Our Modern Prison Defines Us
If the prison-institution has survived for so long, with such immobility, if the principle of penal detention has never seriously been questioned, it is no doubt because this carceral system was deeply rooted and carried out certain precise functions.
— -Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Prisons define us all.
If you arrive at a contemporary prison in the morning, say six o’clock or so, you will first encounter chow hall odors of oatmeal, toast, eggs, bacon, even fried baloney or ham. If you’re lucky you will smell cornbread, hot and sweet, for nobody makes cornbread like convicts. Then you will hear the yard loudspeaker break the first housing units to go to breakfast: one unit after another staggered to avoid dining room congestion. Boisterous prisoners stream from the units to enjoy the outdoors and slack appetites.
At some prisons housing units compete in cleanliness inspections for the privilege to be the first to go to chow; because yard is not closed until the last unit is served, so the first out get to stay outdoors longer. But this bucolic boys’ academy routine belies the…
