the carceral continuum: controlling, containing, and punishing the poor
1. INTRODUCTION: institutions of sanctioned and unsanctioned abuse
I have been working and doing research in the unhoused community in Tkoronto since around 2009. During this time, I have often heard residents compare shelters to prisons, both folx with, and without prison experience.
During the making of the experimental documentary, We Want You To Listen: Shelter Video Project, the Stanford Prison Experiment was raised in discussion as relevant to shelter residents’ experience. In 1971, lead researcher, Philip G. Zimbardo and his assistants set up a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology department. An ad was put in a local newspaper calling for male participants who were offered the choice of whether they wanted to act the role of prisoner or guard. 24 college students were selected as volunteers. The experiment, meant to last two weeks, was terminated after 5 days because the ‘guards’ became so abusive towards the ‘prisoners’ that the prisoners started to exhibit symptoms of trauma. While controversial, the experiment exposes how abusive practices and relations penetrate deep into the psychological level of those enforcing the institutional hierarchy beyond the punitive containment of the institution itself. For those is the shelter video project, the Stanford Prison Experiment described how shelter authorities hold autocratic power over shelter residents who they disparage, abuse, and stigmatize as lesser. Shelters, understood by the status quo as spaces of ‘care’ are, in many cases, actually punitive spaces of profound de-humanization and trauma where rules are enforced in an arbitrary, infantilizing, and corrupt manner with the constant threat that you will be thrown out onto the street — evicted — if you don’t obey orders.
“Enter that place and see what you come out like because you will not be yourself. You will not be the same person who went in. You will not have the heart and soul that you went in with. You cannot bond in there. You cannot be emotional in there. It’s taken as weakness. And you get warnings for that. You're written up for not being strong or nasty. If you're nice, you’re weak. You're just fed to the sharks.” (Anonymous)
What the Stanford Prison Experiment describes bears out in a plethora of accounts of torture, sexual abuse, experimentation, and murder within institutions mandated with the ‘care’ of those individuals and communities who have been denied the ability to care for themselves — those subject to historical and intersecting oppressions resulting in impoverishment. Historical examples of such institutions include reservations and residential schools across so-called Canada, the Huronia Regional Centre and other institutions for those with intellectual disabilities, and orphanages run by the Catholic church such as Mount Cashel. Each of these non-prison sites are surrounded by unmarked graves of those who were used, abused, and then made to die in order to hide the real crimes of a society that produced such institutions and the people who ran them — leaving aside the larger social crimes behind how folx came to require ‘care’ in the first place.
And institutional abuse continues. At the time of this writing, there was a scandal in the news surrounding a private foster-care company in Ontario who is abusing Indigenous youth. In another case, staff at a private company in the US contracted to care for unaccompanied migrant children have perpetrated systemic sexual abuse.
Institutions are both social structures of sanctioned abuse, as well as sites where unsanctioned abuse flourishes.
Alongside the Shelter Video Collective (Tkoronto), community based groups such as the Disability Justice Network of Ontario (Hamilton) and Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing (LA) have been applying a carceral analysis to institutional sites such as long-term care, psychiatric institutions, and social housing. Knowledge producers (community members, activists, and researchers) have also written about the carcerality of the reserve, refugee camps, the ghetto, gated communities, foster care, psychiatric institutions, the family, and more.
This writing lays the ground for a broad analysis of the diverse non-prison institutional sites of carcerality as connected by a logic emanating from the prison at the centre. While prisons are understood to be punishment for ‘crime,’ many other institutions contain, control, and punish those who have been convicted of no crime. It is popularly stated that it is the ‘crime’ of being poor for which those subject to institutionalization, both prison and non-prison, are paying — despite the condition of poverty being an essential function of colonial/capitalism. Poor people are criminalized for their survival strategies, their culture, their very presence in public space, and for their expression of social, historical, and personal trauma. The ongoing trauma of being stigmatized, and stereotyped, and utterly excluded by the whole society you live in. Belonging is a basic human need.
In this writing, I argue that the carceral continuum constitutes a permanent war on the intersectional poor (or lumpen) in the service of a plutocratic class fueled by the successes of neo-liberal austerity in enhancing their wealth to grotesque proportions. Such a system that deploys multiple levels of carceral force throughout society against its ‘Others’ and in service of a plutocracy aligned in this historical period with colonial/capitalist white-supremacy, can only be described as fascist.
2. A carceral society
In response to the critical lived experience analysis of those in the Toronto shelter system with whom I work, I have taken up the concept of the carceral continuum proposed by Foucault (1979) who sought to understand how the state acts to “discipline and punish” society into conformity through the development of a spectrum of institutions for which the prison provides the logic including: asylums and hospitals as well as the factory, monasteries, the army, and the school. While Foucault noted that the institutions that make up society seek to control the social body as a whole, it is clear that they impact different social strata differently: some institutions seek to reproduce the “docile” working and middle-class while at the same time, other institutions act as vehicles of elite privilege for the rulers of society. And of course, there are the institutions that I am speaking about here which exist to contain, control and punish the poor. This way, institutions operate together as a sorting mechanism that stratifies society into a class hierarchy with the very poor falling outside class relations of colonial-capitalist production and into the sub-class of the intersectional poor, or “lumpen.” On the abstract level, there are similarities in the way that institutions are carceral across class: they all have rules and punishments for breaking them, they all try to produce a subject who is compliant enough to the colonial/capitalist power arrangement to not vitally threaten it. At the same time, it is important to look at the diverse dimensions of the carceral critically and relationally, meaning through the lens of those most directly and materially harmed — that being the intersectional poor or lumpen.
In this writing, I focus on the carceral continuum as what Wacquant refers to as the "carceral management of poverty." Furthermore, I understand poverty itself to be a result of plutocratic control against ‘the people’ which uses various tactics from outright war, political, ideological and economic attack, policing, and institutionalization, to everyday forms of stigmatization and exclusion against targeted identities.
3. A historical context: the emergence of settler/bourgeois dominance
The historical origins of the carceral continuum reveal its core purpose: to enforce the racial colonial/capitalist plutocracy which depends on private property and wage-labour relations.
The carceral continuum arises through the advent of capitalism in Europe and in those nations subject to colonization and the trade in enslaved peoples. In the early capitalist period in Europe, an aristocratic (and then bourgeois) movement of legal reforms enclosed the commons thereby alienating peasants from their traditional access to Land where they grazed animals and collected wood, foods, medicines, and other resources of nature used for survival. The bourgeois theorists of capitalism asserted that Lands used for small peasant subsistence economies were ‘waste’ and asserted that private ownership facilitated greater production and, most importantly, profit. Enforcement of enclosures included the setting of “man-traps” in forests and fields and other corporal punishments for “stealing” what was once freely accessed. In order to avoid destitution, peasants were forced to adapt to wage-labour within the new profiteering systems of industrialized agriculture and factory production.
Concurrently, European powers set out to colonize nations around the world. The Papal Bull called the Doctrine of Discovery claimed white superiority as the basis for Land theft. European whites imposed their foreign idea of ‘terra nullius’ to characterize Indigenous Lands as empty for the taking while also framing Indigenous subsistence practices as ‘waste.’ The Western notion of private property was used to justify the protracted violent and legalized process of theft of Indigenous Lands and resources, the terrorizing and genocide of peoples, and the criminalization of a people and their culture through law and war. Over time, genocide against Indigenous peoples facilitated white settlement while indentureship, enslavement and the exploitation of women were used to occupy and profitably develop the Land.
A white supremacist system of racial capitalism — also understood as colonial/capitalism — was executed within the letter of Western law set up specifically to secure and protect settler/bourgoeis property rights. Seized Lands were commodified into the profit system as private-property held exclusively by privileged individuals and corporations, or as public property and ‘crown lands’ controlled by the government. The only commodity left to the landless poor ever after is their labour. Wage-labour is normalized as the only way a person can legally survive. This arrangement serves the owners of property: the employer, company shareholders, and the banks who profit from the exploitation/ extraction of labour, and the government who collects and redistributes taxes.
The emergence of colonial/capitalism in Europe marks the replacement of aristocratic power by the bourgeoisie: a white-cis-hetero-patriarchal-ablist-citizen subject who claims superiority, not only against it’s colonial Others, but also against its poor members subject to racial and ablist tropes that drive the eugenic core of the white supremacy project. The bourgeoisie normativized its self-interests and self-centred value system while presenting the illusion of a common liberation by democratic principles. I refer to this subject as the settler/bourgeois subject in the context of so-called Canada.
Settler/Bourgeois economic power is gained through an ecocidal, extractive (of resources and labour) market fundamentalist economic ideology — what I call monetary fundamentalism — the belief and practice that money mediate all relations and is the measure of all value. A monetary fundamentalist society is plutocratic — that is, a society ruled by the wealthy. The greater the power of the plutocracy to accumulate wealth, the greater is the disenfranchisement of the people, their impoverishment, and thus, struggle. The greater the wealth divide, the more entrenched and violent carceral society becomes.
Poverty is a war on ‘the people’ who are historically configured as the source of wealth and not the beneficiaries of natural abundance.
4. To be made poor, to be made lumpen
As mentioned in my previous essay, the strata of poor people existing largely outside the official wage relation structure is referred to derogatorily by Marx and Engels as the ‘lumpen.’ The lumpen should be understood as an intersectional category made up of peoples impacted by historical oppressions: disabled, Indigenous, Black, people of color (BIPOC), trans, gender non-conforming and queer folx, migrants, refugees, and women are vastly over-represented within the social strata experiencing poverty and lumpen economic realities. Being an Elder is also a category of social exclusion and disposability and being a youth is to be suspect — will that vital young energy be harnessed by the system or will the youth fight the establishment of their elders? Disability is one of the main intersectional identities of the lumpen, those whose embodiments do not conform to the normative competitive and efficiency demands of wage-labour.
“My mind couldn’t handle it. I broke, I had so many layers of thoughts, walls, protecting me. Homelessness, and the human nature I’d seen at its worst, ate through every layer, every boundary I had established like a caustic acid poured into my thought patterns. I wish I could have just run away. Get a job, control my path, but being on disability prevented that option. Not enough funds for the disabled to change one iota of their existence. The discarded and useless to politicians and the elite” (Michael Eschbach, Displacement City, 68)
Without access to land and resources, those who cannot or will not sell their labour are put in a position to become dependent on the welfare state, private charity, and/or criminalized means of survival. The lumpen are seen to be a ‘burden’ on the dominant economy for collecting meagre government issued support payments and for the cost of their institutionalization. In this relational dynamic, the lumpen are constructed as without class standing, without agency, autonomy, or political representation. They have no right to exist and no place in society where they are safe from continual eviction. The extreme social exclusion experienced by the lumpen is evidenced by the recent Grants Pass Supreme Court decision that makes it possible for municipalities to criminalize sleeping on public property even when you have no housing. Currently, the Ontario government is planning to pass a bill that allows the use the notwithstanding clause by municipalities in order to remove encampments from public space even though shelters are full and there is nowhere near enough social housing. Alongside attacks on Overdose Prevention Sites, threats of increasing criminalization of public drug use, forced treatment, and minimizing safe supply access, attacks on encampments is the clearest expression of class society’s desire for poor people to die.
The eradication of poor people, their communities, and spatial inhabitation — without solving the issue of poverty (overthrowing colonial/capitalism) — is taken for granted. The lumpen are configured as pure problem, as excess, disposable, as without the right to live.
The lumpen form a ‘constitutive outside,’ those against whom the settler-bourgeois norm is defined. In other words, the normative subject is formed by the denial or excising of its Other. The body marked as Other is deemed abject, monstrous, guilty, amoral, degenerate, lazy, criminal as opposed to the normative law abiding, wage labouring, tax paying, able bodied, consumerist, possessive citizen of the status quo. Perpetuating a false binary, the normative body becomes rigid in defense of it’s own inherent biological vulnerability, the ethical failures of its toxic privileges, the decimation of the planet required to maintain class society’s expected standard of living, it’s bigotry and poor-bashing attitudes, and misguided allegiance to the racist colonial/capitalist power system. The normative subject seeks to be always market ready and safe from poverty because, as unhoused community members often say: “anyone can become homeless.”
In order to keep society under the illusion that their captivity within this deadly economic system is their freedom, the constitutive outside, the lumpen, must be relegated to the ‘hidden abode,’ denied a legitimate social presence, kept out of public view, their knowledge subjugated, their critical voices silenced, their political subjecthood denied. The lumpen live in a state of eviction from status quo society.
Keep in mind that, despite the stigma faced by the unwaged, not having an officially waged j.o.b does not mean that the lumpen don’t work. It’s an incredible amount of work being poor, accessing basic necessities, hustling for a bit of money, jumping through institutional hoops, and navigating an ineffective social services system. Everything is more expensive when you are poor. Beyond making ends meet, poor people also have a vast network of survival practices that includes: re-distributing food, clothes, illicit and pharma medicines, tents and gear; communicating vital information; doing harm reduction and first aid; giving support and protection to disabled and elderly folx; sharing love, care, friendship, culture, street justice, and wisdom. And this is not to mention the ethical work of holding society accountable for the harms it perpetrates through impoverishment. All of this while surviving and negotiating significant past and current trauma and the lateral violence that attend scarcity within a rich society.
Poor people must do the work of social workers who are often underpaid, improperly-trained, and without the resources to do their jobs effectively due to neoliberal austerity. Social workers are beholden to rules and regulations, police collaboration, and medical, government, and court systems that make social work carceral.
5. carceral continuum: a system of transformation
The socially constituted role of the lumpen then is as fodder for the institutions that make up the carceral continuum at it’s bottom end. Foucault described the dispersal of institutions across the social landscape as a “carceral archipelago” evoking the image of a series of islands in a sea of non-carceral society, each island in the archipelago being a discrete physical building of confinement. Chartrand notes that “[d]uring this period, often referred to as the ‘great incarceration,’ populations were divided through the development of political and economic standards, moral regulations, cultural norms, and social divisions based on what was considered acceptable, reasonable, rational, or necessary” (676-7). Alongside the prison, the early landscape of institutions included poor houses and work houses, debtors prison, orphanages, asylums, sanatoriums, training schools, homes for unwed pregnant people, and hospitals. With the archipelago metaphor, we can understand institutions as similar to each other and to the prison.
Foucault made another important observation by saying that “the frontiers between confinement, judicial punishment and institutions of discipline...tended to disappear and to constitute a great carceral continuum”(297). Foucault, noted that bodies easily moved from one type of institution to the other, from orphanage to poor house to prison to hospital. A contemporary example from these Lands is my dear friend, artist and community member, Marlene Bluebird Stickings, who moved from Big Grassy reserve to foster care under the 60’s scoop, to school, to psychiatric ward, to prison, to the shelter, to social housing, to sheltered workshop, to rehab, to hospital, to palliative care. During her lifetime, Marlene never had a waged job, she collected disability and worked hard to build community despite all the traumas and troubles she endured as a Ojibwe lesbian. Since the emergence of the modern prison was imbricated with this plethora of other institutions for the poor, these institutions cannot be so easily separated from each other. We can understand that, as a continuum, carceral institutions actually work together for the greater purpose of subjugating, oppressing poor people, and thus producing the lumpen.
This new era of discipline sought to “correct, reclaim, ‘cure,’” to offer “a technique of improvement” within the context of the institution in accordance with the Enlightenment’s scientific and rationalist view of the human body and mind, of behavior, sexuality, and the techniques of experimentation and treatment. Goffman comments that “total institutions,” such as the asylum, were constructed as “the forcing houses for changing persons; each is a natural experiment on what can be done to the self”(12). While the catch word, “rehabilitation,” means a restoration of functioning in a context of care and treatment for an injury, in a carceral setting it represents a hollow and abusive practice that ‘treats’ the individual as if the problems with their functionality are personal instead of structural. One former prisoner, teacher, and activist, Cathee Porter, refers to prison rehabilitation as “re-programming” in that a dominant power is subjecting an individual to a set of non-negotiable rules, disciplines, standards, regulations, expectations, ideological points of view, and behavioural demands backed by punishment. The prisoner is never allowed to be more than their ‘crime’ and thus is never truly allowed back into society.
“I think it’s the power differential of the people in these systems, and the people who run these spaces. The power differential especially, but what makes them carceral? oversight, oversight, you're looked at all the time, you're always being watched. You're always being thought of as less than and needing to be watched. There's no trust. I shouldn't say ‘no’ as like a definitive term, but trust is minimal. You don't feel empowered. You have to ask for everything. You're over dependent on the system because that is the position that you're put in, like, you can't go get something you need, you have to ask, you have to have somebody do it for you, you know, different things like that are all part of the carceral.” (Cathee Porter, From Shelters to Prison: Resisting the Carceral Continuum, 2022)
Rather than the body being the site of experience, complexity, knowing, and inherent gifts specific to the individual that they contribute to society, instead of considering the right to heal from oppression and trauma, negative stereotypes and stigmas are projected onto the body from a place of normative judgement. The body is seen as a site of extraction and manipulation by dominant forces outside of it. The body is expected to respond accordingly: to accept the coercive rehabilitation paradigm, respect authority, act guilty, succumb to labour discipline, be sober of criminalized substances, be a consumer, pay taxes, aspire to wage labour and property ownership, etc. For instance, in my experience talking with shelter staff, they are most often blatantly ignoring a residents actual lived reality, often of crisis, in favour of judging whether they are following rules and being compliant to authority. At the same time, Toronto shelter residents commonly complain that effective support and resources to be able to even attain a modicum of stability just do not exist. However, the punitive function of institutions works very well and replaces the claimed purpose of providing supports and resources as the dominant dynamic between the institution and those who live in them. The prevailing social attitude is that the poor are pitiful, undeserving, should feel lucky with whatever they get, and shouldn’t complain or advocate for their rights. Personhood must be erased in order to extract a compliant subject. The actions involved in erasing personhood includes both the normal functioning of the institution, as well as, systemic corruption by the ‘keepers’ of the institution (as described in the Stanford Prison Experiment). This multi-tiered punitive approach results in a chaotic violence meted out on the lumpen in the institutional context.
Ultimately, the institutions of the carceral continuum work together to promote the settler/bourgeois fantasy of transforming those who have fallen out of wage-labour back into compliant exploitable workers — a misguided project irrelevant to the political-economic realities and history of the lumpen as a social strata produced by impoverishment.
7. The Persistence of Corporal Punishment
Foucault proposed that “rehabilitation” as a disciplinary technique used within the prison marked a departure from the historical use of corporal punishment in the form of torture and execution. This shift in the mode of punishment is said to have coincided with the early onset of capitalism and its rationalist, ‘liberal democratic’ political apparatus from the 16th century towards the development of the modern prison. Foucault’s analysis is important, however, his assertion of a transition from corporal punishment to rehabilitation is not completely accurate. We know that colonial/capitalism was born “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” In the colonial context Indigenous peoples, not considered to be part of “modernity’s advancements,” have, and continue to be, subject to ongoing genocide, eugenics, containment on reserves, sexual and physical abuse in residential schools, hyper incarceration, police violence, and by the many control mechanisms of the Indian Act and corrupt treaty process. Doreen Manuel describes the residential school as a place of systematic rape, torture, and murder. Manual reveals the carcerality of the residential school as she recalls visiting her siblings many of whom were kidnapped: “it was like visiting somebody in prison, the way my mom and I were treated as they brought us in there, and the visit was supervised. And then we left. And when they came out of there, they were different than when they went in.”
Whereas African peoples were also kidnapped and subject to unimaginable violence and mass death during the Atlantic crossing. This, followed by subjection to chattel slavery, lynching, torture, and segregation. While white people are at least said to “own their own labour,” the labour of Black Americans and many Indigenous people was owned by the white man under the terrorist economics of settler colonialism.
This white supremacist history of corporal punishment and death dealing persists throughout the reformist Victorian era and into the present of police and civilian murder and hyper-incarceration of Black and Indigenous peoples in both the US and (so-called) Canada, especially of those who are also disabled and poor.
The carceral continuum of institutions described by Foucault are founded on, and continue to be sustained by corporal violence: threatening physical pain and endangering life not only to extract compliance, but just because. Ferguson (4) points out that “abusive custodialism” has become the manner in which poor people are to be contained and that institutions themselves “are calculated to be inhumane.” What I witness in my work with shelter residents in Toronto is that relational violence is the order of the day: unhoused folx are subject to, not just lack of supports, but traumatization and neglect leading to the development or exacerbation of health issues and early death. As well as psycho-emotional provocation, harassment, and physical aggression by shelter staff, security and police that leads to being kicked out of the shelter. Folk then, have to survive the more dangerous conditions of street living, criminalization, and police violence. The carceral logic isn’t just one of containing, controlling, and punishing poor people, it’s also about scarcity, overflow, constant eviction, and death. The intersectional poor/lumpen live in a fluxing state of lesser or greater contingent threat from civic governments, police, the public, the shelter system, and each other.
Institutions for the intersectional poor/lumpen exist in a dialectic relation where, on the one hand, they cost money to taxpayers they’d rather keep for themselves vs. the private contracts, research, disciplinary function, and jobs that they provide as an institutional industrial complex. The physical institutions themselves never manage to contain or treat all the unmanageable poor considered a nuisance to society; thanks to neoliberalism, there is not enough social housing, shelter beds, ops sites, detox or rehab beds, not enough medical supplies, food, or schools and so the utter immiseration and death of the poor becomes acceptable: even eviction, exclusion, and being made to die on the streets employ technocratic knowledge, economics, strategies, politicking and labour. Not to mention lack of empathy. With settler-bourgeois society’s claims to moral ascendancy, universal freedom, human-rights, and justice, it becomes important to wash the corporally punitive dimensions of the carceral continuum with a conscience soothing suds of ‘charity,’ ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘care.’
The widespread use of corporally impactful punishment in institutions deserves a proper investigation. It must be understood as an outcome of the inequality and dehumanization of those subject to institutionalization. Considering the fact that if the government put the exorbitant amount of money needed to operate the institutional industrial complex towards the social safety net (raise the rates, housing, healing supports) it would easily solve the issue of poverty, we must realize that maintaining poverty as a punitive social condition has a real purpose to the plutocracy.
8. Carceral Law: the production and reproduction of the lumpen
Laws define and enforce the social structure, that is the class structure, of society. The legal system provides the armature of colonial/capitalist wealth and thus actively creates poverty. A law that is constantly shifting according to its need to: protect private property, the wage-labour relation and family, expand corporate access to resources, and create opportunities for ever increasing profits. The law was set up to establish and maintain settler-bourgeois power during a time when universal enfranchisement didn’t exist. Enfranchisement was limited to property owning white males based on an ideology of superiority. The right to vote has only been extended through often violent struggle. While ‘universal enfranchisement’ has moved closer to being achieved, the democratic system of political representation does not function for poor people. Poor people are not constituents to be listened to or consulted on issues pertaining to their status and role in society. The carceral continuum is a core dimension of the settler/ bourgeois legal system that includes the poor as a management problem, not as political subjects.
“Okay, I think of carceral is anything where you lose your choice. Choices. You lose freedom of movement, freedom of expression, freedom of thinking, and identity. Your identity, your you're not who you are as a person, you are the entity that holds your actions. Like, I'm not C, I'm C, who did blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So, I think anything like that, where you lose who you are, and any sort of choice, any sort of human connection, and I think anywhere where you disappear, because if you're going into prisons, you disappear, you go into the psych wards, you go into shelters like you disappear from mainstream society, you're disappeared, right? People don't have to worry about you anymore.” (Cathee Porter, 2022)
Those for whom the law acts as an instrument of oppression must fight from the outside to have injustices accounted for, however, radical lawyers I have conversed with comment that it is impossible to find justice through legal means and even if you do win a ‘right,’ it’s not implemented in an empowering way. For example, the federal government legislated a National Housing Strategy in order to comply with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the right to housing which states explicitly that housing is not a commodity but a basic need, however, when tested in the Canadian courts, international housing rights are found to be non-binding. Such legal obstruction allows governments to move further in the direction of the financialization of the housing market in line with the interests of capital. Another example is the Black Lives Matter fight for mandatory body cam used by police. Body cam footage has done little to nothing to hold police accountable for violence and murder, while turning out to be very useful against activists.
The legal impoverishment of intersectionally oppressed peoples is tantamount to their relegation to a ‘state of exception’: the suspension of their political identity, enfranchisement, knowledge and experience, legal rights, and their social and spatial inclusion. The law facilitates the refusal of the Canadian Government to uphold international human rights, let alone acknowledging the sacredness of every individual, their existential or species being, their birthright to the life that they are and have. Being in a state of exception means that, on top of facing life threatening state organized injustice backed by state violence, the intersectional poor are criminalized. The fact is that almost a 100% if people in prison are poor and upwards of 20% were homeless at the time of conviction with the risk of return to homelessness elevated after imprisonment. At the same time, those who oppress, immiserate, and murder the intersectional and working poor (including politicians, armies, CEO’s, cops) face little to no consequence effective enough to stop their behaviors.
Law doesn’t just create and frame impoverished life, it is a tool of attack against the people. In the colonial context there is the Indian Act that has been used against Indigenous cultural, economic, political and Land sovereignty practices. Indigenous folx continue to be targeted for practicing and protecting their cultural ways, or even just being on their Lands inside and outside of ‘reserves’ including in urban parks, on privatized property, oceans, lakes, and rivers, and on sites of resource extraction. In the broader non-Indigenous context people are subject to laws against: vagrancy, truancy, sex work, loitering, camping in public space, informal trade, distribution and use of non-pharma medicines, panhandling, squeegying, and many more of the survival strategies poor people must resort to. While courts in BC and Ontario have affirmed the rights of unhoused people to live in public space if there was no shelter space available, this hasn’t stopped the government from egregiously displacing people and looking for other legal mechanisms to persecute the unhoused community.
As stated, the Western legal system directly contravenes the ability of peoples to survive outside a relation of wage-labour exploitation. Settler-bourgeois states have a monopoly on the use of violence and ‘carceral’ techniques and imprisonment to enforce this legal structure. That is to say, carceral techniques are a main tool of law enforcement. As the law protects the freedoms of the privileged, it does so at the expense of the people. The law is an active agent of oppression, pushing people further into the margins and into lumpen lifeways. Thus the Western legal system is both working exactly how it is intended, and is an injustice system, an evolving system of domination and oppression.
A carceral continuum analysis shows how much of the state and its legal framework is dedicated to carceral control of the poor beyond the prison, while maintaining the primary status of the prison as the epicentre of the continuum. The prison represents a highly concentrated form of carceral technique that infiltrates other institutional sites and criminalizes the poor in general. Considering the inter-connectivity of the institutions of the carceral continuum and the failure of law to be anything resembling an ethical and just institution, disrupts the false binary between ‘criminalized’ and ‘innocent’ persons, between ‘deserving’ and ‘underserving poor,’ those consigned to prison and those to the shelter, social housing, detox, foster-care, or reserve. As a structure that actively harms, prevents people from surviving and protects the wealthy, the law needs to be opposed not to be obeyed. Where poor people’s survival is at stake, transgressing the law is a radical act of existence and resistance against society’s wish for your death.
9. Carceral society-relations
As I have attempted to map out, the carceral cuts colonial/ capitalist society through and through. Foucault offers a broadened understanding of the carceral in which “the prison transformed the punitive procedure into a penitentiary technique” and then “the carceral archipelago transported this technique from the penal institution to the entire social body”(298) That is to say that, aside from institutionalization, the carceral infuses our everyday relations in order to reproduce the greater structure of colonial/capitalism.
LeBaron and Roberts propose that carceral society is marked by hierarchical and unfree relations that are “conditioned by states, markets, and households” and “tend to be directed at the lower classes and particularly at lower-class women, certain racial minorities, and migrants” which “increasingly involves both the penalization of poverty and long-term confinement within it”(21). Unfree relations are those that involve direct and indirect forms of coercion, that is, for instance, indirect coercion via wage-labour and debt as well as direct physical policing and incarceration of those who transgress the wage-relation. As Piven and Cloward note: “Since coercive force can be used to gain control of the means of producing wealth, and since control of wealth can be used to gain coercive force, these two sources of power, tend to be drawn over time into one ruling class”(1). which is to say: coercive power is an essential ingredient of the colonial/capitalist state, making colonial/capitalism itself the root of carcerality, which then extends out into the various control mechanisms that produce docility and conformity society wide as well as exclusion of the Other as the constitutional outside relegated to a state of exception.
If democracy, meant to signal the agency of the people in a free society, is supposed to be the people’s recourse against economic violence and authoritarianism, it must be suppressed. Democracy and colonial/capitalism are in contradiction: agency v. coercion. In an actual democracy, governments would account for the livelihood needs of every person through the nurturing of agency and autonomy as opposed to a dictatorship of the needs of capital. This perspective understands that hierarchies are produced, not by nature, but by some humans over the people. Constructed hierarchies will always produce contradiction and thus freedom struggles. Freedom is an ancient knowing, it is in our bones.
10. The Carceral Continuum as a sorting mechanism
As mentioned by Foucault, the carceral continuum includes both those institutions that contain, control and punish the poor (work houses and asylums), as well as, those that produce the official classes (factories and schools). This leads me to conceive of the carceral continuum, on the everyday level, as a kind of sorting mechanism that channels individuals into different class positions. For instance, the systems of family, education, jobs, finance, private property, and other institutions enable one to access and build on privilege as long as one conforms to institutional rigours. Diverse institutions sort people into those who design, build, maintain, and profit from the carceral system, as opposed to those who are being contained, controlled and punished by it. That is, the carceral continuum works on a reward/punishment mechanism: reward for those who comply, punishment for those who fail to comply. However, reward for compliance differs according to social standing: the reward a poor person will receive for their compliance is relief from additional punishment — aside from the institutionalization they already endure. No matter how hard you try, unwaged poverty is a downward slide. While the reward that a working or middle class person receives is greater consumer power and moral authority. The person who manages to access even more elite privileging institutions will receive economic and political power - not by voters, but by the plutocratic establishment — power that resolves into coercive power, the power to demand compliance by force of police, security, and military and to violate the basic human rights of the lumpen and the poor.
Structures that determine how privilege is attained and maintained arise out of historical oppression. As stated, alienation from Land during the early period of colonial/capitalism is the initial moment from which access to material needs/wants are to be recouped through adhering to carceral attitudes, relations, and structures of private property and wage-labour. Market relations driven by the ‘self-interested’ actions of individuals taken out of its abstract theoretical context and placed in real life, becomes the banality of evil.
Foucault wrote that modern society consists of: “the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge”(304). Rather than using the position of ‘judge’, I prefer to liken those who enforce the continuum to ‘guards’: the teacher-guard, the doctor-guard, the investment banker-guard, the landlord-guard ... even the judge can be seen as a ‘guard.’ Let’s bring them down from on high, from the esteemed location of the technocrat of the so-called justice system and into the trenches of the daily injustice and oppression they perpetrate. And I would also add the social worker-guard, the gentrifier-guard, the academic-guard, and the citizen-guard. In the most diffuse sense, much of the so-called law-abiding status quo of class society - are also ‘guards’ in some way. Even in progressive communities, the tendency to ‘police’ and punish each other enters into relational dynamics. Carcerality can be understood to have the purpose of reproducing the normative neo-liberal subject - the ‘hard working,’ morally superior, normative, individualist who adheres to the marketization of their lives and relations. Privileges within carceral society come from reproducing it. Compliance to carceral relations comes at the cost of your ethical freedom and is ultimately undercut by the constant threat of losing ones class status and thus, being sorted into punitive poverty. Unhoused community members have often said to me that “anyone can become homeless.”
“You cannot tell how you will behave when you're sleep deprived and hungry. When your belly is full, and you're living in a comfortable home it's easy to say, well, I certainly wouldn't have found myself in that situation. Rather than people wanting to help me pick up the pieces and build another life, it was as though people wanted to punish me for not behaving as they believe they would have in a similar situation.” (Shirley Berry)
In this sense, we can see the class arrangement differently from a lumpen perspective: the ‘official classes’ of working, middle, and bourgeois, elites or plutocrats that sit atop the intersectional, landless, wageless poor who do not have class standing. In carceral terms, class society, or the ‘official classes’ are those who are working to access privilege and power within the legal system and thus through carceral means versus those who are fodder for the carceral continuum. Simply put, this means there is a dialectic, a historical contradiction, a conflict in liberatory interests between the lumpen and the ‘official classes.’
11. poverty as a weapon of war
I propose that poverty itself should be understood as a weapon used against the people in our inherent expectation for the equity and liberation that arises out of our very ‘species being.’ We see this with the Late Victorian man made famines in which 10’s of millions died under the watch of the British empire and their experiments with laissez-fair capitalism in India, Asia, and South America. Such impoverishment strategies persist with the present day sanctions against nations whose governments are not allied with the West, such as Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Afghanistan, and Syria. And of course, there is Palestine and Lebanon where the autonomy of nations and peoples from western colonial/capitalist domination is punished by the destruction of livelihood.
The theory of bio/necro politics tells us that we live in a society that enhances the privileged lives of those who conform to the settler/bourgeois value structure of colonial/capitalism and puts at risk the lives of those who are made poor through its normal functioning. The necro- side of this equation describes the trauma and ultimately the death that constitutes a persistent eugenic drive to cleanse society of the ‘undeserving poor,’ sometimes one body at a time, sometimes en masse: opioid crisis to missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and 2Spirit people. From Turtle Island to Palestine to the seas of the southern European coast and the US Mexico border. Theorist have written about ungrievable bodies, bodies whose value must be erased before they can be killed. Projects that grieve the ungrievable such as the homeless deaths memorial are so important to restoring the species being of those whose death is desired.
The carceral continuum and its institutions for the poor (prisons, residential schools, refugee camps, detention centres, shelters, social housing, foster care… and the list goes on) are an integral aspect of this war on the people.
12. Rebellion
The white-supremacist historical structure of social exclusion gives rise to liberal movements for inclusion in a greater distribution of wealth, as well as more radical freedom seeking movements (who understand that the liberal approach is based on incomplete privileged understandings) that want to overthrow colonial/capitalism and its hierarchies. Led by IBPOC, disabled, queer, gender rebels, trans, and poor people, migrants, women and accomplices means that these same groups and their distinct cultures, needs, and desires are configured as enemy of the status quo of colonial/capitalism.
The best efforts of the carceral continuum to produce docility flounder when economic, climate, and other crises inevitably hit hard. The marginalized of society and our allies are forced to rise up to hold the state and its various actors, branches, associates, and interests accountable for their ethical failures, their failure to live up to their own legal standards, policies, fairness, and justice claims. Activism is simply the recourse people take when we are disenfranchised from the political process and excluded from public discourse, when the oppression and suffering we experience is ignored. Those who protest the system are only supposed to do so within the limited rights to assembly and self-expression defined within the Charter of Rights as set up and continually honed through legal processes by the state. In the so-called democratic state context, room is made for protest but the state is under no obligation to integrate the social critiques that protesters are trying to advance, and thus rarely do. The struggle of the Grassy Narrows people is a case in point. The Ojibwe community, poisoned by the release of ten tons of mercury by a papermill upstream from their water source, have been protesting for decades with little substantial action on the part of the government to make reparations for the devastating harms to the health of the community or respect for their rejection of further industrialization of their Land. The governments’ true genocidal intent is revealed by its funding of hospice facilities for those suffering mercury poisoning: the government will not support the Grassy Narrows people in life, but will ‘help’ them suffer and die. Industries spring up to study issues, theorize, make recommendations, and perhaps propose some minor reforms as a response with little to no actual change on the ground. Mostly, governments appropriate the justice language generated in resistant communities to ‘wash’ their image and hide their violence, such as with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In the case of the Toronto shelter system, after the decades long fight for adequate shelters and housing in Toronto the city’s rhetoric gets more liberal as the condition of unhoused lives worsen.
While the intersectional poor, as the constitutional outside of settler/bourgeois society, are stigmatized and stereotyped as a collection of pitiable failures not worth listening to, we remain as a simmering threat to the state and society. We are constructed in the social imagination as an amoral mob to be feared. The poor must be kept in conditions of constant displacement, incarceration, trauma, immiseration, toxification, and stigmatization in order to silence our critical voices which threaten to expose the utter ethical failure of the colonial/capitalist state. The poor must not have access to public discourse, space, solidarity, and resources for resistance. Poverty must be exponentially hard in all social dimensions.
When one calls out carceral society, speaks truth to power, rebels, refuses to take part or be disciplined, tries to build communities towards a just future, one is targeted and criminalized. For instance, the government attack on Overdose Prevention Sites, a strategy developed completely outside of legal regulations by the drug user community and health advocates to address the overdose crisis related to toxic supply. The hardest possible work done to save lives in community is seen as a threat because it represents the agency of drug users to organize and demonstrate what a liberated poor people’s community looks like. Now, the community praxis of overdose prevention will have to go back into the criminalized margins doing the work that the government and carceral society refuses to do to keep drug user communities alive while also surviving the carceral attack of forced drug treatment by governments. Criminalizing community activists is the historical pattern of how the state shuts down the efforts of those it victimizes and their allies to seek justice. This is the one directional power arrangement of carceral society.
For this reason, many feel there is no recourse except to step outside of state controlled protest by taking up forms of direct action that purposely ignore the laws that prevent actual justice. Activists struggling against oppression and for liberation are subject to increased levels of policing. The RCMP puts Indigenous Land Defenders on a list of “threats” to Canadian society which then justifies surveillance, special police units, risk of police murder, and prison sentences for those asserting their sovereignty. Worldwide, states manoeuvre anti-terror laws against liberation movements and people’s armies, and more recently, in the context of the Canadian supported Israeli genocide against Palestinians, the use of hate crime laws and special policing tables that target pro-Palestine activists. The terror of the state is protected while the resistance against state terror is criminalized.
13. Neoliberalism and fascism: the carceral core of colonial/capitalism emerges
Attacks on our communities and liberatory labour are expanded under the current rise of the right in governments globally. Trump saying out loud that he is going to target the “enemy within” indicates that the New Right movement is emboldened in its counter-revolution against the gains achieved by the liberation struggles brought on by the onset of colonial/capitalism until the early 1980’s. Neoliberalism — a return to the foundational myth of classical economics that purports that the free market provides for the greatest individual liberty — has achieved a massive transfer of wealth from the people and the planet to the plutocratic class in the context of historically existing hierarchies of embodiment.
Alongside the acceleration of climate change, advanced neoliberalism is increasing pressure between states and their corporate puppet masters, and the people surviving them. Over the past few decades, governments have been doubling down on austerity and withdrawing resources from the social safety net, meant to offset the cyclical crisis impacts of the market on the people, and bolstering the carceral security state. Such an approach demands the dampening of liberal empathy within both welfare services culture and the public which exposes the raw punitive logics of the carceral continuum in managing the effects of impoverishment, criminalized survival economies, aggravation of trauma and the inevitable resistance that grow in opposition to capital’s progressive immiseration of the people.
The current rise in fascism in the world today reflects the economically violent core of classical liberal economics as revealed through advanced neoliberalism. As fascism fantasizes about an ethnically and culturally ‘pure’ nation based on eugenics, neoliberalism fantasizes about an economy, under rule of the mythical ‘invisible hand of the market’— that is, unfettered corporate access to resources and economic domination by any means — that is to say, completely divorced from the historical context of actual lives. Both these stated objectives work together for a system of white supremacy imposed on the people. It’s the fantasy of a return to a former time (before the Keynsian welfare state made efforts to create an economic buffer within the crises cycles of colonial/capitalism), when ideas of classical capitalism informed the hateful inhumanity that drove genocidal colonization, the trade in enslaved people, the New Poor Law reforms against welfare, and the Victorian era economic orchestration of famine mentioned earlier. While the logics are presented as purely economic, a hateful rhetoric is necessary to create a dehumanized Other: subject to impoverishment through labour expropriation and exploitation, Land theft, and war; coerced into assimilatation; deemed as disposable excess slated for death; who are undeserving of existence. The Other, cast as enemy to the wealth entitlements of the settler/bourgeois white-cis-hetero-ablist-male subject, is attacked through state, military, police, social, and institutional violence.
The punitive logic of the carceral continuum should be understood to underlie and make colonial/capitalism possible. Carcerality must be seen as the illiberal logic of colonial/capitalism that makes democracy, universal enfranchisement, and liberation from oppression impossible. In all the definitions of fascism that focus on the charismatic authoritarian leader, the militarization of a single party, discriminatory ideology, a return to some idealized past, and a total break with democratic political order, one important dimension that bears mentioning is fascisms’ purpose of maintaining plutocratic power in the age of capitalism: the normatively empowered white-cis-hetero-male-ablist-citizen subject and those who maintain allegiance in order to access privileges. That is, fascism, through a bigotry infused bio/necro political-economics, uses authoritarian techniques in order to control and circumscribe which and how many people are considered deserving of resources, deserving of life. We are all faced with becoming ‘little Eichmanns’ by propping up this fascist death machine through our everyday compromises with carceral society.
After WW II, there was a global consensus to make fascism illegal, which was again acknowledged at the UN in 1984 with resolution 38/99 which it condemns “all totalitarian or other ideologies and practices, in particular Nazi, Fascist and neo-Fascist, based on racial or ethnic exclusiveness or intolerance, hatred, terror, systematic denial of human rights and fundamental freedoms, or which had such consequences.” Ironically, we now see anti-fascist (Antifa) groups, those actually fighting fascism, being broadly discussed as ‘terrorist,’ particularly in the US and the EU. We see the Israeli occupation and genocide of Palestinians being characterized in racist terms as a war against evil. We see the Israeli government and other allied Western states justifying Palestinian genocide and making resistance to it a crime. We see Residential School denialism take hold. This is a function of the same settler/bourgeois ideology that claims workers are ‘free’ to sell their labour, that denies the exploitation and expropriation on which commodity production is based, that convinces people that a consumer life is innocent of the gross harms it really produces. This is the double-think of a colonial/capitalist world system detached from ethical orientation, driving towards escalating violence against those who are already the historical victims of its hate mongering political economic system. And of course, causing mass extinction and climate disaster.
These are all carceral logics of a system that is fascist at its core.
14. In conclusion
In this writing I offer a very broad perspective on the foundational, structural, and historical role of the carceral continuum within a plutocratic colonial/capitalist society driven by a fascist logic laid bare in its neoliberal phase.
From the transition to colonial/capitalism, imperial/bourgeois elites have waged an intentional and calculated permanent war of self-interest on the peoples of the world through coercive state structures, opportunism, and vigilantism. This war is one of widespread impoverishment, disenfranchisement, police, military and border guard brutality, genocide, institutional abuse, incarceration, and trauma. This war constitutes a historical contradiction between the ruling profiteers and the freedom and justice seeking people configured as disposable resource. This war has a death toll. This war has a historical trajectory. This is a war that squelches life in all its vital diversity.
The carceral continuum constitutes a structural dimension of this war, that is, a carceral industrial complex of institutions, services, and relations which fuel markets, provide jobs, facilitate and protect privileges, define and enforce docile normativity, promote a fear based ideology of the Other, and control, contain, and punish rebels and the intersectional poor for their survival strategies.
Carcerality must be understood as an important tool in the theft of wealth in the form of labour power and resources from diverse peoples by the plutocratic class, or what can be understood as the economic violence of wage and private property relations. Calculated to be painful, the unliveable conditions of state organized poverty are spectacularized and weaponized as a threat to working people as to what happens if they don’t conform: a no win situation between the ‘privilege’ of allowing your labour to be exploited vs. the threat of poverty. If neoliberalism has facilitated the extreme accumulation of wealth by a miniscule 1% of the population, then the mass of people must be cut out of wealth at the same time as being made to be amenable with producing it.
Such an elitist power configuration based on privilege is energized by hatefullness and violence towards intersectionally oppressed peoples and especially towards the unwaged landless lumpen who exist outside of class and in historical contradiction with class society itself. The lumpen are configured as the fodder for the de-privileging side of the carceral industrial complex in juxtaposition to those who are trying to survive and access privileges through it.
With the state’s monopoly on violence through military organizations abroad and legal systems (courts, prison, policing, and security guards) domestically, the function of the carceral continuum is to maintain the fascist core of colonial/capitalist society. A fascist core which is historically continuous within colonial/capitalism and has recently been exposed again through through the rise of the ‘new right’ world wide and its neoliberal carceral strategies.
Plutocratic power has been planning and organizing for decades against the Left movement to redistribute resources and democratize society. Now Trump is overtly stating that he will do away with elections and gut the state and is installing people such as Elon Musk in a position of financial power signalling a new level of plutocratic extremism. And then there’s Pete Hegseth as head of the Department of Defense whose objective is to fight ‘the enemy within’ — a failed project, to be sure, but the duration of which will bring a lot of material and embodied suffering and anguish to diverse resistant communities. Further statements by Trump threaten territorial expansion in order to protect the dominance of the US dollar by military means if necessary.
I don’t believe that the plutocratic structure will change with the latest iteration of the new right that is currently attacking the ‘liberal’ corporate class. Regardless of which faction of the right gains control, they will increase investment in the carceral continuum in order to maintain plutocratic state power. They will continue to advance a white-supremacist and eugenic agenda that involves criminalizing the survival strategies of the intersectional poor and activists who try to hold society accountable to even socially adopted ethical positions and internationally recognized human rights values. Those of us who are working for radically different futures that realize deeper, more real forms of universal liberation will be increasingly cast as ‘terrorists.’
This article places carceral continuum theory within broader structures and histories of oppression and liberation struggles. For sure, a more nuanced analysis on many aspects is needed. Most importantly, this carceral continuum analysis represents an effort to analyze society in its current moment from the standpoint of the lumpen or intersectional poor. Besides offering a radically different analysis, a lumpen standpoint also asserts a political identity of the poor which is under theorized and yet integral to understanding the world we live in. One that I believe is gravely needed in order to face history and deepen the struggle for liberation.
