Why Prison? A Ruby Jubilee Reading of The Prison and the Factory
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Author | Anjuli Verma |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520918814 |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review Symposium: The Prison and the Factory (40th Anniversary Edition) |
Book Review
Why Prison? A Ruby
Jubilee Reading of The
Prison and the Factory
Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini, The Prison and the Factory:Origins of
The Penitentiary System (40th Anniversary Edition), Palgrave Macmillan
UK: London, 2018; xxxii, 282 pp.: 9781137565891 $39.99 (pbk);
9781137565907 $29.99 (eBook)
Forty-year anniversaries are sometimes celebrated with a “Ruby Jubilee.”
1
In modifying the title of Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini’s The Prison and
the Factory for a 21st-century audience, one can accept for clarity’s sake 40th
Anniversary Edition in favor of Ruby Jubilee Edition (though it does have nice
ring). In the 40 years since original publication, an historical development we
now call “Mass Incarceration” materialized, hardly a matter for celebration, but
as a tragic milestone the book’s latest edition serves to commemorate.
In good keeping with a robust line of “radical criminology” works published in
the same era, Melossi and Pavarini did not envision what would soon follow the first
edition, originally Carcere e fabbrica (1977[Italian]), and The Prison and the Factory:
Origins of the Penitentiary System (1981[English trans.]). Decarceration and dein-
stitutionalization were then favored as a dispersal of punishment in the crystal ball
of penal history, which projected the spatial future of social control as a dawning
circuitry outside prisons, forming a “carceral archipelago” (Foucault, 1975: 301) of
community-based sanctioning (Cohen, 1979; Scull, 1977).
2
What came to pass
instead was the “imprisonment boom” of the late-20th century (Lynch and
Verma, 2016) and remarkable surge of incarceration in formal, totalizing institu-
tions that proliferated into a 21st-century landscape thoroughly installed with more
and differently degradingly designed prisons. Alongside the prison’s saturation of
late-modern society, factories would become relics of a bygone era, shuttering doors
to entire sectors of a post-industrial workforce whose wage-labor commodification
surrendered to a commodity of captivity laid bare now in the surplus worker’s last-
ditch commodification, as inmate.
The Prison and the Factory (40th Anniversary Edition) (2018) offers a chance to
reflect on how our reading changes in light of these intervening years, and what an
era of Mass Incarceration reveals about the book’s thesis. Whether or not
Punishment & Society
2020, Vol. 22(5) 723–730
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520918814
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