Abstract
In 1977 the manuscript of Carcere e fabbrica: alle origini del sistema penitenziario was published in Italian (Melossi and Pavarini 1977). We are therefore publishing this new edition in English exactly 40 years since the original publication. Essentially the book consisted of a review of historical material about the origins of imprisonment, informed by a Marxist vision. This was also its claim to originality in the sense that, by applying a Marxist reading to prison history materials, it appeared clearly that the very origin, the very “invention” of the prison, is tightly linked to what Marx, in the first volume of Capital, calls “original” or “primitive” accumulation. Not only this but, in the centuries that followed, the very logic of primitive accumulation would be reproduced and expanded through the incessant conquest and colonization of pre-capitalist areas of society, not only, obviously, in its capitalist matrix, but also in the penal system, by virtue of the crucial requirement of “discipline” (I shall expand on this later on). Notwithstanding, the book has often been read as if it had been a story about the invention of the prison as some kind of “school” (a “professional training school” perhaps?) for an apprentice working class—confusing our thesis, I surmise, with penological visions on rehabilitation/resocialisation/re-education (as Italians call it) by means of work. Hence, there were lots of instances in which critics were only too happy to show that this was not indeed the case. Even if, at times, prisons might indeed have looked a bit like such schools or vocational institutes, this is certainly not what we meant. Through the following very synthetic reconstruction of the genesis of the book, as well as of some of its aftermath, I will try to show why I have always been quite unhappy with such a (wrong) reading.
I thank my good friends Maximo Sozzo and José A. Brandariz-Garcia for all the feedback and exchanges that took place when I presented the main ideas for what follows, within lectures given at the Winter School in Criminology of the Faculty of Legal and Social Sciences, Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina (July 2014) and at two International Conferences organized at the University of A Coruna, Spain, in September 2014 and September 2016. I am particularly grateful to Maximo Sozzo and Alessandro De Giorgi for their comments on a previous version of this chapter (usual disclaimers apply). I also thank the Center for the Study of Law and Society of the University of California, Berkeley, for having provided me once more with the ideal physical and intellectual space during the completion of this work!
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Notes
- 1.
The original English version was published in 1981 by Macmillan (Melossi and Pavarini 1981).
- 2.
At the time, a laurea was the only possible university degree in Italy and, according to how the “tesi di laurea” was developed by the candidate, its value could vary from that of a BA to that of a PhD. If I remember correctly, Massimo got his laurea in 1971, I in 1972.
- 3.
Alessandro Baratta was Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Saarland, Saarbrücken, Germany, but in a close collaboration with Bricola in those days.
- 4.
CNR is ConsiglioNazionaledelleRicerche, the Italian National Council of Research.
- 5.
The NDC had been formed in July 1968 by Kit Carson, Stanley Cohen, David Downes, Mary McIntosh, Paul Rock, Ian Taylor and Jock Young. In the early 1970s the NDC—about which I recommend reading the pages written by Jock Young in the new Introduction to The New Criminology (2013: xxii–xxv)—somehow segued into the creation of the “European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control” which met the first time in September 1973 in Florence, Italy.
- 6.
Massimo and I will then owe to our very dear and unforgettable friend Jock Young the decision to translate and publish The Prison and the Factory as one of the titles in the Macmillan “Critical Criminology Series”.
- 7.
- 8.
Crime and Social Justice was the main expression, in form of journal, of the American branch of “critical” or “radical” criminology, published by those who had given life to the brief (but long-lasting as heritage) Berkeley School of Criminology, closed by the University of California in 1974 also because of the political pressure coming from the Governor of the State, Ronald Reagan, who would then go on to becoming one of the most important political leaders in the “neo-liberal” “revolution” of the 1980s as president of the USA!
- 9.
The authors were Gian Guido Balandi, Fabrizio Corsi, Dario Melossi, Marcello Pedrazzoli and Massimo Nobili. Marcello Pedrazzoli, who was several years our senior, was the author of great part of the document. He and Balandi went on to become Professors of Labour Law. Massimo Nobili was then Professor of Criminal Procedure. I lost track of Fabrizio Corsi. No matter our oppositional stance, we were rather pleased to be noted by some of the philosophers of law of the time such as our own Guido Fassò, in Bologna, who reviewed our document (Fassò 1969) or, even, Norberto Bobbio (1987: 308) about 20 years later (Balandi 2012).
- 10.
Later on, in my work on Georg Rusche’s biography (Melossi 1980a: 57), I discovered that Maurice Dobb had also helped Rusche to settle in London in the mid-1930s, writing letters of reference for him.
- 11.
Also in the Lectures collected in The Punitive Society where, contrary to Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1973) sees the importance of the role of Quakers, he does not see however the importance of the workhouse and its constituting a very important link towards the penitentiary, especially by the action of William Penn and the Quakers. Penn had very probably met what was at the time the very new institution of the Workhouse—of which the Amsterdam Rasphuis was the most famous example—during his travels to the Netherlands and Northern Germany in 1677 (Lewis 1922: 10, Seidensticker 1878). In his penal reform a few years later (1681), part of the broader Quaker “holy experiment” of Pennsylvania, he established the clearest and most explicit link between the workhouses and the modern penitentiaries when he decreed that “all Prisons shall be workhouses for felons, Thiefs, vagrants, and Loose, abusive, and Idle persons, whereof one shall be in every county” (Dumm 1987: 79).
- 12.
This was suggested to me, in a sense, by my mentor at UCSB, Don Cressey. I was discussing with him the relationship between economic change and imprisonment rates and, if we were quite certain about the way in which we should “measure” penality, through imprisonment rates, it was hard to identify a measure of the economy that would be able to express also the cultural changes accompanying economic change. After some running in a circle, Don looked at me and, with his rather typical manner of a good boy who knows he’s doing something bad, asked, “What about the imprisonment rates?”
- 13.
And, by the way, this is also why Socialism does not solve anything insofar as it shifts the nature of capital from “private” to “public” (which is of course sort of a joke in contemporary societies) but leaves the question of the extraction of surplus value untouched. At most, if our hypothetical Socialist society were to be organized along truly democratic principles, would make the issue of class struggle internal to the working class and to each individual member of the working class. The distinction between self-government and self-control would then be abolished (Dumm 1987) and self-control would be also, at the same time, self-government and self-exploitation. Finally there would be no distinction left between Marx’s theory and Freud’s and the command of the Super-Ego would be one and the same with the command of Capital!
- 14.
In the “ancillary institutions”, rules an authoritarian style that is however geared to producing self-governing, and therefore “free” Subjects. Subjects are also able to govern themselves collectively in the historical trajectory from the social contract to the Republic to democracy. These Subjects—capable of self-government because capable of self-control—would soon become those individuals endowed with “free will” by criminal and penal theorists of the Enlightenment. In the years of American independence, Benjamin Rush will call such Subjects, supposedly forged also by the newly discovered “penitentiaries”, “republican machines” (Dumm 1987: 87–112).
- 15.
See Harcourt (2013). Michael Welch (2010, 2011) has written in recent years on the relationship of Michel Foucault with the “Groupe d’information sur les prisons”—an activist group in France, in the early years of the 1970s, in which Foucault participated, trying to expose what was happening inside prisons, and connect with the prisoners’ movement. In answering a letter that I had written to him on April 20, 1974, asking, among other things, whether “your group” had published on the prison, Foucault answered, on May 2, 1974, that “we have published a few pamphlets about the situation in French prisons” but adding right away that “I am going to complete a work on the history of prisons in a few months” (my transl. from French).
- 16.
On September 9, 1971, the prisoners had managed to take the prison, and held a group of prison guards hostage. And while the Governor of the State of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, gave to understand that it was possible to generate a negotiated solution, at the same time prepared an armed intervention of the National Guard together with the prison guards who had escaped the hostage-taking situation, who eventually, on September 13, 1971, stormed the prison and produced something like 39 dead, 10 hostages and 29 prisoners. See the special issue of Social Justice of Fall 1991 dedicated to a commemoration of the events. See also, now, the reconstruction by historian Heather Ann Thompson (2016) according to whom both the prisoners and the hostages were killed by the indiscriminate shooting during the retake of the prison.
- 17.
In the interview Foucault refers what he has seen in Attica and how Attica operates but nothing about the Attica rebellion. This is certainly quite bizarre, especially because in that very interview Foucault makes reference to the struggles of prisoners in France.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
The prognosis however was not entirely wrong: there was no Franco Basaglia in the USA but drugs produced the same result as far as psychiatric institutions were concerned. Bernard Harcourt has shown that summing up psychiatric and criminal commitments there has indeed been an overall deinstitutionalization in the last half a century or so, even in the USA (Harcourt 2010).
- 21.
As Angela Davis claims in an interview on Social Justice commenting on the building of new prisons in Latin America, “more prisons are being built to catch the lives disrupted by […] movement of capital. People who cannot find a place for themselves in this new society governed by capital end up going to prison” (Davis 2014: 51).
- 22.
After all, already Bentham had to recognize that, in his Panopticon, solitary confinement had to give way to cell cohabitation if one wanted to keep up with the “modern” production of the end of the eighteenth century!
- 23.
Who were both gunned down by members of a competing organization on the campus of UCLA on January 17, 1969.
- 24.
See the 2006 documentary film Bastards of the Party, produced by Antoine Fuqua and directed by former Bloods gang member Cle Sloan. See also the interview with Ericka Huggins (2014), former BP member and widow of John.
- 25.
I believe we should distinguish between what Taylor Walton and Young defined as “romanticisation of crime” in Critical Criminology (1975) and what I would call a “dialectic of crime and politics” here, that is the back and forth between a tradition of criminal behaviour of the lower classes wholly subordinated to the hegemony of power elites and the transformation instead of such behaviour into a political action able to challenge such hegemony. What looms in the background is of course the traditional debate, within the workers’ movement, about the so-called lumpenproletariat.
- 26.
Once again specific to the LA area, see the story about the CIA carrying drugs to the LA African American community in order to finance its own dirty wars—a story “discovered” by journalist Gary Webb with articles in the San José Mercury Journal in the 1990s and who was then perhaps too quickly later discredited as another “conspiracy theorist” (see www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/10/gary-web-dark-alliance_n_5961748.html accessed 29 October 2015). Of course the 1990s were the years of the “crack cocaine epidemic” (and related “murder epidemic”) in the USA.
- 27.
See Foucault’s description of Attica’s entrance, “that kind of phony fortress à la Disneyland” (Foucault 1974: 26).
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Melossi, D. (2018). “The Prison and the Factory” Revisited (2017): Penality and the Critique of Political Economy Between Marx and Foucault. In: The Prison and the Factory (40th Anniversary Edition). Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56590-7_1
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