MEDS 203 - The Carceral State

0.5 unit(s)

(Same as AFRS 203 and PHIL 203) Theorizations of the carceral state are commonly traced back to 1975, when, in Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault famously defined the “carceral archipelago” as a series of institutions that, well beyond the frontiers of criminal law, exported penitentiary logics and penal practices to the entire social body. In this course, we pursue a reconstruction of, both, Foucault’s evolution in his assessment of the carceral archipelago – from the ideology of disciplinary institutions to more capillary self-representations and self-fashionings of individuals in late capitalism -, and the constellations of scholars that, before and after Foucault, have provided theorizations of the carceral state. Among those who preceded Foucault, we focus on Jeremy Bentham’s late 18th century layout of the panopticon as the architectural archetype of the modern correctional facility, and Antonio Gramsci, whose 1930s Prison Notebooks inspires us to reflect on how carcerality has become a culturally hegemonic framework within which to imagine life, death, and survival in today’s world. Among the thinkers who came after Foucault, we concentrate on three different sets of voices: social movements, including the Chicano Movement and the Black Panthers, who launched the prison as a stage and a platform of political resistance in the 1960s and 1970s; social scientists and civil rights advocates, who have theorized the continuity between the plantation economy and the prison industrial complex, including William J. Wilson and Michelle Alexander; and public intellectuals, such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis, who have upheld prison abolitionism as the linchpin of criminal justice reform.

First six-week course.

Two 75-minute periods.

Not offered in 2026/27.

Course Format: CLS