The Prison and the Factory Revisited: The Cycle of the Canaille

• In Event: Radical Criminology: What's Left?

Abstract

My paper centers around a reconsideration of a work that I published long ago together with Massimo Pavarini (The Prison and the Factory). Because that work linked the age of the prison to the age of industry, the advent of a post-industrial society should have entailed the obsolescence of imprisonment (Scull and Cohen). Others instead claimed that the function of prisons had become different, having now only a preventative goal (Cohen and Simon and Feeley). There would not be any need of capitalism left for disciplining and re-integrating a mass of outsiders. On the contrary, I shall argue that the only way to understand the period of mass imprisonment that followed the 1970s period, is to understand capitalism's lasting want for disciplinary institutions in relation to specific masses of people that we may want to call, in a sense, migrants, and the children of migrants. I will then touch on the importance of a concept of long cycle of the economy, establishing a connection between the economic cycle and concepts of right, as well as on the role played, in the 1970s, by prisoners’ movements in order to understand both the revisionist literature and the following reaction to it.

Author

• Dario Melossi, University of Bologna