Analysis: Why prisoner abuse and deprivation persists in America
Prisoners call out to protesters and family members gathered outside the Metropolitan Detention Center on Feb. 3 in Brooklyn. By Spencer J. Weinreich Spencer J. Weinreich is a Ph.D. student in the history of science at Princeton University and an editor for JHIBlog. March 7 at 6:00 AM Brooklyn’s now infamous Metropolitan Detention Center is just the latest prison to spark outrage over conditions testing the Eighth Amendment’s protections against “cruel and unusual punishments.
There have been designated places for confining people, whether to punish, coerce or control, since at least the days of Ancient Greece. But the prison as we know it, as the default form of judicial punishment, emerged in the late 18th century. One of its prophets was the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism. In 1787, Bentham published “Panopticon,” a scheme for a perfect prison organized around inmates’ sense of constant surveillance.
Despite Bentham’s notional respect for prisoners’ interests, and however elaborate his plans, his work also reflects a simpler sentiment, one of lasting influence: that criminals are a different, lesser sort of being than the free citizen. The 19th-century founders of the U.S. penal system, many of them avid readers of Bentham, took this for granted. Within the prison’s gates, the inmate was, to quote one warden, “literally buried from the world.
Even the 13th Amendment excluded inmates from its protection: Involuntary servitude was abolished “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” To this day, conviction justifies every bit of Panopticon economizing: spartan meals, extortionate fees, labor so pitifully paid it verges on parody.
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