoners honesty? Are they not still more demoralized by these examples of abominable exploitation?
(Text addressed to L’Atelier, October 1842, by a worker imprisoned for joining a workers’ association)
‘Visit the places where people are judged, imprisoned or executed … One thing will strike you everywhere; everywhere you see two quite distinct classes of men, one of which always meets on the seats of the accusers and judges, the other on the benches of the accused’, which is explained by the fact that the latter, for lack of resources and education, do not know ‘how to remain within the limits of legal probity’
(Lucas, II, 82)
For the observation that prison fails to eliminate crime, one should perhaps substitute the hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency, a specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous – and, on occasion, usable – form of illegality; in producing delinquents, in an apparently marginal, but in fact centrally supervised milieu; in producing the delinquent as a pathologized subject.
Because the prison facilitates the supervision of individuals when they are released, because it makes possible the recruiting of informers and multiplies mutual denunciations, because it brings offenders into contact with one another, it precipitates the organization of a delinquent milieu, closed in upon itself, but easily supervised: and all the results of non-rehabilitation (unemployment, prohibitions on residence, enforced residences, probation) make it all too easy for former prisoners to carry out the tasks assigned to them.
Prison and police form a twin mechanism; together they assure in the whole field of illegalities the differentiation, isolation and use of delinquency.