Culanth Research Paper

8/13/2019 Culanth Research Paper

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/culanth-research-paper 1/8



Xing

2

purpose of prisons was to punish prisoners or to change them for the better. I didn’t think

about how many people are actually wrongfully imprisoned. That 5% of the 2

million people in prison in the US are in fact innocent is mind numbing. One hundred

thousand innocent people. That is analogous to taking almost twice the population of

Chapel Hill and jailing everyone. Even more astonishing, the US has 5% of the world’s

population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners. This was eye-opening as to the scope of the

invisible network that is US prisons. And that is the paradox of US prisons, that they are

so huge and in fact are a significant industry but most people never see or think of them. I

had never given thought to it, but knowing that 2 million people are living in these

institutions, prisons must need a lot of resources and appliances. Prisons are an industry

and many small towns depend on it as the main driver of their economies. The expansion

of the prison network has been given a name: The Prison Industrial Complex, which “is

not only a set of interest groups and institutions; it is also a state of mind. The lure of big

money is corrupting the nation's criminal-justice system, replacing notions of safety

and public service with a drive for higher profits. The eagerness of elected officials to

pass tough-on-crime legislation – combined with their unwillingness to disclose

the external and social costs of these laws – has encouraged all sorts of financial

improprieties" (Eric Schlosser).

And then there is the question of the function of prisons. Are they to punish or to

change? It seems to me that they are a mixture of both, given the dehumanizing and

isolated living conditions described by Lorna Rhodes in “Total Confinement”, a

description based on her fieldwork in a maximum security prison, and the boredom

described by guest speaker Darryl Hunt. This was intriguing, as the media seems to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_services

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_(accounting)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_cost

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_cost

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_(accounting)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_services

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice



Xing

3

portray the worst part of prisons to be the violence and social hierarchy. However, new

prison policies described in “Total Confinement” include allowing prisoners to take

classes and interact with staff in a human manner, in contrast to flinging excrement at

guards due to being dehumanized. This is a dramatic change from the public executions

outlined by Foucault in “Discipline and Punish”. The offender would be publicly and

bloodily tortured and killed, a showing of the power of the sovereign. Foucault then

moves to the evolution of prison systems away from the public spectacle and into more

gentle punishment that was more evenly distributed, standardized. He juxtaposes

the bloodly public execution of Damiens with a timetable for a prison from around 1850,

thus demonstrating the change of public torture as punishment to imprisonment as

punishment. The former concerned physical pain, or taking physical rights, while the

latter takes the rights of freedom and will. A striking thing about the schedule included

was that it bore great resemblance to that of a school, or that of workers in a factory,

although with a few key differences in activities involved. These institutions all speak to

Foucault’s idea of the examination becoming more prevalent in modern times. The

difference between now and the past is visibility. Before, under the rule of a monarch,

everyone sees the monarch and the monarch sees all his subjects as a collective body, but

knows nothing really about his people while his people all know him. The power was

with the monarch while the knowledge was with the people. In modernity, each person is

constantly being monitored, and thus the power is with the observer because the observer

has knowledge. In prisons, the prisoners have their lives regulated to the smallest degree

and are constantly being watched. They are dehumanized; they eat when food is brought

to them, and at the maximum security prison that Rhodes visited they were held in the



Xing

4

same bare cell for over 23 hours a day.

Strangely, a prison can be closely compared to a hospital. I volunteer at Duke

Hospital and deliver art kits to patients to relieve their boredom. After the week on

prisons and especially after reading Foucault, I began to see similarities between the

structures of prisons and hospitals. It was incited when I realized how bored patients must

be, sitting in the same small room with little to do other than watch TV. Of course, life in

the hospital is much more comfortable than in a prison, but boredom was a key

characteristic. Many patients would enthusiastically take our offer of art kits, not because

they loved to draw or paint, but because it would make their stay less boring. Some are

keen for social interaction; one patient would request that I stay and help her with the art

kit and talk to her for at least 15 minutes each time I visited. Family members visit, but

for a large amount of the time it seemed that patients were alone. The same patient who

insisted I keep her company would also call out to nurses and ask for things or just for

company, bids for attention. This can be compared limitedly to the incidences of

prisoners flinging excrement at guards as described by Rhodes; they wanted a reaction

out of the guards and wanted to challenge their helplessness while venting their

frustration. The nurses are analogous to the guards in that they must keep track of their

patients, or prisoners, and they must follow protocol established by the institution. One

time, I was delivering an art kit to a patient, but he wasn’t in his room. I later asked a

nurse if she could give the kit to the patient when he returned from the restroom, or

wherever he was, and she jokingly said “I hope he didn’t escape!” This highlights the

similar burden of responsibility on the nurse or guard. While it was largely for the

patient’s own well- being that he didn’t wander or get lost, this strict regulation of patients



Xing

5

reminded me immediately of the prison system. Similarly, I think that patients are

slightly dehumanized in the hospital, as inmates are very much dehumanized in prison.

When I ask the nurses for patients who might be interested, they refer to patients by their

room numbers. While this may simply be to make it easier for me to find the rooms, it

seems that they naturally think of patients by their room numbers rather than their names.

Occasionally I would hear a nurse refer to a patient by name, but that has only happened

once or twice. In comparison, prisoners are referred to by their numbers, as I am to

understand from my limited prison knowledge. Because I deliver art kits to patients who

are staying long term, they usually have undergone surgery or have recently given birth.

Likely they are not in their usual states of mind, and are, as one nurse put it, “a little

confused”. Hence, it is not uncommon to have to repeat things or to have a little bit of

difficulty in communicating. Because of this, I sometimes catch myself speaking to

patients as if they were children, or less intelligent than they probably are. Weak, tired,

and bored, patients seem vulnerable. Wearing patterned white gowns and yellow socks,

they don’t resemble normal people. The nurses sometimes seem to treat them as children,

or as if they were helpless. This unintentional dehumanizing of patients, while harmless,

speaks to the similar structure between prisons and hospitals. Those who are watching

and in charge are the more powerful, while those who are being watched are

dehumanized. That the prison and hospital have many similarities in structure speaks to

the entire growth as a whole described by Foucault of institutions and bureaucracies that

monitor us, which can be represented by the panopticon, a room from which one can

observe many other rooms but cannot be seen by others. Another similarity I noticed was

the relationship between the nurses and patients and that between the guards and



Xing

6

prisoners. The guards mentioned feeling like servants of the prisoners, just as the nurses

at times seemed like servants to the patients, coming when called, bringing things, and

listening to requests. The prominence of identity with roles is common to both prisons

and hospitals. This calls to mind the Stanford Experiment, which demonstrated how

people can grow into the roles that they are assigned; students randomly assigned the role

of either guard or prisoner had grown so well into their roles by the end of a week that the

experiment had to be stopped because the guards had thoroughly dehumanized the

prisoners and subjected the prisoners to psychological torture. In institutions with clear-

cut roles that are symbolically represented by pastel scrubs or orange jumpsuits, it is

easier for people to identify with their role and thus behave in ways that seem corollary

with their identities.

In general, this class opened my eyes to the differences in practice between the

United States and other parts of the world, in many different areas. The penal system is

no exception. It was very interesting to see how the context of a society influenced its

penal system. In the US, a highly industrialized, bureaucratic, and democratic nation, it

makes sense that people are tried in a court for their crimes and then sent to a machine-

made holding place under the supervision of guards who are in turn supervised by higher

authority. However, in the Andes in Peru, a different penal system is practiced. In

a certain village in which Professor Starn did fieldwork, the villagers would hold their

own trials because the police were corrupt and ineffective. The villagers would serve as a

jury and if convicted, the accused would be whipped, but would not be imprisoned. He

would be returned to society because without him, his family would suffer greatly. In a

village with scarce resources and income, imprisoning offenders is not sustainable, while



Xing

7

in the United States, it is perfectly possible to hold 2 million people without excessive

negative consequences.

In conclusion, the unit on prisons was especially eye-opening for me because it

was extremely informative, but also made me think of the US differently. Over the past

summer, I did absolutely nothing productive and watched a large amount of Law and

Order: SVU. Last weekend, I indulged in another episode and I realized something that I

hadn’t thought of even once during the summer. I realized the extent of documentation of

every single person on the databases that the investigators had access to. All they needed

was a name or a picture, and then they could find almost anything about anyone. I had

never noticed it before, but it seemed kind of scary that any entity could hold so much

knowledge about everyone. Combining all of this with the NSA scandal gave me a much

less idealized but more realistic view on our nation and on the bureaucratic system.

Indeed, I now see the bureaucratic system of our nation as a reflection of

industrialization. Industrialization brings to mind greater efficiency with mechanization

as well as increased specialization. The same way that a factory worker only has one job

and has a manager above him, a worker in a bureaucracy has just one job and a manager

above him. The system is mechanized in the sense that workers are interchangeable parts.

Anyone who has ever left their job at one company to do the same job at a different

company can be seen as an interchangeable part. The system is a giant machine. Combine

this with Max Weber’s explanation of the supportive relationship between Protestantism

and capitalism, and the tendency of human beings to be greedy, a bureaucracy can be

utilized to profit, and thus becomes a factory in a sense.



Xing

8

Outside Source:

Schlosser, Eric (December 1998). "The Prison – Industrial Complex". The Atlantic

Monthly.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98dec/prisons.htm




Culanth Research Paper

Documents

Transcript of Culanth Research Paper