The concept of a carceral archipelago was first used by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 publication, Surveiller et Punir, to describe the modern penal system of the 1970s, embodied by the well-known penal institution at Mettray in France. The phrase combines the adjective "carceral", which means that which is related to jail or prison, with archipelago—a group of islands. Foucault referred to the "island" units of the "archipelago" as a metaphor for the mechanisms, technologies, knowledge systems and networks related to a carceral continuum. The 1973 English publication of the book by Solzhenitsyn called The Gulag Archipelago referred to the forced labor camps and prisons that composed the sprawling carceral network of the Soviet Gulag.
Concepts developed in Foucault's Discipline and Punish have been widely used by researchers in the growing, multi-disciplinary field of "carceral state" studies, as part of the "carceral turn" in the 1990s. Foucault, who died in the 1980s, did not witness the "unparalleled escalation of prison populations" of the carceral state in the United States. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the incarceration rate in the US increased by a factor of five, reaching an incarceration rate of 1 in 100 by 2008. Until the carceral turn, scholars propose how what they describe as the American mass incarcerations and prison-industrial complex were almost invisible. In 1993, the international criminologist, Nils Christie, who was one of the first to warn of the perceived dangers of the alarming growth and danger of the crime control industry in the United States, compared the size and scope of the industry to Western style gulags.<ref name="Nils_CrimeControl_1993"/
Etymology of the term Foucault first used the phrase "carceral archipelago" to describe the penal institution at Mettray, France. Foucault said that Mettray was the "most famous of a whole series of institutions which, well beyond the frontiers of criminal law, constituted what one might call the carceral archipelago." Carceral comes from the Latin "carcer", which means jail or prison and archipelago refers to a group of islands.
"Archipelago", as used by Foucault, refers to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, about the Soviet carceral system of forced labor. The book described the Russian Gulag's vast network of dozens of camps and hundreds of labour colonies scattered across the Soviet Union. The Gulag Archipelago, written between 1958 and 1968, was first published in English in 1974 and was based on Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a prisoner. It has been described as the book that "brought down an empire", the most powerful indictment of a "political regime...in modern times", and "a head-on challenge to the Soviet state."
Discipline and Punish
Foucault was writing Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison in the early 1970s, against the backdrop of prison revolts "throughout the world" that protested a century-old system of cold, suffocation, overcrowding, hunger, physical maltreatment, so-called "model prisons", tranquilizers, and isolation.
As a co-founder of the Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons (GIP)—a group that was active in France for several years in the early 1970s—Foucault was highly critical of the French penal system, believing that it converted petty criminals into hardened delinquents. A year after the GIP folded, Foucault published Discipline and Punish, in which he examined the evolution of the penal system, away from corporal and capital punishment, into the modern carceral system that began in Europe and the United States around the end of the 18th century. His biographer Didier Eribon described Discipline and Punish as "perhaps the finest" of Foucault's works.
Foucault described Discipline and Punish as providing a "historical background" to the "formation of knowledge in modern society". It provides a "history of the modern soul." He provided a "genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules." In both Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault developed archaeological and genealogical methods which emphasized the role that power plays in society. The carceral network, with its mechanisms of normalizing social control, made the human sciences "historically possible" through its analytical investment into "knowable man"—his "soul, individuality, consciousness, and conduct. Foucault refers to the term "discipline" as used within punitive penal systems. In his 1969 publication, The Archaeology of Knowledge, and again in Discipline and Punish, he investigates the origins of the "disciplines" in the humanities and social sciences. PDF In the chapter on "Science and Knowledge", he suggested that 'disciplines' could be called "groups of statements that borrow their organization from scientific models" that once they were accepted, became "institutionalized, transmitted, and sometimes taught as sciences." He goes on to challenge these disciplines—which he also does in Discipline and Punish—asking "[C]ould one not say that archaeology describes disciplines that are not really sciences, while epistemology describes sciences that have been formed on the basis of (or in spite of) existing disciplines?"
In his final chapter entitled simply "Carceral", Foucault described how, within the penal system, disciplinary networks expanded to include carceral mechanisms and technologies, the carceral city, culture, society, system, and network—that are all part of the carceral archipelago. "Medicine, psychology, education, public assistance", and social work began to assume "judicial functions" with an "ever greater share of the powers of supervision and assessment". Foucault called these disciplines, "mechanisms of normalization" and described them as "becoming ever more rigorous in their application". He said that the knowledge generated by the disciplines of "psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, criminology, and so many other strange sciences" have a "terrible power of investigation" that developed the technologies and procedures of panopticism.
Foucault described how new forms of punishment in the 19th century became transformed into general techniques and procedures for controlling populations and how twentieth century society normalized social control, through constant and permanent surveillance and monitoring.
American historian, Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century wrote that Foucault's "great confinement"—was a contemporary form of "'enclosure', an important interpretative idea for understanding neoliberalism." "Enclosure indicates private property and capital: it seems to promise both individual ownership and social productivity, but in fact the concept of enclosure is inseparable from terror and the destruction of independence and community". In The London Hanged, Linebaugh described how the population in London had become criminalized in the 18th century—"People were so impoverished, they had to steal to survive." As the meaning of property changed, property laws were rewritten.
From a culture of spectacle to a carceral society In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traced the genealogy of contemporary forms of the penal or carceral system, from the eighteenth century until the mid-1970s in the Western world.
The "culture of spectacle" included public displays of torture, dismemberment, and obliteration of the human body as punishment. Foucault opened Discipline and Punish with a detailed description of the execution of the French citizen, Robert-François Damiens in 1757 as punishment for regicide in a public display of drawing and quartering.
According to Foucault, punishment and the criminal become an integral part of 'western' scientific rationality by the late 18th century. Reformers called for "better punishments. It was based it on a model 'cure' for reforms—to "punish with an attenuated severity perhaps, but in order to punish with more universality and necessity; to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body." This involved the submission of bodies through the control of ideas and the analysis of representations as a principle in a politics of bodies. Foucault quoted Servan—a member of the influential group called the Idéologues—Parisian intellectuals in the 1790s who developed ideology as a "science of ideas". Servan described how a "true politician" guides citizens by forming a "chain of ideas" on [crime and punishment] that is "strongly linked" with the "stable point of reason" securing the "end of the chain."
By 1810, in France, detention in the large "enclosed, complex and hierarchized structure", had replaced the scaffold as the "essential form of punishment" and punishment was "integrated into the very body of the state apparatus." The modern carceral system, was taking form with the publication by 1838, of books on prison reform by Charles Lucas, Louis-Mathurin Moreau-Christophe, and Léon Faucher. In his book House of Young Prisoners, Faucher prescribed "strict discipline, exact rules, surveillance and rehabilitation". From the late 18th century through the early decades of the 19th century, modern criminal codes were implemented in Europe and North America. By 1838, with the publication of Leon Faucher's book on prison reform, society had transitioned—the public execution was replaced by the "timetable".
The carceral society—in which "punishment and discipline" was "internalized and directed to the constitution and, when necessary, rehabilitation of social subjects"—had replaced the culture of spectacle.
According to Foucault, modern penal theories—including their inherent power structures—originate with the Mettray, a French penal colony for children and youth, that operated from January 22, 1840, until 1937. To Foucault, the carceral system is personified in the French penal institutions like Mettray and Neufchatel. Foucault described Mettray as the "most famous of a whole series of institutions which, well beyond the frontiers of criminal law, constituted what one might call the carceral archipelago." These penal systems included the prison, the school, the Church, and the work-house. Foucault said, "Were I to fix the date of completion of the carceral system... [t]he date I would choose would be 22 January 1840, the date of the official opening of Mettray. Or better still, perhaps, that glorious day, unremarked and unrecorded, when a child in Mettray remarked as he lay dying: 'What a pity I left the colony so soon.'"