The Carceral Continuum

1. Coming to the carceral continuum

As someone who has worked within communities in the context of urban impoverishment, communities who face the realities of institutional violence across different sites from homeless shelters, social housing, and prison to the street, I have taken up the concept of the carceral continuum. I was also prompted to take up this work in response to discussions had in the context of the video project, We Want You To Listen: The Shelter Video Project, where folx with lived expertise of the shelter system within a gentrifying context likened it to prison.

The carceral continuum was first proposed by Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish (1979) that looked at the demise of corporal punishment and the rise of institutions such as prisons, hospitals, poorhouses and asylums, with prison constituting the penultimate carceral logic. Foucault (1979) first described the dispersal of institutions across the social and physical 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.

Foucault (1979, 297) also wrote that “the frontiers between confinement, judicial punishment and institutions of discipline...tended to disappear and to constitute a great carceral continuum.”   Importantly, Foucault understood that as the carceral flows from one space to another that “people (…) [also] easily move from one of these institutions to another” (300-301). Furthermore, Foucault points out how society itself has become “disciplinary” and that “social regulation operating within prisons have spread across institutions into the very fabric of society” (Allspach 2010, 708-9).

In a contemporary context, I understand the continuum as being made up of a diverse range of institutions which manage and contain intersectionally oppressed folx (those experiencing multiple, instersecting oppressions of gender, race, Indigeneity, disability, class and sexuality, Otherness etc) who are often unwaged, unhoused, and criminalized. In my activist work experience, I have witnessed how people tend to move from one institution to another, or may be involved with several institutions at once. For instance my good friend and collaborator, Marlene Rita Bluebird Stickings (Ojibway, Big Grassy) was born on reserve, was apprehended by the state during the sixties scoop, ended up in foster care, then, from the trauma she experienced at a young age, she ended up in a psychiatric institution, from there she did a short bit in prison, then moved to a shelter, got onto Ontario Disability Support, from there she got into social housing, worked in a sheltered workshop for people with disabilities, then ended up passing to the spirit world in palliative care. As an Indigenous person, Marlene spent her whole life interacting with institutions within a geography of the carceral continuum.

So how do we trace the history of the carceral continuum and what is its purpose?

2. History

First of all, the carceral continuum arises through the advent of colonial-capitalism (Davis 2003, 43). In the early capitalist period, alienation of common people from the Land occurred in Europe with the brutal movement of enclosures. In the colonies, Indigenous Lands were seized and commodified. Genocide removed Indigneous bodies and slavery was used to profitably develop the Land (Marx 1990). White supremacy and racialized capitalism (Gilmore 2007; Pfingst & Kimari 2021) - what I refer to as colonial-capitalism (Ince 2017) were entrenched in order to enforce a monetary fundamentalist and extractive economic system. 

This brutal history has been executed within the letter of the law set up specifically to secure and protect colonial-capitalist property rights. A law that is constantly shifting according to colonial-capitalist needs (Gilmore 2007; Gordon 2006). Thus the legal system is both working exactly how it is intended, and is an injustice system.

Dispossession from the Land is a key moment when peoples, separated from ‘resources for life,’ all together lose economic agency. Thus as Landless people we are now forced into a wage-labour system to survive (Marx 1990).

However, colonial-capitalism requires a labour surplus, that is a set unemployment rate in order to keep competition for jobs high and wages low. Furthermore, job tasks are defined by the employer and require a specific embodiment; the employee must be able to perform specific tasks at a fast enough rate to be profitable, what Marx (1990) called the abstraction of labour. Thus, many people are cut out of the labour market because of what would then be termed a ‘disability’: being non-normative, elderly and/or non-compliant. 

Furthermore, many jobs are not at all desirable and thus require coercion additional to that of being Landless, such as criminalizing unemployment and poverty, and making poverty painful in general - actually traumatizing. Those folx who are unable and/or resistant to performing available wage-labour become a social strata of poor, unemployable and ‘dependant’ folx that arises as a permanent feature of colonial/capitalism (Marx 1990).

3. The poor = lumpen

This strata of poor people existing outside the wage relation is referred to derogatorily by Marx and Engles (1988) as the ‘lumpen’. And keep in mind here that, despite the stigma faced by the unwaged, not having an official  j.o.b does not mean that one doesn’t work.

The lumpen should be understood as an intersectional category. Indigenous, Black, racialized, gendered, queer and disabled peoples are vastly over-represented within the social strata experiencing extreme poverty. Being an Elder is also a category of social exclusion. As unwaged/unhoused peoples, the lumpen exist outside of capitalist reproduction instead relying on Lumpen life ways and economic agency that are considered transgressive and are often criminalized. Those working in sex services, criminalized substance use and trade, criminalized appropriation (theft), and various other forms of street economy. They are also considered ‘dependent,’ collecting welfare or other government issued support payments (Bourke et al. 2011).

For Indigenous peoples, the legacy of the criminalization of their communal (ie. non-capitalist) life ways, prevented from fishing, hunting, gathering, speaking their language and practicing culture effectively increases the possibility of bringing Indigenous individuals into a social space paralell to that of the lumpen.

The lumpen experience is one of profound oppression and often life threatening trauma. The theory of bio/necro politics tells us that we live in a society that enhances the lives of those who conform to colonial/capitalism and puts at risk the lives of those who are the ‘constitutional outside’ to the wage labour system (Blaney and Inayatullah 2012; Foucault 2003; Mbembe 2003; McIntyre & Nast 2011; Montag 2005). The lumpen then, become fodder for the institutional industry - that is the carceral continuum.

4. History of institutions

Foucault (1979) (see also Ben Mosche et al. 2014; Chapman and Withers 2019) offers a certain kind of institutional history starting with the development of the prison which, in its beginnings, was a catchall for ‘deviants’ and ‘dependents’. The prison was meant to be punitive, a replacement for the aristocratic system of corporal punishment and death sentence by torture.  

Later, the prison was diversified into a multitude of differing institutions according to the paradigm of scientific diagnosis and rehabilitation of the ‘criminal, ‘insane,’ queer, disabled, sick, vagrant, Indigenous, unemployed etc… (Ben Moshe et al. 2014; Chapman and Withers 2019).

For example, Indigenous peoples have been consigned to reservations, residential schools, foster care and prison. Disabled and mad peoples have been consigned to hospitals and residential institutions where they have been subject to medical experimentation and eugenics. Unmarried pregnant women have been put in homes for wayward girls. Delinquent girls put in training schools. With the so called movement for “de-institutionalization,” disabled folx are now over represented in prisons. Disabled Black folx are also subject to police murder. 

Joe Clayton: Yeah you have to listen. There’s fear. A little boy at 13 or 12 and a half years old. You have the fear of the staffs. Every morning you get up at 7 o’clock in the morning and your bed is stripped. And you have to make it. And if you don’t make it, you’ll do it all day if you have to. And they’d throw a bucket of water if you don’t wake up in your bed. I was shock treated. They said they were going to give me a brain test, but it wasn’t a brain treatment. It was shock treatment.

Invisible Institutions, Episode 1: Rideau Regional Centre & the History of Institutionalization in Canada, Megan Linton, 2022.

Each of these sites are among those, that have similar controls and work together to manage unruly bodies.

Historically speaking, corporal punishment did not disappear with the rise of the institution meant to replace it. For example, variously Othered, Indigenous, Black, Queer and disabled bodies were slated for death by genocide, war and lynching and other forms of racialized/colonial retribution and violence (Gilmore 2007). While Asian bodies were considered disposable in dire work conditions on the railway in particular.

From this history we can understand that the diversity of institutions we see today are  interconnected by their roots in the European prison and the prior aristocratic violence of torture, and thus draw on similar disciplinary tools and purposes.

5. The carceral continuum

Foucault also noted that while “the prison transformed the punitive procedure into a penitentiary technique; the carceral archipelago transported this technique from the penal institution to the entire social body” (298). 

In their survey of carceral continuum theory, Moran et al. (2017, 675) seek to understand how the carceral can be discrete, compact, architectural, diffuse and pervasive at the same time. 

For me, a politically robust approach needs to include two considerations: The first is to see that the institutions and spaces of the continuum are linked by the ultimate goal of protecting and reproducing the white supremacist colonial/capitalist power structure of commodified property from those who are of the Constitutive Outside: the Landless, the racialized, Indigenous, wageless, non-compliant, the dependant, ie. the ‘lumpen.’

Those who hold the embodied and critical knowledge of the ethical failure of society, who might threaten the system via sovereign acts of economic and/or political rebellion and thus must be contained, disciplined, warehoused, disposed of, disappeared.

Second, I think it is of key importance to not just look at how techniques of the prison are applied in different sites and spaces, but to also see how carcerality is relational.

The guards

Understanding the continuum as a relational structure brings to the fore the dynamic between those who are in a position to incarcerate, to uphold the carceral continuum, and those subject to containment and control. The carceral continuum does not only manage and stigmatize poor and transgressive bodies, it also enforces docility among the other classes. 

According to Foucault (1979), now society consists of: “the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social worker’-judge” (304). Rather than the ‘judge’, I prefer to liken those who enforce the continuum to ‘guards’: the teacher-guard, the doctor-guard ... even the judge can be seen as a ‘guard’ - lets bring them down from on high, from the esteemed location of the technocrat of the so-called justice system and into the trenches of injustice. And I would also add the gentrifier-guard and the citizen-guard - thus in the most diffuse sense, much of the so-called ‘law-abiding general public/body politic’- are also ‘guards’.

SB: As soon as I start walking towards the shelter, I feel such anxiety inside, such tension. And then, by the time I reach the shelter and go to sign in, I can barely breathe. The people behind the desk won't even look at you. When the staff talk to us, it is usually with contempt. I've actually said to a staff member, is there some reason you're talking to me that way? Have I done something or said something? And she said “I talk to everybody that way!” as if that was an explanation. I said: “well, out in the hallway you have a list of values posted on your wall. One of the top values listed is respect and I certainly am not feeling it here!”

- Anonymous, We Want You to Listen: Shelter Video Project, 2021.

Structures that determine how privilege is attained within colonial/capitalism (for those not born into privilege) means that privilege and oppression occur together as a double edged knife. For instance, the de-privileging of relation to Land is the initial moment from which privileges to material needs/wants are to be recouped through adhering to carceral relations and structures. Propertyless  Peoples must adhere to the power structure in order to live. The more an individual moves up the ladder of colonial/capitalist privilege, the more guard-like they become. The more they move down, the more they will encounter institutionalization.

Characteristics of the continuum

The institutions of the continuum start with the abstraction of the body and a requirement to perform docility. 

Rather than the body being the site of complexity, potency and inherent gifts specific to the individual that we contribute to society, the body is seen as a site of extraction by dominant forces outside of it. A set of rules, disciplines, standards, regulations, expectations are placed on the body by those who operate the institutions and by those who more broadly uphold the continuum. The body is expected to respond accordingly: to succumb to labour discipline, be sober of criminalized substances, accept rehabilitation, respect authority, be a consumer, pay taxes, aspire to Land ownership, etc.

Each site of the carceral continuum has characteristics of other sites that play out to varying degrees. The prison is a site of shelter, social work and forced medication. It has educational, family and work programs. Surveillance and now algorithm softwares are a constant and normal part of everyday life used on city streets, social media, in prisons, banks, schools, social housing, shelters, the workplace etc. The homeless shelter is a site of disciplinary action, rules, arbitrary power, hierarchy, nutritional starvation, sleep deprivation, displacement. The hospital is a site of forced restraint, over medication, regulation of daily routine, infantilization. Social Housing is a site of social danger, neglect, stigmatization, infestation, segregation.

The main tool of the carceral continuum is a multiplicity of violences from micro-aggressions to execution: all of them structural and meted out along lines of imposed difference from the white supremacist-cis-hetero-patriarchal-classed norm.

XB: 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, written up.

- Anonymous, We Want You to Listen: Shelter Video Project, 2021.

Spatial dimension

The carceral continuum is ultimately a production of space by the body politic (Massey 2005; Smith 2008) within capitalist/colonial power structure. Our everyday actions as law abiding/law making ‘citizens’ relationally and spatially reproduces the carceral, even when we have no contact with the prison itself. 

Beyond the specific architectures of various institutions, the carceral continuum describes a spatial discipline, or spatial production of  the colonial/capitalist city. A spatial discipline manifest through private property, neighbourhoods, and public space, through crown lands, parks, through reserves (reservations) and other legal frames that are placed on the Land.

Walcott (2021, 44) says: “…for Black people the police are seen as a foreign and occupying force inside, as well as outside, our neighbourhoods; they are seen as regulators of movement and intimidators threatening potential if not outright violence.”

Alongside the actions of police in regards to Black people, there are by-laws (the Safe Streets Act here in Canada) that constrain poor lives from living out doors, loitering, panhandling or doing squeegee work, busking outside of designated areas, and doing regular thrift sales on public property....

the colonial/capitalist legal system also continues to target Indigenous folx practicing and protecting their cultural ways on their Lands inside and outside of ‘reserves’ including in urban parks, private property, oceans, and sites of resource extraction.

Such frameworks inhibit self-determined economic and (in the case of Indigenous peoples) sovereign treaty relations to the abundance of the earth we live on (Blomely, 2004).

Moran et al. (2017, 675) raise the comparison between “prison and gated communities” where Mitchelson (2012) argues that ‘prisons are no less important to the urban fabric than are the suburbs, exurbs, and gated communities that similarly “orbit” large cities’”. Moran et al. (2017, 675) see the techniques of “gates, locks, surveillance and armed response” as prison like. While Lynch (2001 in Moran et al. 2017) has “pointed out synergies between the two, with both proliferating at similar rates in the United States – sharing characteristically homogeneous populations and security infrastructures, and with fear of prisons being used as an explicit sales technique for gated communities.”

These analyses show how the docility of the normative, compliant population to the carceral system is linked to the incarceration of the lumpen/unwaged/landless. There is no metaphor here. These sites are linked by a singular objective, but differ greatly in the impacts of each on the bodies they contain - 

• This text represents a brief explanation of the research I am working on.