#carceral archipelago

[fatehbaz]

Midway through Jamil Jan Kochai’s collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, which maps generations of Afghan and Afghan American lives against over a century of entwined wars, sits what appears to be a résumé. Entitled “Occupational Hazards,” it meticulously records the everyday labors of an Afghan man: [...] his “[d]uties included: leading sheep to the pastures”; from 1977–79, “gathering old English rifles” left over from the last war while being recruited into a new war; in 1980–81, “burying the tattered remnants of neighbors and friends and women and children and babies and cousins and nieces and nephews and a beloved half-sister”; [...] becoming a refugee day-laborer in Peshawar, Pakistan; in 1984, becoming a refugee in Alabama, where he worked on an assembly line with other Asian migrants whom the white factory owner used to push out the local Black workforce; and so on. Dozens of events, from the traumatic to the mundane, are cataloged one by one in prose that is at once emotionless and overwhelming. [...] Kochai interviewed his father for the résumé’s occupational trajectory [...]. An Afghan shepherd [...] is displaced by imperial wars and then, in the heart of empire, is conscripted into racialized domestic economies [...]. [M]ethodically translating lived violence via a résumé, a bureaucratic form that quantifies labor in its most banal functionality, paradoxically realizes the spectacular breadth of war and how it organizes life’s possibilities. [...]

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In this collection, war is past, present, and plural. In Afghanistan, Kochai recounts the lives of Logaris and Kabulis, against the backdrop of the US occupation, still dealing with the detritus of previous wars - British, Soviet, a­nd civil - including their shrines, mines, and memories. In the United States, Afghan Californians experience the diasporic conditions of war -- state neglect of refugees combined with targeted surveillance -- amid the coming-of-age of a second generation that must confront inherited traumas while struggling to build political solidarities with other displaced youth.

These 12 stories explore the reverberations between historical and psychic realities, invoking a ghostly practice of reading. Characters, living and dead, recur across the stories [...]. Wars echo one another [...]. Scenes and states mirror each other, with one story depicting Afghan bureaucracies that disavow military and police violence while another depicts US bureaucracies that deny social services to unemployed refugees. History itself is layered and unresolved [...]. Kochai, who was born in a refugee camp in Peshawar, writes from the position of the Afghan diaspora [...]. In August 2021, the US relegated Afghanistan to the past, declaring the “longest American war” over. Over for whom? one should ask. [...] War, in other words, is not an event but a structure. [...]

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In Kochai’s collection, war is not the story; rather, war arranges the scenes and life possibilities [...]. Kochai carefully puts war itself, and the warmakers, in the narrative background [...].

This is a historically incisive narrative design for representing Afghanistan. Kochai challenges centuries of Western colonial discourses, from Rudyard Kipling to Rambo, that conflate Afghanistan with violence while erasing the international production of that violence as well as the social and conceptual worlds of Afghans themselves. Instead, this collection moves the reader across Afghans’ transcontinental, intergenerational, and multispirited social worlds -- including through stories of migrations and returns, homes populated by the living and the martyred, language that enmeshes Dari, Pashto, and Northern California slang, as well as the occasional fantastical creature [...].

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Like Kochai’s debut novel 99 Nights in Logar (2019), this collection merges realism and the fantastic, oral and academic histories, Afghan folklore and Islamic texts, giving his fiction a dynamic relation to history. Each story is an experiment, and many of them are replete with surreal or magical elements [...].

As in Ahmed Saadawi’s 2013 novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, a nightmarish sensorium collides with a postcolonial body politics [...].

In a recent interview, Kochai said that writing about his family’s experiences of war has compelled him to explore “realms of the surreal or magical realism […] because the incidents themselves seem so unreal […]. [I]t takes years and decades to even come to terms with what had actually happened to them before their eyes.” He points not to a documentary dilemma but to an epistemological one. While some scholars have argued that fantastic genres like magical realism are often conflated with exoticized imaginaries of the Global South, others have defended the form’s critical possibilities for rendering complex realities and multiple modes of interpretation. Literary metaphors, whether magical or otherwise, are always imprecise; as Afghan poet Aria Aber puts it, “you flee into metaphor but you return / with another moth / flapping inside your throat.” [...]

Kochai does not “escape” into the surreal or magical as fictions but as other ways of reckoning with war’s pasts ongoing in the present.

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All text above by: Najwa Mayer. “War Is a Structure: On Jamil Jan Kochai’s “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories.”“ LA Review of Books (Online). 20 December 2022. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

DES FORÇATS ONT QUITTES LA ROCHELLE De nombreux forçats sont partis mercredi dernier de l'Ile de Ré pour le bagne. Notre photo montre un convoi quittant La Rochelle a destination de l’Ile, l'homme au chapeau mou est Castaner, danseur mondain, qui tua un de ses camarades. (Voir page 12.)

- Police Magazine. 2ieme année - n° 42. 13 Septembre 1931

[james-spooky]

the panopticon came up in my work today and i was like ‘omg tma ref hahaha’ but then… it went on to say ‘carceral archipelago’ which links to what Sam said in ep10… what if the panopticon is still relevant in tmagp? we all thought he was silly for mentioning islands but here we are!!! i’m actually losing my mind because of this… PLUS the guy who came up with the panopticon is called Michael.

[beingharsh]

The carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there is no outside. It takes back with one hand what it seems to exclude with the other. It saves everything, including what it punishes. It is unwilling to waste even what it has decided to disqualify. In this panoptic society of which incarceration is the omnipresent armature, the delinquent is not outside the law; he is, from the very outset, in the law, at the very heart of the law, or at least in the midst of those mechanisms that transfer the individual imperceptibly from discipline to the law, from deviation to offence. Although it is true that prison punishes delinquency, delinquency is for the most part produced in and by an incarceration which, ultimately, prison perpetuates in its turn. The prison is merely the natural consequence, no more than a higher degree, of that hierarchy laid down step by step. The delinquent is an institutional product. It is no use being surprised, therefore, that in a considerable proportion of cases the biography of convicts passes through all these mechanisms and establishments, whose purpose, it is widely believed, is to lead away from prison. That one should find in them what one might call the index of an irrepressibly delinquent ‘character’: the prisoner condemned to hard labour was meticulously produced by a childhood spent in a reformatory, according to the lines of force of the generalized carceral system. Conversely, the lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the ‘outlaw’, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order. But it is not on the fringes of society and through successive exiles that criminality is born, but by means of ever more closely placed insertions, under ever more insistent surveillance, by an accumulation of disciplinary coercion. In short, the carceral archipelago assures, in the depths of the social body, the formation of delinquency on the basis of subtle illegalities, the overlapping of the latter by the former and the establishment of a specified criminality.

Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault

[imaginedsoldier]

Liberals are just straight up jetskiing around the carceral archipelago right now.

Your institutions of “care” are deeply entwined with police and policing. The medical industry makes its strides on Black bodies, social services are deeply racialized, the psychiatric and psychological disciplines are morasses of control and sedation- all of your alternatives to the police reek of the mechanisms of state subjugation. Why are you looking to trade one form of violence for another?

[panoptiphobia]

Dissertation Prospectus: The Development of South Korean Prisons and Penology, 1945-1961

Dissertation Prospectus

[Please DM for file with full citations]

“The Development of South Korean Prisons and Penology, 1945-1961”

I. Project Overview

Stripped of its legitimating discourses, imprisonment is the simple act of putting human beings into cages. By the mid-twentieth century, the practice of incarceration had spread by means of Western colonial expansion to nearly every area of the globe. Many of the formal vestiges of empire fell away after the second World War, but Western-style incarceration remained a worldwide practice. The project to modernize the Korean prison system continued long after its initial development during the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945). After a chaotic period under the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK; hereafter “MG”) (1945-1948), South Korean penal officials were immediately swept up in bold prison reform efforts.  My dissertation research examines the ways South Korean penal reformers imagined the past, present and future of the prison system during Korea’s tumultuous 1950s. I am working to map the cultural, political and economic influences on Korean penology and its discourses in the early Cold War era. The United States government relied on the internal stability of South Korea as an East Asian bulwark against communism, and directly shaped the development of the penal system within the Cold War system.  This study has larger implications for the general history of 1950s South Korea, Cold War international relations, and the development of power and social control in the Republic of Korea (ROK) state by historicizing a crucial institution used for state control of the incarcerated and free population alike. This dissertation will argue for rereading the history of the South Korean prison as a crucial site for the production of notions of ROK national identity and citizenship.

The historical timeline of this project extends from Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule and subsequent division by the U.S. and Soviet Union in 1945, through the Korean War (1950-1953) and fall of the Syngman Rhee regime in 1960, and ends with the coup d’etat by General Park Chung Hee in 1961. After the establishment of the Republic of Korea in 1948, penal reformers proclaimed the goal of “democratizing” the prison system under the slogan ‘Democratic Penology’ (minju haenghyŏng). Prior to the Korean War, prisons were underfunded, overcrowded, and used for ostentatious performances of anticommunist conversion. However, by the late 1950s penal officials boasted of the prisons’ humane conditions and state-of-the-art rehabilitative and educational function. Exhibitions displaying prisoners’ paintings, calligraphy, craftworks and writings evidenced their “reformation” for the public. How did the state of prisons change so drastically over a single decade, and how much of these claims is simple propaganda? These purportedly liberal reforms were carried out by the notorious authoritarian regime of South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee. Penal practice departed drastically from reformist theory when it came to punishing political opponents of the regime, but the prison system nevertheless did see major changes in the overall treatment of prisoners and training of penal officers. At the same time, this official narrative of reform is conspicuously silent with regard to the state of prisons during the Korean War (1950-1953), a period in which tens of thousands of political prisoners were massacred.

The devastation of the conflict left nearly every South Korean penal facility in ruins. Postwar reconstruction efforts focused not only on the rebuilding of existing prisons, but also the addition of new, state of the art facilities. With the help of material aid from the United Nations and the United States, Korean penal reformers began to transform their system in the image of their Cold War allies. Post-Korean War penal practice took on the guiding ideologies of liberal democracy and ‘penal education’ (kyoyuk hyŏng). The new system emphasized job training and rehabilitation of prisoners for reentering society. Penal reformers also embarked on UN-sponsored trips abroad to study the prison systems of the U.S. and Western European countries. These officials debated responses to the challenges facing their system in the pages of professional journals and books on penology and its history. While the period spanning South Korea’s first republic (1948-1960) stands as a crucial first stage of autonomous penal reform, it remains understudied in the field of Korean history.

Through my analysis of the discourse in professional journals of penal administrators, prisoner educational materials, and the memoirs of former guards and inmates, I will ask the following questions: What rules governed what could be said about the socially deviant and their treatment? What behavior constituted true violation of the social contract and what acts would be punishable by death? How and why was the idea of rehabilitation of convicts sold to the public? How were these rules affected by the Cold War system? What statements were qualified and by whom? When penal reform efforts were obviously failing, what political goals were achieved by state officials and civil society members claiming the contrary? Why was it culturally and socially significant to portray images of the well-ordered prison to the populous? I will trace the changes in these discourses of criminality and reform in the early ROK to explicate the pivotal role of punishing the deviant in the reflexive formation of national identity and solidification of state power.

II. Theoretical Framework: The Prison, the State, and Power

This dissertation, as it deals with the repressive apparatus of the prison, also deals concomitantly with theories of state power and violence. It interrogates the thesis of colonial continuity in the post-liberation state. The Korean history field assumes direct continuity between the colonial and post-liberation states without agreeing on a clear methodology or framework for locating which actors and institutions qualify as the “state.” Max Weber, one of the many scholars expounding on just what constitutes the state, defined it as the “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.” The parenthetical status of “success” in this translation perfectly reflects the tension at the heart of this project. The prison system was a vital tool for solidifying state power that acutely manifested the evolving relationship between subject and sovereign, but its supporters constantly struggled to defend its legitimacy and exaggerated the effectiveness of reforming inmates in the crisis-ridden institution. The U.S. occupation and Syngman Rhee regime inherited the colonial prison system’s veneer of legitimacy in incarceration as a practice resulting from due process of law, but continually reverted to extrajudicial and exceptional violence to solidify control of their territory. Giorgio Agamben’s work reveals this sovereign exception, the violent act of exclusion of the killable other from qualified political life, to be as old as the polis itself. Agamben amends Michel Foucault’s notion of state racism—the normalizing precondition that allows for killing internal others —to include all states, not just their modern and totalitarian instantiations. However, analyzing cases under the the Cold War system presents novel challenges to these theories of state power and violence: ROK authorities’ indiscriminate massacre of ideological prisoners without regard for loss of legitimacy reveals that their monopoly of violence was legitimated by the external machinations of Cold War containment, rather than an internally derived pact between the state and citizenry. This dissertation examines the shifting status of ROK sovereignty and authority to punish and kill through periods of both occupation and an “autonomous” South Korean government.

The U.S. occupation had to ‘rebuild’ the state in the momentary absence of the Japanese colonial repressive apparatus: this dissertation views prison-building as a part of state-building. Bruce Cumings has shown how Korea’s transition period from colonial to occupation state power was a crucible for popular resistance to underlying social contradictions that often pitted the rural populace against representatives of central power in the capital. Penal systems have a distinct function for suppressing such revolt by controlling bodies and flow of information in prescribed spaces, part of a process that Anthony Giddens calls “internal pacification.” Internal pacification is a generalized phenomenon that establishes “locales” to “promot[e] the discipline of potentially recalcitrant groups at major points of tension, especially in the sphere of production.” Neither the U.S. military occupation nor the fledgling Rhee government could claim total control of the peninsula’s mountainous regions, but improving surveillance networks through an archipelago of carceral institutions made both rebel activity and common criminality ‘legible’ as sets of tables, statistics and programs for social engineering. This project will treat provincial jails and prisons as outposts of pacification, simplification, and the spread of central power to the whole of the Korean peninsula.

Researching postcolonial societies in their immediate post-liberation period also reveals the nebulous nature of the state as a set of institutions, discursive effects, and material realities. Timothy Mitchell has proposed analyzing the state “not as an actual structure, but as the powerful, metaphysical effect of practices that make such structures appear to exist.” At various points in the analysis of early ROK penal history, the prison system appears as more idealistic rhetoric than fact, but it nonetheless projected the effects of a (re)developing state apparatus. Examining Korea’s ‘Liberation Space’—the period after 1945 when political control of the Korean peninsula was still in flux—and tenuous sovereignty after 1948 is better served by Foucauldian power analysis and his idea of ‘governmentality’: the “institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security.”

This approach allows for analyzing discourse as both an instrument and effect of power, identifying the “decentered and productive nature of power processes.” Traditional political histories fail to locate, or misattribute state power as a possession of a select few actors in the Syngman Rhee regime without accounting for the persistent local contestations to central power or the ambiguous status of South Korea’s sovereignty in the U.S.-dominated Cold War system. This dissertation asks how power was produced and maintained in early South Korea by diverse sets of actors and discursive effects of state and non-state institutions alike. Foucault’s reframing of modern power as a matrix of relations dispersed throughout the social body allows for thinking social existence beyond the juridical and state horizon: Power is not held, but constantly negotiated. Previous scholarship has looked for the emergence of such Foucauldian phenomena as governmentality, biopower, and panopticism before and after colonial annexation, but there has been little scholarship about what became of these dispersed power relations in the interlude between the colonial and U.S. occupation, how they were reified in the military government, or how they manifested in the ROK state. Korea’s ‘Liberation Space’ has been characterized as a power vacuum, but one can reexamine the period through the prison as a representative institution that facilitated the continued spread of disciplinary power in post-liberation society. Analyzing governmentality in this period problematizes Foucauldian models’ linear progression toward the telos of the Western European nation-state. Was the spread of these technologies of colonial state power truly continuous? Or was their spread halted and then redeveloped? Is modern power a one-way threshold or cyclical phenomenon capable of starts and stops, progression and regression? The broader goal of this research is to examine the rebirth and/or afterlives of governmentality and modern power in post-liberation Korea.

III. Methodology

This dissertation will utilize discourse analysis to track changes in notions of criminality, deviance, and its punishment in post-liberation Korea. The existing penal historical scholarship on the early South Korean prison system, which is minimal, has merely identified the gaps between penal officials’ theory and their practice, limiting analysis to the immediate space and functions of the prison and simply concluding that little had changed between the colonial and ROK penal systems. This narrow approach confines historical analysis to prison spaces without accounting for the myriad social forces that shape penal policy and their (in)efficacies.  

A more thorough Foucauldian discourse analysis will allow for reading between the lines of official discourse to identify subtle changes in framing and rhetoric that signify larger currents in not just the prison system, but in the broader society as well. Shifts in penal discourse reflect changes in modes of production, emergence of new mentalities, and changes in power relations between the citizen and state. This dissertation will ask why significant thematic shifts in penal discourse occurred when they did, identifying the larger social and historical forces that shaped popular assumptions about citizenship and its deviant other. This analysis will answer these questions to account for the porous nature of prisons as spaces productive of a power that comes to permeate all social relations in the modern state. It will identify the dialectical nature of the prison that both affects and is affected by social and historical change.

More specifically, this dissertation will primarily focus on the post-Korean War discourse of “democratic penology” (minju haenghyŏng), a guiding principle of late-1950s penological texts that elevated the rehabilitation of the prisoner to the status of (re)building the nation itself. A more integrated analysis of both official and public discourse on punishment reveals the ways the Cold War system came to colonize the very consciousness and subjectivity of ROK citizens, shaping the way individuals viewed basic categories of the criminal and what constituted the ideal democratic citizen. One of the basic arguments of this dissertation is that early South Korean penal culture was fundamentally shaped by transnational interaction with the penological regimes of the U.S. and United Nations during the Korean War. The Cold War system influenced penology by reframing rehabilitation as the necessary work of reforming unruly bodies susceptible to idleness and communism into industrious, educated participants in the crusade to build a “Free World.” In this way, the Syngman Rhee’s anticommunist authoritarian state regime utilized prisons as both a productive and repressive technology for maintaining control of prisoners and the broader public. Images of ideal ROK citizenship found their other not only externally, with the positioning of South Korea as the anticommunist opposition to their northern counterparts; ROK identity was also formed through the isolation, confinement, and reform of the internal deviant other.

IV. Writing Korea into Global Penal Historiography

This dissertation is an attempt to write Korea into the broader field of penal history to better understand local instantiations of the global spread of incarceration. The current field of U.S. penal history was largely inspired by the historiographical turn of the 1970s that reframed punishment as a technology of social control. While their theoretical approaches differ, penal historians working in the 1970s and 1980s fundamentally refuted the traditional narrative of the prison as a self-evidentiary necessity or universal good. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) has had the most lasting impact on penal historians for fundamentally reframing the role of prisons in the development of novel forms of power, governance, and modern subjectivity. Foucault revealed the prison as a key site for examining the production of docile, normalized bodies in modern states. Additionally, the prison produced discourse of the deviant recidivist and presented itself as the sole answer to this self-generated problem. Foucault viewed this normalizing ‘power/knowledge’ of the deviant as both a repressive and productive force. These Foucauldian concepts help to contextualize the historical developments of post-1945 South Korean penal culture, where authorities repeatedly committed to the “failing” prison system while simultaneously producing knowledge about the criminal and deviant. This dissertation will interrogate the persistence of the prison form and its normalizing discourses across ruptures of the liberation, division, and the Korean War.

The field of Western penal history has been significantly focused on explaining the persistence of the prison despite its continual failure to achieve its proponents’ goals. The group of scholars contributing to The Oxford History of the Prison (1995) demonstrate that modern incarceration has almost always been ineffective in attaining its changing and even conflicting goals. For the purpose of reform, it has historically been impossible to find meaningful correlation between the quality of imprisonment and deterrence of crime. Prison also does not satisfy the public need for retribution: at any given time, the majority of citizens of modern societies perceive punishment as overly lenient. Even when the prisoner is simply considered a source of cheap or free labor, there are varied conclusions regarding the efficacy of productive labor in penal history. The general consensus is that Western imprisonment seldom, if ever, achieved the intended goals of its implementation: it self-perpetuates despite its internal contradictions. Rebecca McLennan has shown how U.S. penal reformers at various points from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century continually portrayed the prison in a state of “crisis” as it expanded and solidified its hold as the dominant form of punishment. Crises in the modern state, both manufactured and real are met with political attention, expenditure of resources, and bureaucracy that takes on an expansionist logic and life of its own. Further research in Korean penal history presents a crucial case study for the persistence of the carceral form in material conditions starkly different from its development in Western Europe and the United States. It must critically examine the highly propagandistic discourse of early ROK reformers with evidence of the material conditions of war and poverty that threatened the very existence of the carceral apparatus throughout the 1950s.

Some penal sociologists claim that Foucauldian explanations for carceral expansion are too instrumentalist. David Garland challenges the Foucauldian view of an agentless, rational power driving the expansion of the carceral state, and revitalizes the Durkheimian view of punishment as the public’s passionate retribution against social deviance. For these scholars, punishment is highly imbued with cultural meaning and public participation. Garland seeks to go beyond Foucault’s perspective on power, demonstrating the ways the prison “satisfies a popular (or a judicial) desire to inflict punishment upon law-breakers and to have them dismissed from normal social life, whatever the long-term costs or consequences.” Philip Smith further questions Foucault’s erasure of the role of irrational concerns and cultural values in punishment. He responds to the Foucauldians, “how does the ideal type of disciplinary power intersect with broader systems of meaning? How does the civil sphere participate in surveillance? Under what circumstances might spectacle still play a role in social control?” This research will hold these approaches in tension with Foucauldian analysis, a framework developed from the specific historical case of Western European nation-states. Examining the sudden reversal to punitive retribution against social and ideological deviance during the Korean War must account for Korean penal development’s post-colonial and Cold War historical specificities.

This dissertation is further informed by Western penal historical scholarship that emphasizes the porous nature of prisons as social and cultural entities. Some have amended the Foucauldian view of one-way discursive production of prisoner identity as it overlooks the ways deviant subgroups were defined and defined themselves. Others have revealed how penal regimes respond to external stimuli, and sometimes even serve as the primary impetus for political formations in free society. Accordingly, historicizing the development of South Korean prisons must account for their reciprocal relationship to political and economic dynamics in the broader society along with the development of an emerging ROK national identity. The prison must be examined in its Korean context, as well as the regional and global context of the Cold War.

Contemporary penal historians have charted the expansion of the Western prison form to the rest of globe outside of Europe and North America. Comparative penal histories further accentuate the importance of differing local conditions that shaped the African, Latin American, and Asian experiences of penal modernization. Contributors to the influential volume, Cultures of Confinement (2007) center the role of cultural practices and social dynamics to develop a more comprehensive approach that “highlight[s] the extent to which common knowledge is appropriated and transformed by very distinct local styles of expression dependent on the political, economic, social and cultural variables of particular institutions and social groups.” Frank Dikotter reminds us that the prison, like all institutions, “was never simply imposed or copied, but was reinvented and transformed by a host of local factors, its success being dependent on its flexibility.” Not every case of colonial prison expansion was “successful” for colonial aims: Peter Zinoman’s Colonial Bastille demonstrates how French colonial prison spaces facilitated intellectual exchange across dispersed geographic locations and helped foment a Vietnamese national identity amongst otherwise disparate linguistic and ethnic groups of Southeast Asia. Clare Anderson presented a case with the opposite effect in British colonial India, where the prison forced cohabitation of traditionally segregated social castes—an offense severe enough to foment popular uprising across the subcontinent. Despite vast differences with the case of Korea, these examples demonstrate how development of the western prison form was not always an unproblematic or effortless technique of social control: the spatial entity of the prison brought together diverse social forces, impacting existing local conditions and drawing dynamic responses to reorganization of the social order. The same attention to local dynamics must be applied to the crisis-ridden early ROK prison system that took more than a decade to clothe, feed, and properly contain its inmates.  

The English-language penal historical field’s shift in focus to colonial prisons revealed challenges to Foucault’s emphasis of the advent of disciplinary power in modern incarceration. While previous scholarship on the global rise of imprisonment framed colonial institutions as “laboratories of modernity” that employed state of the art technologies for effective governance, Zinoman found that “[French] colonial prison officials introduced no such innovations and ignored many of the putatively modern methods of prison administration that had been developed in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century.” Dikötter emphasized that colonial or peripheral iterations of the penitentiary deviate from the Foucauldian narrative of imprisonment’s shift away from corporal punishment:  “a history of the prison shows not so much the ‘disciplinary power’ of the modern state but on the contrary the many limits of the government in controlling its own institutions: prisons were run by a customary order established by guards and prisoners on the ground rather than by a panopticon project on paper.” Florence Bernault cites the persistence of retributive and deterrent violence in African colonial regimes to refute the correlation between modern governance and the decline of “state-inflicted destruction.” Proponents of the Western penitentiary reframed free individuals as subjects, while the colonial prison primarily constructed colonial individuals as objects of power. Black and brown bodies bore the brunt of colonial, retributive violence well into the twentieth century despite changes in metropolitan nations. Historicizing the advent and persistence of the carceral form in Korea must allow for local specificity that challenges common Foucauldian narratives of the development of bloodless, disciplinary power. Widespread corporal punishment, torture, and destruction of the body was maintained in the penal practice of colonial and postcolonial Korea until as late as democratization in 1987.

The rise of the prison in Western European metropoles paralleled the extension of political rights of citizens in the rise of the modern liberal state, and thus held great promise for nascent anti-imperial and nationalist modernization movements. Following this model, East Asian powers enthusiastically adopted the prison as a tool of social control, producing a well-disciplined citizenry as a preemptive measure to resist colonization, or, in the case of Japan, forcing legal modernization on their neighbors as a strategy of colonial aggression. Prisons were quintessentially modern facilities that promised rehabilitation of human beings and the (re)invention of the nation itself. Frank Dikötter’s study shows how late-Qing and early republican reformers were quite successful in developing modern penal facilities and practices, so much so that Western imperial powers demanded a regression to corporal punishment to bolster the deterrent effects protecting their extraterritorial interests in China. This clearly demonstrates the Janus-faced nature of the Western penal form’s entrée into East Asia: modern disciplinary power was reserved for white bodies and the prison otherwise served imperialist, capitalist endeavors. Daniel Botsman further details the advent of East Asian penal modernization in Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan. Botsman analyzes penal institutions in Japan before Western influence, their hasty reform in the Meiji era, and the use of legal reform discourse to justify imperial expansion into the rest of East Asia. Once the carceral form came to dominate Western imperialist discourse of legitimate exercise of state power, Japanese historians raced to locate its origins before Western imposition in the Tokugawa stockade. Japanese reformers quickly developed model prisons and flaunted them as both tools of colonial legitimation and repression in Korea and Taiwan. These works by Dikötter and Botsman are the most prominent English-language works writing East Asia into global penal history, but no such work yet exists for the Korean case. This dissertation will start to write Korea into global penal history, tracing the development of the carceral form on the Korean peninsula through its colonial introduction and extending analysis beyond liberation. Historicizing the postcolonial South Korean penal system will reveal the ways postcolonial penal regimes both reflected and challenged penological trends after World War II, when the world historical system that brought imprisonment to every corner of the globe entered a new phase of global struggle in the form of the Cold War.

V. Korean Penal Historiography

The following section will outline secondary scholarship in Korean penal history, highlighting the ways previous scholarship has been limited by the thesis of a dichotomy between premodern and modern forms of punishment, and between colonial oppression and Korean resistance. Korean penal historiography has primarily focused on the late-nineteenth century introduction of the carceral form and its uses during the Japanese Colonial Period (1910-1945) to suppress resistance to Japanese rule. Chosŏn penal culture was primarily retributive with legal institutions relying heavily on corporal punishment for deterrent effect, and torture to extract confessions. By prioritizing the mere deprivation of liberty over physical harm of the body, the 1890s codification of carceral punishment and conversion of flogging to units of time served represented a monumental shift towards rehabilitationist penal thought during the Taehan Empire (1897-1910) period. While the question of autonomy of the Korean state to carry out penal reforms without colonial manipulation is debated in existing scholarship, it is clear that the continued rationalization of the Korean criminal justice system in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries aided the subsequent colonial state’s penetration of everyday life on the peninsula.

Historicizing Korea’s first modern prisons cannot be separated from their use by the colonial regime to detain, torture, and execute members of resistance movements. Lee Jong-min has shown how colonial penal modernization had political dissent as a primary concern, and more general crime as an afterthought. The explicitly political nature of penal reform continued into the colonial period, and saw a racialized recommitment to bodily punishment and ideological conversion. Previous scholarship focuses almost entirely on colonial penal authorities’ persistent use of bodily torture to refute the notion of colonial prisons’ “modernity.” This view uncritically accepts both incarceration and modernity as positive developments in a linear progression of the humane treatment of the subject by state power. More problematically, it reifies the notion of a more “humane” form of incarceration that hypothetically would have developed had it not been for the colonial intervention.

Scholars inspired by the “colonial modernity” paradigm questioned nationalist historical narratives, and problematized notions of “distorted” modernity. They do not see flogging as a disqualifying factor for a novel type of state power under Japanese rule, and present a nuanced reading of the development of Foucauldian disciplinary power that retained corporal punishment due to local specificities of the Korean colonial context. Flogging Korean bodies in the presence of medical doctors was a sophisticated technology of social control used in lieu of the underdeveloped use of incarceration and monetary fines, punishments that colonial authorities feared had not yet been sufficiently internalized by the local populous as deterrents to crime. By the end of the colonial period, Korea’s premier penal institutions had factories, educational programs, and ideological conversion programs aimed at cultivating ideal imperial subjects. Korea’s penal modernization was indeed colored by the colonial experience, but this fact should not cloud analysis of the global spread of disciplinary power through both colonial regimes and their post-colonial successors.  

The Korean history field still lacks a comprehensive work detailing Korea’s post-1945 penal history in either the Korean or English languages. The most thorough narrative can be found in the Republic of Korea Corrections Bureau’s official history. While useful as a starting point for scholarly research, the work presents a hagiographic account of the triumph of the ROK’s modern penal practice over traditional and colonial practices, and uncritically accepts the development of incarceration as desired progress. The most recent edition of this state-sponsored history retains the Cold War-influenced, anticommunist narratives of the division and Korean War, notably silencing the early ROK penal system’s use in ideological indoctrination, preventive custody of political prisoners, and massacres of political prisoners. Political concerns aside, this institutional history fails to place Korean penal history in its social and political context, taking the prison form for granted and extending its history backward from the present day.

More critical academic scholarship in penal history attempts to contextualize development of the ROK carceral system, but the field has largely overlooked the period between the peninsula’s Liberation in 1945 and the 1961 military coup by General Park Chung Hee. The seminal work of Bruce Cumings and contributors to the first volume of Haebang chŏnhusa ŭi insik (Korean History Before and After Liberation) clearly established the role of the U.S. military occupation government in appointing collaborators and veterans of the colonial system in the early ROK police and legal apparatuses. The specifics of post-liberation continuity in the penal system from the colonial period have yet to be properly fleshed out, but existing scholarship paints a picture of overcrowded, underfunded, escape-prone prisons in the wake of popular resistance to U.S. occupation policy.  Prisons were most crowded following the crackdown of the Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1946, a series of widespread clashes between central authority and local supporters of the ‘people’s committees’ that had sprung up after liberation. Though his work focuses primarily on prisons during the later Park Chung Hee dictatorship, sociologist Ch’oe Chŏng-gi briefly examines the post-Liberation turnover of prisons to contextualize colonial continuities in the penology and ideological indoctrination of South Korea’s subsequent authoritarian regimes. He attempted to explicate the “real conditions” (silt’ae) of post-liberation penal spaces, revealing that most of the personnel retained their positions from the colonial system, and newly hired officials received minimal training that changed little from the colonial model. Pak Ch’an Sik’s work revealed the strain on the penal system when mainland prison facilities received an influx of detainees after the 1948 Cheju Uprising, a series of revolts on Cheju Island that were met with a protracted campaign by the MG and South Korean authorities to massacre leftists, their collaborators, and ordinary citizens caught in the fray. Further research utilizing U.S. military archival sources will facilitate a more detailed understanding of the MG’s role in penal modernization, its colonial legacies, and the Cold War’s impact on South Korea’s penal history.

There is even less scholarship dedicated to the penal system of the First Republic (1948-1960), but prison spaces served a crucial role in suppressing leftist activity from the founding of the ROK in 1948 to the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Historian Kang Sŏng-hyŏn has provided detailed historical accounts of the early Rhee regime’s expanded categorization of “thought criminals” (sasangpŏm) after the 1948 passing of the National Security Law, the act that allows for the exemption of constitutional rights to due process and habeas corpus in cases related to national security. As prisons overflowed, the state attempted reeducation and conversion of ideological offenders through the euphemistically named National Guidance League (Kungmin podo yŏnmaeng). Historians working in the early 2000s exposed the history of forced reeducation and eventual wartime massacre of suspected leftists who were members of the League, but the League’s relationship to the penal apparatus needs to be examined further to better historicize changes in penal thought and practice at the founding of the First Republic.  

Historical analysis of prisons during the Korean War emphasizes their use as sites of liberation or massacre while the peninsula changed hands back and forth between the ROK and DPRK. After the retaking of Seoul in the Fall of 1950, the Rhee regime used penal spaces for detainment and expedited execution of those suspected of collaborating with the Korean People’s Army (KPA) of North Korea. The literature on prisoners of war reveals a geopolitical layer to consider when charting the Cold War influence on Korean penal practice. Further research of the UN’s extensive POW and ROK civilian internee reeducation programs will show changes in ROK penal practice across the wartime rupture and account for the Cold War imposition of the Geneva Convention and United Nations-imposed penal paradigm. Nearly all of South Korea’s prison facilities were destroyed or damaged in the war, and reconstruction  was still only partially complete as late as 1960. Other than a brief mention in the ROK Correctional Service official history, there appears to be no published research detailing the post-war reconstruction of the ROK penal system or its transformation to the “correctional” model in 1961. This dissertation will use diverse and previously underutilized primary sources to explicate the pivotal role of the prison and its discourses undergirding the social upheaval of the early ROK’s history of war and reconstruction.

VI. Primary Sources

Inspired by a Foucauldian model of discourse analysis, this research seeks to historicize changes in ROK penal culture by analyzing both official reform discourse and responses to its implementation on the ground. Primary source materials related to prisons in the immediate post-liberation period are scarce, and researchers must utilize both U.S. and local sources to develop even the most rudimentary account of the turnover of penal authority from colonial to occupation forces. The files of the United States Military Government in Korea contain the occupation government’s penal section records. MG administrators kept haphazard, and often handwritten reports on prison conditions and fluctuations in inmate totals, which also contained evaluations on changes in penal practice relative to their Japanese predecessors. These materials are invaluable for ascertaining the most basic information about the penal system after the transfer of authority from the Japanese colonial government to the U.S. military occupation. They will also help track the evolving MG penal discourse that celebrated perceived advances in reform while facing intensified resistance to the occupation. This dissertation will also analyze Korean print media sources to chart local perceptions and responses to prison overcrowding, organized escape attempts, and deteriorating prison conditions. After events like the Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1946, depictions of penal spaces and activities appear in more diverse archival sources produced by different sections of the military government tasked with suppressing rebellion, investigating hygienic conditions and prisoner abuse, and responding to reports of massacres.

This dissertation also examines the early development of the field of ROK penology—the study of prisons and penal practice. The liberation period saw a limited number of publications by Korean penologists establishing the state of their field with renewed purpose and the perspective of an autonomous institutional future in an independent Korean nation. These early publications include the first post-liberation issues of Penal Administration (Hyŏngjŏng), a successor to a similar colonial period penal journal that was then discontinued after the outbreak of the Korean War. Novelist Yoon Paek-nam also published a history of Korean penal culture, A History of Chosŏn Penal Administration (Chosŏn Hyŏngjŏngsa), in 1948. The work traces developments in punishment on the Korean peninsula from before the Three Kingdoms Period (57 BCE - 688 CE) through to the colonial period, and repositions the Korean people as the subject of their own penal modernization. Newspapers also served as both cheerleader and watchdog for early advances in South Korean penal administration.

With the outbreak of the Korean War, the body of available primary source material becomes sharply limited and shifts subject focus from typical penal administration to the handling of prisoners of war. The United Nations Command’s Provost Marshall section, the unit responsible for the handling of POWs and Civilian Internees (CI), kept extensive incident reports for cases of abuse, injury, and death of prisoners. The U.S. National Archives and Record Administration facility (NARA II) in College Park, Maryland holds extensive records, course materials, and correspondence related to POW reeducation programs. The same institution also holds vital materials related to wartime atrocities such as the massacres at Taejŏn Prison in the summer of 1950,  and the summary execution of Sŏdaemun Prison inmates at Hongche-ri in the fall of same year.

The key primary source for analyzing post-Korean War penal development discourse is the Ministry of Justice professional journal, Penal Administration (Hyŏngjŏng). The monthly journal ran from 1952 to 1961 and featured a diverse range of articles on penal reform, musings on life as a prison guard, comics, poems, short stories, and reporting from observation tours of the penal facilities of the United States and other Cold War allies.  Active penal administrators contributed to the journal and fleshed out the specifics of what it meant to “democratize” their vocation as public servants in an ostensibly democratic and developing society. This project will consider the subjectivity of prison guards (many of them veterans of the colonial prison system) in developing an autonomous penological ideal and institutional culture infused with nationalist and Cold War anticommunist ideology. Late-1950s newspapers profiled veteran prison guards, remarked on advances in penal practice since liberation, and introduced the public to the “new penology” of rehabilitation through arts, crafts and vocational training. The period also saw further development of the field of penology in international context with publications like Kwon T’ae-gŭn’s Penology (Haenghyŏnghak) in 1956. The prisoner magazine, New Path (Saegil) featured articles and creative works by prisoners for prisoner consumption, and is another vital source for understanding the specific content and messaging of rehabilitation programming. South Korean archives contain more official records and prisoner-targeted materials produced by the Ministry of Justice’s Penal Bureau, such as textbooks and approved recreational reading material, plays, and films. Further field work will also prioritize finding unofficial memoirs and eyewitness accounts of penal spaces to bring propagandistic claims of reformers and prisoner experience into the same frame of analysis. This project will also utilize interviews with former guards and inmates introduced through the network of historians associated with Seodaemun Prison History Hall.

Further archival work is needed to excavate the specific primary sources relevant to changes in prisons after Gen. Park Chung Hee’s 1961 coup d’état, but the period’s much improved administrative and records-keeping capacity make obtaining official documentation much easier than work on the Rhee regime. The largest obstacle, however, to obtaining primary sources for both the 1950s and early 1960s is the stringent nature of South Korean privacy laws that prevent archival access for materials containing the personal information of living private citizens. Thus the project will require alternative methodologies and creative use of unofficial sources to historicize the changes to penal administration in this period.

VII. Chapter Outline

The first chapter of this dissertation will reevaluate the advent of the carceral form and practice on the Korean peninsula by reviewing the scholarship on penal modernization and suggesting a more thorough Foucauldian reading of carceral practices and governmentality during the Taehan Empire (1897-1910) and Japanese colonial period. This chapter identifies the local specificities of Korea’s penal modernization, highlighting autonomous Korean discourses of reform and changes in penal culture, and merge Korean penal history scholarship with debates on the emergence of modern governmentality prior to formal annexation. This chapter will locate trends in colonial period penal discourse to better understand continuities and ruptures in the post-Liberation penal system.

The second chapter analyzes the official discourse that reframed the prison as a necessary tool for public safety divorced from its colonial legacy.  It seeks to answer the question of how southern Korean prisons went from nearly empty in the Fall of 1945, to overflowing by August of 1948. It combines analysis of U.S. military archival sources with local responses to flesh out the narrative of post-Liberation penal reform and its opposition. This chapter will complicate the narrative of a seamless transition from colonial to ROK penal practice by accounting for both U.S. and local officials’ repositioning of the role of punishment under occupation and (ostensibly) autonomous Korean rule. While the infrastructure and personnel were often the same, post-liberation authorities struggled to justify the prison as a necessary institution for public safety while emphasizing qualitative difference with colonial penal practice. Popular resistance to U.S. military rule complicated official narratives about criminality and social deviance by pitting the occupation against the very people it proposed to protect. Koreans’ fight for local autonomy and survival under mismanaged economic policy landed many in jail or prison, revealing the MG criminal justice system as the repressive tool of yet another occupier. The chapter will further examine official and public discourse surrounding the state of USAMGIK prisons in comparison to their Japanese predecessors, and center high-profile cases of abuse and prison breaks following the Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1946. It will utilize the abundant primary source material (testimonies) produced surrounding the October Taegu Uprising (1946) and Cheju Massacres (1948) to account for the role of the penal apparatus in suppressing rebellion and facilitating massacre.

The third chapter will explore penal reform and ideological indoctrination, analyzing the shifting official and public discourse surrounding criminality and punishment after the founding of the Republic of Korea in 1948. The establishment of a separate government in the south further solidified division of the peninsula and raised the status of social control of deviance to that of the Cold War containment of communism. Maintaining an archipelago of well-ordered prisons (and the disciplinary power they projected to the free population) were crucial to solidifying South Korea’s internal stability as a bulwark against the spread of communism in East Asia. This chapter focuses on the penal rhetoric of president Syngman Rhee, a problematic figure with his own history of incarceration and prison activism. As one of the first administrative measures of the new republic, the Rhee regime enacted mass pardons to release a significant portion of nonviolent offenders from prison, a thinly veiled measure to remedy prison overcrowding and reduce operational costs. The problematic pardons prompted a wholesale reevaluation of the parole system and South Korean society’s belief in rehabilitation penology at large. Any relief mass pardons provided for prison overcrowding was immediately erased with the expansion of categories of political crime after the passing of the National Security Law. This chapter traces changes in the discourse surrounding “ordinary” criminality alongside the First Republic’s resurgence of colonial era methods of ideological conversion (K: chŏnhyang; J: tenkō) in penal spaces and activities of the National Guidance League. It interrogates the historiographical division between “normal” and politicized penal practice with a case study where hegemonic anticommunist ideology came to influence every facet of governance and public discourse. Analysis of materials related to the activities of the National Guidance League will emphasize the shift to a Cold War penal paradigm after the passing of the National Security Law in 1948 and flesh out the relationship between early ROK penology and ideological indoctrination.

The fourth chapter will trace developments in ROK penology and penal administration through the rupture of the Korean War. It will examine the phenomenon of massacres of political and ordinary prisoners, exploring the role of ROK penal spaces and practices in the killing.   Where the previous chapter explored the discourse and rationale of pardons, this chapter examines wartime massacre of prisoners as a reversal of disciplinary power, where the status of prisoners as social deviants and the ulterior motive of conversion programs were laid bare. Prior to the outbreak of the Korean War, prisoners undergoing anticommunist conversion were housed, fed, educated and socially assimilated. After North Korean forces invaded Seoul in June of 1950, tens of thousands of ideological offenders were massacred. This chapter explores the breakdown of penal administration and resort to retributive violence towards both political and ordinary prisoners in wartime crisis. Prisons were sites of both liberation and massacre as the KPA occupied portions of South Korea in 1950. This chapter will account for the use of southern prisons by North Korean authorities, isolating the prison as a site and technology of power readymade for use by shifting polities for varied political ends.

This chapter will further explicate the influence of U.S. and United Nations penological schema on the development of rehabilitation-based penology that was infused with wartime ideological indoctrination. The UN Command’s Civilian Information and Education Section oversaw an extensive program for the “reeducation” of North Korean and Chinese POWS as well as ROK CI’s through propaganda film screenings, assigned readings produced by the United States Information Service (USIS), group discussions, and other cultural activities in the POW camps of Kŏje Island. This chapter will weave analysis of materials related to POW and civilian internment to account for changes in pre- and post-war ROK penology across a period that has heretofore only registered as a rupture in the penal historical record.

The fifth chapter will focus on the post-Korean War reconstruction of the prison system and wholesale reframing of penal administration as a tool of “democratization” and development. Nearly all of South Korea’s prison facilities were destroyed in the war. The primary aim of this chapter is to chart the significant shift in the post-war (1953-60) ROK penal imaginary that refigured the prison as a site for rehabilitation and production of the ideal democratic citizen. Spurred by technological aid from the U.S. and U.N., ROK authorities embarked on a campaign to reconstruct existing prisons, build new state-of-the-art penal facilities, and reframed their guiding ideology as a project for “democratizing” penal administration (minju haenghyŏng). Rehabilitation through education and penal labor was reframed as a mission to prepare inmates to not only rejoin society, but contribute as model citizens in an emerging member state of the Cold War’s “Free World.” This chapter will explore how South Korean penality interacted with discourses of development, modernization, poverty, and overcoming “backwardness.” It will demonstrate how discourse on the prison and deviance reflected hegemonic discourses of gender and race in the Cold War 1950s. South Korean discourses of the democratic citizen, their duties, and the human itself were significantly impacted by encounters with U.N. aid organizations and the emerging “human rights” global discourse. This chapter asks how the Cold War environment and U.S. influence racialized notions of deviance and development through the lasting impact of wartime reeducation schema that emphasized a perceived East Asian difference in the capacity for reform and achievement of liberal democratic subjectivity. South Korean penologists responded to these encounters with Western penal regimes with an urgency to overcome the “backwardness” of their system and its material limitations.

The concluding chapter concerns changes in the ROK prison system after the April Revolution of 1960 (the popular uprising that overthrew the Syngman Rhee regime) and subsequent military coup in May of 1961. Prison spaces appear in historical narratives of the initial period of repression following the fraudulent election of March, 1960, but the role of prisons in this period is understudied. The military junta (1961-63) led by Gen. Park Chung Hee fundamentally reframed the mission of penal institutions under the euphemistic schema of “corrections” by renaming penal institutions kyodoso in December of 1961. South Korean penal culture still utilizes the language and guiding ideology of corrections developed in this era.

VIII. Research Plan

My archival work in South Korea, which will start in July 2019, will be supported by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship. While in Korea I will be affiliated with Sungkyunkwan University’s Interuniversity Center for Korean Language Studies which will provide library access and other logistical assistance. I will also work closely with one faculty member at SKKU, Professor Oh Je-yeon who specializes in contemporary Korean history and student movements of the 1950s. With Fulbright funding I will spend eight months in Seoul accessing several state archives, including the National Assembly Library, the National Library System’s central library, and the National Archives of Korea. I will also search for materials held by the Ministry of Justice Correctional Service’s central headquarters, and also explore what is made publicly available by the remaining prison facilities and archival institutions in the provinces outside of Seoul. I have also met with the director of Seodaemun Prison History Hall, Dr. Pak Kyŏng-mok, and his curatorial staff will assist me in accessing their archival materials. They also have a network of former staff and inmates from the Park Chung Hee period who periodically speak about their experience, so I have obtained the necessary credentials from UCLA’s institutional review board of the Office of the Human Research Protection Program to conduct interviews. I will return to Los Angeles in March of 2020 and support the rest of my writing process with funding as a teaching assistant. I plan to make another research trip to NARA in Maryland, as well as other U.S. archives to further flesh out the U.S. influence on Korean penology. I will then apply for the Dissertation Year Fellowship (DYF), planning to use the rest of my departmental funding and finishing my dissertation to graduate in 2022.

Sample Bibliography

Primary Sources

Newspapers and Magazines

Chosŏn ilbo

Chungang ilbo

Hyŏngjŏng

Kyŏnghyang sinmun

Saegil

Tonga ilbo

Archival Sources

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA II)

Record Group 554: Records of General HQ, Far East Command, Supreme Commander of Allied Powers and United Nations Command. USAFIK, XXIV Corps, G-2, Historical Section. “Records Regarding the Okinawa Campaign, U.S. Military Government in Korea, U.S.-U.S.S.R. Relations in Korea, and Korean Political Affairs. 1945-48.

---. Provost Marshall’s Section. Records Relating to Anticommunist Measures, Prisoners of War, and Troop Planning, 1950-51.

---. Provost Marshall’s Section. Prisoner of War Division, Correspondence Relating to Interned Korean Civilians.

RG 59 General Records of the Department of State. Central Decimal File, 1960-63. Box 2178. Country Law study for the Republic of Korea. JAG Section, HQ, Eighth U.S. Army.

“Appendix C: Reports on Korean Prisons,” Country Law study for the Republic of Korea. JAG Section, HQ, Eighth U.S. Army. 4/19/61. p. C1. NARA II, RG 59 General Records of the Department of State. Central Decimal File, 1960-63. Box 2178.

Hoover Institution Archives:

Haydon L. Boatner Papers

George F. Mott Papers

Other

American Advisory Staff, Department of Justice, USAMGIK, “Draft of Study on the Administration of Justice in Korea Under the Japanese and in South Korea Under the United States Army Military Government in Korea to 15 August 1948”

Ch’oe Se-hwang. Yŏngguk ŭi hyŏngjŏng chedo. Seoul: Ch’ihyŏng Hyŏphoe, 1954.

Gayn, Mark. Japan diary. William Sloane Associates, 1948.

Kwon, T’ae-gŭn. Haenghyŏnghak. Seoul: Kyujangsa, 1956.

Yoon, Paek-nam. Chosŏn Hyŏngjŏngsa. Seoul: Munyesŏrim, 1948.

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Smith, Philip. Punishment and culture. University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Thomas Lemke, Foucault’s Analysis of Modern Governmentality: A Critique of Political Reason. Translated by Erik Butler. London: Verso Books, 2019.

Mitchell, Timothy. “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics.” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Mar., 1991): 77-96.

Scott, James C. Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Weber, Max. In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited and translated by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 77‐128. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.

Wright, Brendan. “Civil War, Politicide, and the Politics of Memory in South Korea, 1960-1961.” PhD diss., University of British Columbia-Vancouver, 2016.

Yoo, Theodore Jun. It's madness: The politics of mental health in colonial Korea. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016.

Zinoman, Peter. The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940. University of California Press, 2001.

[hofculctr]

Hofstra University

Carceral Straits and Sentimental Appeals: Afro-Cuban Political Deportees in Chafarinas

In 1847, Spain occupied and incorporated the Chafarinas Islands, just off the Moroccan coast, into its carceral circuit in the Straits of Gibraltar; the tiny archipelago joined existing nodes of confinement in Cádiz, Melilla, Ceuta, and Vélez de la Gomera. For centuries, and dramatically intensifying in the 19th century, this larger space functioned as a “periphery of control” that at once defined the borders between European “civilization” and African “barbarism”, and enabled Spain to siphon off presumed troublemakers from across the global empire.

Presenter: Susan Martin-Márquez, Rutgers University

Wednesday, March 30, 4:15-5:45 p.m. Breslin Hall, Room 105, South Campus Advance registration is required.

ALL GUESTS (Hofstra students, faculty and staff, as well as visitors) that attend a Hofstra University-sponsored indoor event must be fully vaccinated. Evidence of vaccination will be required at time of entry with Hofstra Pride Pass or proof of vaccination and government ID. Mask-wearing is optional in indoor places on campus.

More info and to RSVP http://tiny.cc/i03quz

[fatehbaz]

When you tag things “#abolition”, what are you referring to? Abolishing what?

Prisons, generally. Though not just physical walls of formal prisons, but also captivity, carcerality, and carceral thinking. Including migration prevention and barriers to mobility; detention; national borders; indentured servitude; inability to move due to, and labor coerced through, debt; police and policing; de facto imprisonment and isolation of the disabled and medically pathologized; privatization and enclosure of land; sacrifice zones at the periphery; the urge to punish; categories of “criminality"; (and nationalism, rent, debt, capitalism, plantation monoculture, of course); etc.

In favor of other, better lives and futures.

Specifically, I am grateful to have learned from the work of these people:

Katherine McKittrick on imaginative geographies; emotional engagement with place; legacy of imperialism/slavery in conceptions of physical space and in devaluation of other-than-human lifeforms; legacies of racism/imperialism in academia and the sciences; escaping enclosure; plantation “afterlives” and how plantation logics continue to thrive in contemporary structures/institutions like debt colonies, workplace environments, prisons, etc.; a range of rebellions through collaborative acts, refusal of the dominant order, and subversion through joy and autonomy.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore on “abolition geography”.

Macarena Gomez-Barris on landscapes as “sacrifice zones”; people condemned to live in resource extraction colonies deemed as acceptable losses; place-making and ecological consciousness; and how “the enclosure, the plantation, the ship, and the prison” are analogous spaces of captivity.

Liat Ben-Moshe on disability; informal institutionalization and incarceration of disabled people through physical limitation, social ostracization, denial of aid, and institutional disavowal; and "letting go of hegemonic knowledge of crime”.

Achille Mbembe on co-existence and care; "necropolitics" and bare life/death; historical evolution of chattel slavery into contemporary institutions through control over food, space, and definitions of life/land; the “explicit kinship between plantation slavery, colonial predation, and contemporary resource extraction” and modern institutions.

Sylvia Wynter on the “plot against the plantation”; "plantation archipelagos"; the “revolutionary demand for happiness”; "secretive histories"; the remaking of the planet after Portuguese/Spanish plantation agriculture colonies from 1450s to 1490s cemented slavery and race in European practice in ways that infected discourses, sciences, institutions, ways of thinking.

Robin Maynard on "generative refusal"; solidarity; shared experiences among homeless, incarcerated, disabled, Indigenous, Black communities; to "build community with" those who you are told to disregard in order "to re-imagine" worlds; envisioning, imagining, and then manifesting those alternative futures which are "already" here and alive.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey on indentured labor; the role of plants, food, and botany in enslaved and fugitive communities; the nineteenth-century British Empire's labor in the South Pacific and Caribbean; the twentieth-century United States mistreatment of the South Pacific; the legacy of race/empire in academia and the sciences; panoptic imperial vision through cartography and aerial surveillance; and the role of tropical islands as "laboratories" for profit-oriented planting and isolated open-air prisons for Britain and the US.

AM Kanngieser on "deep listening"; “refusal as pedagogy”; and “attunement and attentiveness” in the face of “incomprehensible” and immense “loss of people and ecologies to capitalist brutalities”.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten on “the undercommons”; fugitivity; dis-order in academia and institutions; and sharing of knowledge; refusal; practice.

Lisa Lowe on "the intimacies of four continents" and how British politicians and planters feared that official legal abolition of chattel slavery would endanger Caribbean plantation profits, so they devised ways to import South Asian and East Asian laborers.

Ariella Aisha Azoulay on “rehearsals with others’.

Phil Neel on p0lice departments purposely targeting the poor as a way to raise municipal funds; the "suburbanization of poverty" especially in the Great Lakes region; the rise of lucrative "logistics empires" (warehousing, online order delivery, tech industries) at the edges of major urban agglomerations in "progressive" cities like Seattle dependent on "archipelagos" of poverty; and the relationship between job loss, homelessness, gentrification, and these logistics cities.

Leniqueca Welcome on Caribbean world-making; "the apocalyptic temporality" of environmental disasters and the colonial denial of possible "revolutionary futures"; limits of reformism; "infrastructures of liberation at the end of the world."; "abolition is a practice oriented toward the full realization of decolonization, postnationalism, decarceration, and environmental sustainability."

Tim Edensor on urban "ghosts" and “industrial ruins”; "haunting" in debris; searching for the “gaps” and “silences” in the official narratives of nations/institutions, to pay attention to the histories, voices, lives obscured in formal accounts.

Alison Mountz on migrant detention; "carceral archipelagoes"; and the “death of asylum”.

Ann Laura Stoler on "imperial debris" and ruination; haunting and "living in (postcolonial) ruins"; "imperialist nostalgia" and European leisure tourism as a form of intellectual/immaterial colonization related to the nineteenth-century "salvage" mission of colonial/imperial ethnography.

Elizabeth Povinelli on "geontopower"; imperial control over "life and death"; how imperial/nationalist formalization of private landownership and commodities relies on rigid definitions of dynamic ecosystems.

Pedro Neves Marques on “one planet with many worlds inside it”; “parallel futures” of Indigenous, Black, disenfranchised communities/cosmologies; and how imperial/nationalist institutions try to foreclose or prevent other possible futures by purposely obscuring or destroying histories, cosmologies, etc.

Peter Redfield on how metropolitan residents try to hide slavery and torture/punishment on the periphery of Empire; early twentieth-century French penal colony in tropical Guiana/Guyana; the torture of the prison relies on the metropolitan imagination's invocation of exotic hinterlands and racist civilization/savagery mythologies.

Iain Chambers on racism of borders; obscured and/or forgotten lives of migrants; and disrupting modernity.

Kodwo Eshun on African cosmologies and futures; “the colonial present”; and imperialist/nationalist use of “preemptive” and “predictive” power to control the official storytelling/narrative of history and to destroy alternatives.

Megan Ybarra on place-making; "site fights"; solidarity and defiance of migrant detention; and geography of abolition/incarceration.

Sophie Sapp Moore on resistance, marronage, and "forms of counterplantation life"; "plantation worlds" which continue to live in contemporary industrial resource extraction and dispossession.

Deborah Cowen on “infrastructures of empire and resistance”; imperial/nationalist control of place/space; spaces of criminality and "making a life at the edge" of the law; “fugitive infrastructures”.

Jasbir Puar on disability; debilitation; how the control of fences, borders, movement, and time management constitute conditions of de facto imprisonment; institutional control of illness/health as a weapon to "debilitate" people; how debt and chronic illness doom us to a “slow death”.

Dixa Ramirez D’Oleo on “remaining open to the gifts of the nonhuman” ecosystems; hinterlands and peripheries of empires; attentiveness to hidden landscapes/histories; defying surveillance; and building a world of mutually-flourishing companions.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on reciprocity; Indigenous pedagogy; abolitionism in Canada; camaraderie; solidarity; and “life-affirming” environmental relationships.

Anand Yang on "forgotten histories of Indian convicts in colonial Southeast Asia" and how the British Empire deported South Asian political prisoners to the region to simultaneously separate activists from their communities while forcing them into labor.

Avery Gordon on haunting; spectrality; the “death sentence” of being deemed “social waste” and being considered someone “without future”; "refusing" to participate; "escaping hell" and “living apart” by striking, squatting, resisting; cultivating "the many-headed hydra of the revolutionary Black Atlantic"; alternative, utopian, subjugated worldviews; despite attempts to destroy these futures, manifesting these better worlds, imagining them as "already here, alive, present."

Kanwal Hameed and Katie Natanel on "liberation pedagogy"; sharing of knowledge and subversion of colonial legacy in universities; "anticolonial feminisms"; and “spaces of solidarity, revolt, retreat, and release”.

[boobasprite]

Fumiko Kaneko Park Yeol medieval pike plate armor Payment Methods Ancient origin dominus signorum #Pythagoras wound man nihil chaos blade carceral capitalism matricidal archipelago yoke amor nothing missed fake falling fell beyond caring @Drake cupboard crystal #clearskintwiter made to order po- -wer corrupts all wage lift debt loss media grey alien ant farm darkambient #WhoIsAmerica Dontcare4it Israeli #AutocorrectAQuote #sociophonaus #M88 #RedKnight WorldCup @prediction2K18 dungeon family #99problems #spambot #bottlefed #suplements #plumbing plume wedge #telegraph #TrumpBabyBlimp #cash4gold coldwave #afterwork debt #ATM #Chapter73 colour field monochrome @tiny_star_field parted sheets crosses dot points split pages notes on the side separate pieces of paper a solid red jumper triptych Toblerone bear Winnie the bear #WorldCupFinal #missed #Marx #GoalsGoalsGoals #RunningMan @MasanaoHirayama #STILL #Tidal crows sleeping on the wing fire wings heart rate free capsule captive I n flames fly rest pulse practice of sleep of pause flying higher way up the sounds of importance the thrill of subjectification the gentrified id he sells she sells by the see sure the margin Merlin and Marry Magdalene a mandolin an armadillo flower between poised fingers Exxon rolled oat quilt bear plug winter rhythm vowel to vole and burrow which way up state in cars with comerdy ladden seat covers lost coins in seat cracks sat down at a table staring outward at less space than within after fires light quickly upstream feel mid way only not packets lost stream USB drives cut up words separated by time in a way way to far away but not also about it but not about it like like you know why not but in a sense it goes on it is not an end point punctuation suplies ripples in timeless

[coloradoprisontour-blog]

Colorado State Penitentiary: (Publicly Owned) 

- Prison Population: 756

- Notable Features/Incidents: Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP) is the primary execution site for death row inmates. It is also one of 11 prisons in the Cañon City/East Complex, the largest carceral archipelago in the state and at 7,600 inmates, one of the largest in the country. Cañon City is colloquially referred to as “Prison Valley” by residents. 

[imaginedsoldier]

The violent sexualization of prison life within women's institutions raises a number of issues that may help us develop further our critique of the prison system. Ideologies of sexuality--and particularly the intersection of race and sexuality--have had a profound effect on the representations of and treatment received by women of color both within and outside prison. Of course, Black and Latino men experience a perilous continuity in the way they are treated in school, where they are disciplined as potential criminals; in the streets, where they are subjected to racial profiling by the police; and in prison, where they are warehoused and deprived of virtually all of their rights. For women, the continuity of treatment from the free world to the universe of the prison is even more complicated, since they also confront forms of violence in prison that they have confronted in their homes and intimate relationships. The criminalization of Black and Latina women includes persisting images of hypersexuality that serve to justify sexual assaults against them both in and out of prisons.

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

[Source]

Davis here links the school-to-prison pipeline and gendered violence towards illuminating the nature of how subjects are constructed, both within and outside of prisons. This reminds me of Foucault’s carceral archipelago (which you can read about here, pages 296 through 301, which I’ve autolinked to), a string of islands functioning as a high-security prison system, and its connection to surveillance. When Davis lays it out like this- Black and Latino men are constructed as carceral subjects from birth, with Black and Latina women subject to the additional layer of construction as sexual objects (willing, even aggressive ones)- its very evident that a carceral society is not a thought experiment, but a very real condition we exist in.

[korbynwatt237331]

Week 2

In your digital workbook include at least three entries/key points of Tony Bennett’s theory, the ‘exhibitionary complex.’ In your own words explain how these points link to modes of display, the disciplining of museum visitors, and/or display architecture (interior or exterior). You may consider the logo brand identity of Te Papa in 1997-98 featured in Getting to Our Place.

Bennett’s theory is categorised between two main principles; The first being that galleries and museums should be open to the public for everyone to equally access. And the other to have all museums portray culture in an adequate representation that allows all to understand the proper values of their or others environments and traditions.

The Employment of anthropology within the exhibitionary complex in the late 19th century played a large impact on connecting the histories western nations and civilisations, yet ultimately created a separation between culture and nature.

Museums are typically located in the middle of cities which implies an undertone of power and monopoly.

“The space of representation constituted by the exhibitionary complex was shaped by the relations between an array of new disciplines: history, art history, archaeology, geology, biology, and anthropology. Whereas the disciplines associated with the carceral archipelago were concerned to reduce aggregates to individualities, rendering the latter visible to power and so amenable to control, the orientation of these disciplines - as deployed in the exhibitionary complex - might best be summarized as that of 'show and tell'. They tended also to be generalizing in their focus.”

Consider one of the exhibition spaces you visited in week one. Can you determine or suggest ways you think visitors are being disciplined as viewers in their museum experience? This could address the way exhibits are presented, specific architectures, and/or any other aspects about the visitor's museum going experience. 

Within the Exhibition “A Place Apart” in the City Gallery Wellington “Pataialii’s energetic compositions revolve around idiosyncratic forms—picket fences, rugby posts, cowboy hats, and boxing gloves—which recall her Auckland childhood. As a child of a Samoan immigrant generation, she explores the implications of living in diaspora. For her, these histories surface and crystallise in icons of pop culture, music, and suburban memories.” 

Yet the city Gallery itself and the surrounding architecture in which Pataialii’s artwork is housed in can differ those minds who view it. Having a strong story of immigration and pop culture surrounded by an undertone of power and monopoly could possibly underset the significance of Pataialii story. 

This makes me think to myself in which context can Pataialii’s artwork be shown in order to dodge this issue. But this also had me think of the significance that Pataialii’s work had on those who viewed it. Which could be a less striking attribute to those who visit the gallery to what I’m making it out to be. Overall this concept of story telling under a house of such significance could be taken in many ways. Ways of which can be told as a brave and striking  story to be exposed to. Whereas some may take it as a fabricated alternative version as such that the city gallery may bring into the art. This concept of how architecture and the placement of art effects our experience may be a bit extreme but it could definitely play a large role in how we view a gallery when it comes to other museums. 

Later in the course we consider outreach and target audiences. Make a few notes about the brand identity of your selected museum/art gallery. Specifically, consider how your selected museum/art gallery brands itself to;

i)               communicate its identity as a museum/exhibition space

ii)              attract the public, or specific target audiences

“City Gallery Wellington is a contemporary art gallery with a dynamic programme of exhibitions and events, and an international reputation. We’re the hub for art life in New Zealand’s capital.”

i) The City Gallery Wellington communicates its identity through a vast array of cultural representation within a varying amount of contemporary art mediums. 

ii) The City Gallery Wellington works amongst local “galleries, collectors, and an extensive range of organisations and business partners to present exhibitions and events that are relevant to our lives today” Which attracts the public for reasons of relativity and context. People who visit the gallery will be exposed to artists that target issues and ideas that are relevant to todays issues and events. 

The gallery is free entry and is located in the middle of the city making it an easy and attractive place to visit. 

Undertake some further reading on any one of the following exhibition events raised during discussions in the lecture session.

The International Exhibition 1906-07, Hagley Park, Christchurch

              -ART GALLERY-

Frederick John Barlow, who designed the Machinery Hall, also designed the Art Gallery, which was built by Moore Brothers at a cost of £4998.

It was a brick building at the rear of the Main Building, specially constructed to give maximum fire protection. 

The walls were strengthened with buttresses and the ceiling was lined with asbestos slabs.

[lollipoplollipopoh]

America's jailhouse journalists | The Listening Post (Feature) by Al Jazeera English Despite their outsized presence in American popular culture, life within the United States's carceral archipelago remains a great, frightening mystery to most Americans. With the flow of information tightly controlled by prison authorities, news of horrific abuse, neglect and civil rights violations punctuate the news cycle, briefly, eliciting shock before receding from memory. For journalists who want to report on prison life, getting and maintaining access remains difficult. "I think there's very little information about what it's like inside and when there is information, when somebody does go inside the walls, it tends to be fairly superficial because of course they're going in once and you're really scratching only the surface of what happens on a daily basis," says Yukari Kane, a former Wall Street Journal technology reporter who began teaching journalism at California's San Quentin State Prison in 2016. This does not mean that the complex daily realities of prison life will be lost to history. Working hard to report these for their fellow prisoners and the outside world is a small press corps of prisoners who work across a variety of media to inform, entertain, and keep the record straight. While most report almost exclusively for their fellow prisoners, some, like Esquire contributing editor, John J Lennon - who is currently serving 28 years to life at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York State - build devoted audiences far beyond prison walls. They toe a delicate line, striving to tell the truth as best they can without alienating prison authorities, or releasing information that could harm their fellow prisoners. "The guys self censor themselves," San Quentin public information officer, Sam Robinson told The Listening Post's Flo Phillips. "They understand that they are living in a community. There are things that they have the ability to write about but they choose not to ... they live amongst the people that they write about. And so I think you have to ... you have to protect yourself." These reporters do have one advantage: unrivalled proximity to the subject. "We've built up a certain reputation or credibility with other prisoners that an outside journalist isn’t going to be able to have," Jeffrey Hillburn, a reporter at The Angolite, a magazine based out of Louisiana State Penitentiary, told the Listening Post’s Martin de Bourmont. "If you've been in the same dormitory and you've slept beside each other for 5, 10, 15 years then there have been times where family issues come up and the guy needs somebody to talk to and he knows you and he's willing to do that. But then when a story comes up that he may be, may be a participant in the aspects of it, then he's willing to open up and talk to you because of that prior history." For some prisoners, this privileged access, as well as an acute awareness of how little their circumstances are understood by society at large turns into a sense of social responsibility. "As far as the prison side goes, I have always been interested in being able to tell my own story and having the autonomy of telling my own story," says Troy Williams, a producer who founded a radio project while serving a life sentence in San Quentin, before his release in 2014. This sense of responsibility to the truth can go a long way towards rehabilitation, a renewed sense of purpose that drives prisoners to maintain a connection with the world beyond the prison yard. "At the end of the day, I guess I would say I'm a storyteller and I look forward to telling stories," says Lennon. "I may live in prison but I'm no longer a criminal." Produced by: Martin de Bourmont and Flo Phillips Contributors: John J. Lennon – prison journalist, Sing Sing Correctional Facility and contributing editor, Esquire Magazine Kerry Myers - former editor, The Angolite and deputy executive director, Louisiana Parole Project Troy Williams - founder, San Quentin Prison Report and founder, Restorative Media Project Sam Robinson - Public Information Officer, San Quentin State Prison Aaron Thomas - sports editor, San Quentin News Yukari Iwatani Kane - advisor, San Quentin News and co-founder, Prison Journalism Project - Subscribe to our channel: https://ift.tt/291RaQr - Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish - Find us on Facebook: https://ift.tt/1iHo6G4 - Check our website: https://ift.tt/2lOp4tL

[khristineclarrise-blog]

Increasing Governmentality

Si Michel Foucault ay ipinanganak noong Oktubre 15, 1926 at siya ay namatay noong Hunyo 25, 1984. Siya ay isang french philisopher at kilalang historyador.

Ano nga ba ang ipinagkaiba ni Michel Foucault na isang post modernist sa mga naunang sociologist tulad nila Weber?

1. Una, ang mga modernist ay madalas na hinahanap ang origin o pinagmulan ng isang social development upang malaman nila ang sagot kung bakit nageexist o nangyayari ang isang bagay. Samantalang si Michel Foucault ay mas gustong inaanalisa o nilalarawan ang mga pangyayari. Inaanalisa ni Michel Foucault ang mga pangyayari sa pamamagitan ng pagreraise ng question upang mas mapalawak ang kaalaman sa nasabing pangyayari kesa sa hanapin ang sagot o pinagmulan nito. Dahil kapag nahanap mo na ang sagot tapos na ang issue sa bagay na iyon pero ito ay sinasalungat ni Michel Foucault.

2. Ang mga modernist ay mas ineemphasize ang pagiging logical mag-isip at si Michel Foucault ay illogical naman mag-isip. Ito ay may koneksyon sa naunang pagkakaiba. Ang mga modernist kapag nahanap na na ang origin o pinagmulan ng pangyayari, ito na ang kanilang nagiging sagot habang si Michel Foucault ay naniniwalang may ibang dahilan kung bakit nangyayari ito. Isang halimbawa ay ang pangongopya, kung ito ay susuriin ng mga modernist sasabihin nila na kaya nangongopya ang isang bata dahil ito ay hindi nakapag-aral o hindi nakapaghanda para sa pagsusulit. Pero para kay Michel Foucault hindi ito ang dahilan, dahil para sa kanya naapektuhan ng kasalukuyang estado ang pangyayari. Maaaring ang bata ay underpressure at mataas ang ekspektasyon ng magulang kaya nagawa ito ng bata at marami pang maaaring maging dahilan sa issue ito.

3. Kinokontra ni Michel Foucault ang sinasabi ng mga modernist na ang social development ay linear o continuity. Para sa mga modernist sa dulo ay iisa lang ang nagiging resulta at ito ay maganda pero para kay Michel Foucault ang social development ay pwedeng magbago at ang nakakapagpapabago dito ay ang oras lugar at kasalukuyang kalagayan.

Increasing Governmentality

Ang governmentalities ay isang practice at techniques na ginagawa upang makontrol ang mga tao.

1. Discipline at Punishment

Mas binigyang pansin dito ang kanyang gawa noong 1757 at 1830's na tumatalakay ng Prison system. Makikita dito ang pagbabago mula sa pagtotorture sa mga prisoners at napalitan ng pagkokontrol sa kanila sa pamamagitan ng rules.

Anu-ano nga ba ang mga advantages ng pagbabagong ito?

A. Mas mapapabilis ang pagpapasunod sa mga prisoners kung magiimpose ng rules kesa sa pagtotorture.

B. Ang pagiimpose ng rules ay sinasabi na mas tatagal at pwedeng ituro ng ituro ulit sa mga prisoners samantalang sa torture ay hindi.

C. Mas magiging maayos kung magiimpose ng rules at magkakaroon ng rationalization.

Instruments of observation and control

Panopticon - ito ay isang structure na kung saan ang isang tao o prison officer ay mayroong kapangyarihan na maobserbahan at makontrol ang isang grupo ng tao o prisoners. Isang halimbawa nito ay ang isang prison officer na nasa itaas ng isang

Increasing Disciplinary Power

Carceral Archipelago - ito ay nagreresulta mula sa isang ideya na pagpapakalat ng disiplina sa isang society. Ang naapektuhan lang nito ay ang ibang parte ng isang society at yung iba ay hindi o maaaring sa oras na ito, itong grupo lamang ang maaapektuhan at sa susunod ay yung iba naman.

[fatehbaz]

In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain [...]. Slavery and industrialization were tied by the various afterlives of slavery in the form of indentured and carceral labor that continued to enrich new emergent industrial powers [...]. Enslaved “free” African Americans predominately mined coal in the corporate use of black power or the new “industrial slavery,” [...]. The labor of the coffee - the carceral penance of the rock pile, “breaking rocks out here and keeping on the chain gang” (Nina Simone, Work Song, 1966), laying iron on the railroads - is the carceral future mobilized at plantation’s end (or the “nonevent” of emancipation). [...] [T]he racial circumscription of slavery predates and prepares the material ground for Europe and the Americas in terms of both nation and empire building - and continues to sustain it.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019.

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When the Haitian Revolution erupted [...], slaveholding regimes around the world grew alarmed. In response to a series of slave rebellions in its own sugar colonies, especially in Jamaica, the British Empire formally abolished slavery in the 1830s. [...] Importing indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential way to maintain the British Empire’s sugar plantation system. In 1838 John Gladstone, father of future prime minister William E. Gladstone, arranged for the shipment of 396 South Asian workers, bound to five years of indentured labor, to his sugar estates in British Guiana. The experiment [...] inaugurated [...] "a new system of [...] [indentured servitude]," which would endure for nearly a century. [...] Desperate to regain power and authority after the war [and abolition of chattel slavery in the US], Louisiana’s wealthiest planters studied and learned from their Caribbean counterparts. [...] Thousands of Chinese workers landed in Louisiana between 1866 and 1870, recruited from the Caribbean, China and California. [...] When Congress debated excluding the Chinese from the United States in 1882, Rep. Horace F. Page of California argued that the United States could not allow the entry of “millions of cooly slaves and serfs.”

Text by: Moon-Ho Jung. "Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations". The Conversation. 13 January 2022.

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The durability and extensibility of plantations [...] have been tracked most especially in the contemporary United States’ prison archipelago and segregated urban areas [...], [including] “skewed life chances, limited access to health [...], premature death, incarceration [...]”. [...] [In labor arrangements there exists] a moral tie that indefinitely indebts the laborers to their master, [...] the main mechanisms reproducing the plantation system long after the abolition of slavery [...]. [G]enealogies of labor management […] have been traced […] linking different features of plantations to later economic enterprises, such as factories […] or diamond mines […] [,] chartered companies, free ports, dependencies, trusteeships [...].

Text by: Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. "Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times". Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives (edited by Petitcrops, Macedo, and Peano). Published 2023.

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Louis-Napoleon, still serving in the capacity of president of the [French] republic, threw his weight behind […] the exile of criminals as well as political dissidents. “It seems possible to me,” he declared near the end of 1850, “to render the punishment of hard labor more efficient, more moralizing, less expensive […], by using it to advance French colonization.” [...] Slavery had just been abolished in the French Empire [...]. If slavery were at an end, then the crucial question facing the colony was that of finding an alternative source of labor. During the period of the early penal colony we see this search for new slaves, not only in French Guiana, but also throughout [other European] colonies built on the plantation model.

Text by: Peter Redfield. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. 2000.

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To control the desperate and the jobless, the authorities passed harsh new laws, a legislative program designed to quell disorder and ensure a pliant workforce for the factories. The Riot Act banned public disorder; the Combination Act made trade unions illegal; the Workhouse Act forced the poor to work; the Vagrancy Act turned joblessness into a crime. Eventually, over 220 offences could attract capital punishment - or, indeed, transportation. […] [C]onvict transportation - a system in which prisoners toiled without pay under military discipline - replicated many of the worst cruelties of slavery. […] Middle-class anti-slavery activists expressed little sympathy for Britain’s ragged and desperate, holding […] [them] responsible for their own misery. The men and women of London’s slums weren’t slaves. They were free individuals - and if they chose criminality, […] they brought their punishment on themselves. That was how Phillip [commander of the British First Fleet settlement in Australia] could decry chattel slavery while simultaneously relying on unfree labour from convicts. The experience of John Moseley, one of the eleven people of colour on the First Fleet, illustrates how, in the Australian settlement, a rhetoric of liberty accompanied a new kind of bondage. [Moseley was Black and had been a slave at a plantation in America before escaping to Britain, where he was charged with a crime and shipped to do convict labor in Australia.] […] The eventual commutation of a capital sentence to transportation meant that armed guards marched a black ex-slave, chained once more by the neck and ankles, to the Scarborough, on which he sailed to New South Wales. […] For John Moseley, the “free land” of New South Wales brought only a replication of that captivity he’d endured in Virginia. His experience was not unique. […] [T]hroughout the settlement, the old strode in, disguised as the new. [...] In the context of that widespread enthusiasm [in Australia] for the [American] South (the welcome extended to the Confederate ship Shenandoah in Melbourne in 1865 led one of its officers to conclude “the heart of colonial Britain was in our cause”), Queenslanders dreamed of building a “second Louisiana”. [...] The men did not merely adopt a lifestyle associated with New World slavery. They also relied on its techniques and its personnel. [...] Hope, for instance, acquired his sugar plants from the old slaver Thomas Scott. He hired supervisors from Jamaica and Barbados, looking for those with experience driving plantation slaves. [...] The Royal Navy’s Commander George Palmer described Lewin’s vessels as “fitted up precisely like an African slaver [...]".

Text by: Jeff Sparrow. “Friday essay: a slave state - how blackbirding in colonial Australia created a legacy of racism.” The Conversation. 4 August 2022.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“The second purpose of transportation to carceral islands was to discipline convicts who misbehaved or reoffended, through the dual mechanism of distance and labour. In 1817, John Thomas Bigge, former deputy-judge advocate of Trinidad, was commissioned by the British parliament to report on the convict system in Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales. The two key aspects of Bigge’s convict reforms were to disperse convicts across the countryside under assignment to pastoralists in order to rapidly increase the area of land under cultivation, and to introduce a multi-level system of punishment which isolated convicts undergoing secondary punishment, as well as subjecting them to hard labour. Convicts found guilty of misconduct worked either in road or chain gangs or, for more serious offences, were sent to isolated penal settlements. 

Bigge’s scheme was designed to rapidly expand agricultural and pastoral industries, situated in the coastal and interior regions of New South Wales respectively. In order to fulfill the Colonial Office’s instructions to “separate the convict population from the free population”, Bigge “was naturally led to inquire whether any of the islands in Bass Straits, or upon the eastern coast of New South Wales, were calculated for the reception of convicts”. However, upon receiving information from surveyors and locals, Bigge complained that Norfolk Island had proved too difficult to access by boat and “no other island […] had the same advantages of soil or climate” to sustain a convict population.

Ultimately, Bigge recommended several sites on the coast of New South Wales as possible locations for secondary punishment stations. However, when the Governor of New South Wales, Thomas Brisbane, and the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Bathurst, came to establish a new penal settlement in 1824, they rejected Bigge’s suggestions and opted instead to settle Norfolk Island in the Pacific. Bathurst believed that, rather than having the “worst description of convicts […] placed in the midst of a thriving and prosperous colony”, Norfolk Island should be occupied “upon the principle of a great Hulk or Penitentiary”. 

The penal system that Bigge created relied on distance as the primary mechanism of secondary punishment within the Australian colonies, which translated into officials selecting remote islands. For Norfolk Island to act as an effective deterrent to crime for the convict population, it had to be feared, and a distant island was a powerful image in the minds of the general public. As the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, George Arthur, wrote, “being sent to Norfolk Island […] should be considered a place of ultimate limit, and a punishment short of death”. The fact that Norfolk Island was so distant fed into rumours and myths about the “depravity” of the convicts who were sent there. Far from being the “worst” convicts, the majority of Norfolk Island’s inmates had been convicted of minor property crimes and a third were serving their original sentence of transportation. The imaginary of Norfolk Island was so strong in the public mind that insularity became synonymous with isolation in the Australian context, as subsequent prison islands were all understood in relation to their Pacific counterpart.

The other colony that overhauled its convict system along the lines of Bigge’s report was Van Diemen’s Land. Officials here were equally drawn to islands as sites of secondary punishment. At the centre of Macquarie Harbour, a body of water twice as big as Sydney Harbour, was an archipelago of carceral islands. The main settlement, with shipyard, was the vast Sarah Island (also known as Settlement Island), which stretched from the pilot station to the shores of Macquarie Harbour. Next door was the “detached fort” of Grummet Island (or Small Island), which housed a hospital and penitentiary. In 1826, Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur wrote to the Colonial Office recommending its closure because of the encroachment of free settlers and the high rates of escape. 

Between 1821 and 1832, there were 150 escape attempts involving 271 individuals, or nearly one in four of those who had been convicted of a second crime after being transported to the colony. Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur’s language mimicked Bigge’s when he stressed that “as the Colony becomes more and more populated, the barrier between these wretched Criminals and the rest of the Community will be decreased, and escape will constantly become more easy”. Even if convicts were kept on islands overnight, they worked on the mainland, which presented an opportunity for escape. On similar grounds, Arthur criticised the penal settlement on Maria Island, which had been for the punishment of less “serious” secondary offenders a year earlier, in 1825. Situated just four kilometres east of the Tasmanian mainland, Arthur complained that “it is much too near the settled districts on the Main Land to be regarded as a safe depot for very desperate offenders”.

For this reason, Arthur suggested King Island, to the west of the Bass Strait, as a suitable alternative, from which escape would be almost impossible. However, Arthur noted that its warm climate and natural beauty made it more akin to a paradise, than a penitentiary, rendering it in some respects undesirable as a place of punishment. In 1827, Arthur once again put forward a new island penal settlement on Phillip Island – situated off the southern coast of Australian, near modern-day Melbourne. However, Phillip Island was far from a utopia: its dry soil and swampy interior made it economically unviable for convicts to cultivate the land, though Arthur believed it could still be a “viable temporary penal establishment”. In the same year, Arthur formed an executive committee on the problem of educated convicts, suggesting that they should be segregated from the corrupting influence of the general convict population. Arthur seemed certain that “an island may be found much more convenient and available than any district” to keep educated convicts separate from the rabble.

Similarly, the Colonial Treasurer, Jocelyn Thomas, claimed that “the various islands in the Bass Strait (King, Furneaux, Cape Barren etc. etc.) all afford eligible situations for Penal Settlements”. Many of these islands were later used for the confinement of Indigenous Australians. This demonstrates the enduring appeal of islands as “natural prisons”, though officials used different arguments to explain why a certain population was best suited for confinement there. Islands offered the possibility to protect society from “dangerous” convicts, but the isolation could also protect “gentlemen” convicts from corruption from a society made up of “ex-cons.”

In the mid-1830s, policymakers turned away from remote islands to urban islands located in the midst of city harbours as sites that balanced surveillance, security, and labour needs. In the preceding decade, the extraction of convict labour in penal settlements had become increasingly more important than punishment through “internal relocation to the peripheries of New South Wales”. From the mid-1830s, islands in Sydney Harbour – including Goat Island, Cockatoo Island, and Pinchgut Island – were used as sites of secondary punishment through hard labour. From 1833 to 1839, convicts on Goat Island quarried a gunpowder magazine, soldiers’ barracks, and a wharf to fortify the harbour. Between 1840 and 1841, convicts levelled the top of the island to build a military fortification on the colony’s first prison, Pinchgut Island (now Fort Denison). On the largest island in the harbour, Cockatoo, convicts spent over a decade from 1847 quarrying a dry dock directly into the sandstone base of the island, and then built and manned the workshops to repair and outfit ships until 1869.

Convicts were sometimes sent to the islands under sentence by magistrates (with powers awarded under the 1830 Offenders’ Punishment and Transportation Act), but more often they were simply transferred from a road gang to an island gang. The Principal Superintendent of Convicts would send convicts deemed dangerous or likely to escape to these islands, which were perceived as sites of increased security despite their proximity to Sydney. In December 1840, for example, a convict found guilty of sexual assault of an Indigenous woman, two convicts suspected of bushranging, and nine convicts who had been re-transported from South Australia were sent to Goat Island (the latter awaiting transfer to Norfolk Island). When John Carroll committed burglary the convicting magistrate recommended that he be punished “at a distance from Sydney, in consequence of […] [his] desperate character”. With this in mind, Governor George Gipps instructed that he be “sent either to Cockatoo or Pinchgut Island”, rather than mainland stockades that were several hundred kilometres distant from the capital. Clearly, officials viewed the islands of Sydney Harbour as both extra-punitive sites and locales for extra-mural convict labour.

In 1837, the British parliament commissioned a Select Committee on Transportation, which was chaired by Sir Henry Molesworth and comprised anti-slavery abolitionists and evangelicals. Based on testimony by a carefully selected set of anti-transportation witnesses, the committee concluded that the Australian convict system was characterized by excessive violence (flogging and chaining) and many forms of vice (including rape, sodomy, and child molestation). When it became clear that convict transportation to New South Wales would likely cease, the former Secretary of State Viscount Howick issued a memorandum with a list of possible destinations for British and Irish convicts – all of them islands. He rejected the Ionian Islands off the coast of Greece, St. Helena in the Atlantic, and the Falkland Islands off the coast of Argentina before settling on Norfolk Island as the best site. This indicates there was a wider British imperial consensus about islands’ suitability as penal colonies, and islands were also favoured as penal colonies in other empires.

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It was incumbent upon Gipps to find a new penal settlement for secondarily transported convicts who needed to be removed from Norfolk Island. However, since convict transportation to New South Wales had ceased, Gipps could no longer transport convicts to penal settlements within the colony, leading him to pass legislation to remove convicts from penal settlements to any “site of hard labour”. Thus, relocation to islands continued, under a different legal sentence, as a regional practice after transportation between the metropole and colony had ceased. In February 1840, Gipps proposed that either Tasman’s Peninsula or King Island in the Bass Strait replace Norfolk Island as “a new penal colony”. However, Governor John Franklin refused to accept secondarily transported convicts within the limits of Van Diemen’s Land. Franklin, for his part, proposed Auckland Island, off the coast of New Zealand. 

In 1841, Lord Russell suggested Goat Island in Sydney Harbour, but Governor Gipps adapted his instructions to send convicts to another harbour island, Cockatoo Island, because it was not safe to send convicts to a “place already occupied by a magazine of gunpowder”. Despite being separated from Sydney’s shore by just a few kilometres, Gipps insisted it was “the place of greatest security within the colony, not actually a prison”. Indeed, Gipps asserted that proximity was preferable to isolation when it came to secondary punishment, claiming that “stations for doubly convicted men, seem to me to have been erroneously placed at great distances from the seat of Government […] [so they] have rarely, if ever, been visited by the Governor of the Colony, or by any person high in authority”. Cockatoo Island, in the midst of Sydney Harbour, was both secure and easy to survey; or, as Gipps put it, Cockatoo Island was “surrounded […] by deep water, and yet under the very eye of authority.”

Over the next five years, secondarily transported convicts were transferred from Norfolk Island to Cockatoo Island under a scheme that more than halved the terms of their remaining sentences. They were joined by the Superintendent of Agriculture, Charles Ormsby, who became Superintendent of Cockatoo Island from 1841. The movement of both the Superintendent and a large body of convicts from one to the other led convict James Laurence to remark that Cockatoo Island was the same as Norfolk Island in every respect, except for the fact that Cockatoo was a “small island”. This marks a decisive shift away from isolation as punishment, which was replaced with hard labour for the public benefit, but with the added value of the security offered by water and walls to keep the felons in. Despite Cockatoo Island’s proximity to Sydney, Godfrey Charles Munday described it as a “natural hulk”, using the same descriptor as Lord Bathurst had for Norfolk Island. 

Long after the majority of secondarily transported convicts had left, and Cockatoo Island effectively operated as a local gaol, it retained its associations with the convict system through its Pacific predecessor. In an 1857 inquiry, Cockatoo Island was dubbed a “worse hell-on-earth even than Norfolk Island”, and Henry Parkes claimed that the superintendent “Mr. Ormsby is so isolated, as much indeed as if he were a thousand miles off in the Pacific”. Despite their clearly opposite geographies in relation to the mainland – the former just one-and-a half kilometres and the other 1,500 kilometres away from Sydney – they were considered comparable due to their insularity. Though from the mid-1830s a clear shift had taken place in favour of proximate urban islands, in the public mind islands were by definition “isolated” – an idea dating back to Robinson Crusoe’s “desert island” (1719), which was further entrenched in the Australian colonies through Norfolk Island’s mythology. This led officials to believe that Australian islands were a better deterrent and were more suitable for the “worst” offenders.”

- Katherine Roscoe, “A Natural Hulk: Australia’s Carceral Islands in the Colonial Period, 1788–1901.” International Review of Social History 63 (2018), p. 53-59.

Image is:  A pair of convicts, known as canary birds because of their colourful though degrading 'punishment' clothes, at work writing letters on Cockatoo Island, Sydney, drawn by Phillipe de Vigors, 1849. State Library of New South Wales SSV/39.