Political Economy of Punishment

Almost every theory in this archive asks why people commit crime. The political economy of punishment looks at punishment itself. Why do some eras execute, others deport, others lock away, and others work prisoners to exhaustion? The conventional answer, that justice, the gravity of the crime or the morality of the age demands it, is for this theory an illusion. The form punishment takes is decided by the economy: the state of the labour market, the value of a human body, the need for or surplus of hands.

// OriginRusche, Kirchheimer and punishment as a market

It was formulated in 1939 by two German researchers of the Frankfurt School, Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, in a book written in exile and published in the United States: Punishment and Social Structure. Their thesis is that every system of production “discovers” the punishment that corresponds to its economic relations. When labour is abundant, the life of the poor is worth little and punishment becomes cruel, corporal and disposable: the gallows, flogging, mutilation. When labour is scarce and every body is needed for production, punishment stops destroying the condemned and begins to exploit them: the galleys, workhouses, forced labour, deportation to colonies in need of settlers.

Rusche and Kirchheimer traced this logic across centuries. In the early Middle Ages, with a scarce population, fines and compensation prevailed. When demographic growth saturated the labour market at the end of the Middle Ages, bloody punishments arrived. With mercantilism and the sudden need for hands came the houses of correction (the English bridewells, the German Zuchthäuser), workshops where the vagrant and the thief were re-educated in the discipline of work. The galleys, deportation to America and Australia or penal labour appear when the economy discovers that a condemned body can yield profit, more than when morality softens. The modern prison, they conclude, owes more to the factory than to humanitarianism: it is wage labour turned into penalty.

// The legacyFoucault and Wacquant: from the body to the ghetto

In Discipline and Punish (1975), Michel Foucault shifted the focus from the market to discipline: the prison seeks less to exploit labour than to produce docile bodies, drilled by constant surveillance (the panopticon), the timetable, the cell and the examination. For Foucault, the prison is the laboratory of a form of power that later spreads to the factory, the school, the barracks and the hospital: it no longer punishes the body with the axe, it moulds it with routine and produces the obedient individual that industrial society needs.

Decades later, Loïc Wacquant updated the thesis for neoliberal capitalism. In Punishing the Poor (2009) he showed that, as the welfare state was dismantled, the penal state grew to take its place: mass incarceration, especially of poor minorities in the United States, works as management of the surplus populations the economy no longer needs. The ghetto and the prison become, says Wacquant, two faces of the same machine for containing those discarded by the market, and Rusche's old intuition reappears in the era of private prisons.

// In fictionBusinesses shaped like a prison

The natural villain of prison cinema is whoever administers the punishment: the warden, the guard, the overseer. Samuel Norton, the warden in The Shawshank Redemption, is Rusche's thesis made character: he puts his prisoners to work on public projects outside the walls and takes kickbacks from contractors, all while preaching the Bible. The prison becomes, literally, a business in captive labour. El Hombre sin Ojos, the eyeless overseer in Cool Hand Luke, embodies naked forced labour: the chain gang working the roadside under the sun, the condemned body reduced to a tool at gunpoint. Rudolph Hazen, the warden in The Longest Yard, exploits another vein: he turns his prisoners into spectacle, a football game against his guards' team in the service of his prestige.

—, the sadistic death-row guard in The Green Mile, fits the theory less well: his cruelty yields profit to no one, and the system tolerates it because he is the nephew of the governor's wife. He shows the petty power the institution protects rather than its economy. And —, commandant Amon Göth of Schindler's List, a real historical figure, runs the Płaszów camp, where the human being is disposable labour. There the theory reaches its limit: slave labour coexisted with an extermination driven by racial ideology, not by the market.

AN

The Shawshank Redemption · Film

Alcaide Norton

PW

The Green Mile · Film

Percy Wetmore

AG

Schindler's List · Film

Amon Göth

BG

Cool Hand Luke · Film

Boss Godfrey

AH

The Longest Yard · Film

Alcaide Hazen

From the warden who rents out prisoners to the commandant of an extermination camp: five faces of punishment turned into business and exploitation. Tap to open their case file.

// Punishment todayThe prison as industry

The prison-industrial complex, the web of firms that make money from every incarcerated person, is the current version of the thesis. In the United States, publicly listed corporations run prisons whose profits rise the more prisoners there are, and some contracts guarantee “minimum occupancy” of cells: a perverse incentive to incarcerate more and for longer. Within the walls, prison labour (inmates manufacturing products, staffing call centres or fighting fires for pennies an hour) reproduces the exploitation Rusche described: captive labour, with no labour rights, whose low cost competes with free work.

// The flawWhen materialism explains too much

Its flaw is economic reductionism: the temptation to explain everything by the labour market, as if morality, religion, politics, revenge or outrage at crime counted for nothing. There were sincere humanitarian reforms and abolitionist movements that won out of moral conviction, not economic convenience. The data, moreover, do not always cooperate: the correlation between unemployment and penal harshness exists, but it is weaker and more variable than the strong version of the theory predicts.

The honest reading takes it not as the explanation, but as a question few theories ask: faced with a form of punishing, beyond how it is justified morally, who benefits from it materially, what labour it manages, what interests it feeds. That question does not exhaust punishment, but it brings to light the part that official morality tends to keep quiet.

// Why it mattersSeeing the bill behind the bars

This theory breaks the spell surrounding punishment. We tend to see prison as the neutral outcome of justice: someone offends, someone pays. Rusche and Kirchheimer make us see that the form of the payment is set, to a large extent, by the accounts. That explains why “humanitarian” penal reforms fail again and again if they do not touch the inequality that sustains them, why mass incarceration always strikes the same people (the poor, minorities, the market's surplus) and why, as long as someone makes money by punishing, there will be a silent pressure to punish more.