The Prisons of Dystopia
I often ping pong between fiction and non-fiction. I might start with an anthology of sci-fi short stories followed by a book on feminist theory, or a light fantasy novel to a collection of essays written by civil rights activists. With fiction, there’s a purpose with every selection. For example, I plowed through classical and contemporary science fiction while working on my space opera. With non-fiction, I find myself floating along without a fixed goal. My lifelong project of understanding critical theory and different forms of oppression (e.g. racial, gendered, class, colonial, etc.) does provide a reading list, but I lack a syllabus for what feels like a lifetime of work.
So, it’s rare that I consciously seek to read, back-to-back, complimentary works of fiction and non-fiction. But these are strange days, and there’s value in examining the dialog between literature and scholarly work. In this rare instance, I paired French philosopher Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, which I will shorten here from 18 letters and a hyphen to 1984. And, by chance, I happened to dogsit for a family that owned a copy of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, so I’ll include that as a useful counterpoint to 1984.
This collection of essays is largely a personal record for me and my thoughts on literature as I develop my craft, so fiction usually takes the spotlight. But here, it’s important to build the foundation of my argument from Foucault’s work to understand how it applies to the two dystopian novels. I should state that given the complexity of Foucault’s work, I will be skipping over his historical descriptions and oversimplifying his larger argument. I will also forego summaries of both 1984 and The Hunger Games since they’re both quite popular. But those links will take you to their Wikipedia pages for a plot refresher.
Discipline and Punish asks and answers a big question: why has the state’s use of public torture and execution diminished as we’ve entered the modern era? In the monarchies of old, a “portion [of punishment] belongs to the prince” (p. 48). A crime was, at its heart, an act that offended the monarch, injured their royal person and their kingdom, and punishment was about reconstituting the wronged sovereign. In demonstrating their power over life and death, the monarch reestablished their rule as total; the “head of war” is also the “head of justice” (p. 50). But in making the execution open to the public, “the main character was the people,” and not the sovereign (p. 57). By witnessing the execution of the king’s enemy, the people become complicit in the act; they share culpability in the state-sanctioned murder and are reminded of their position in a political hierarchy dominated by the sovereign. An execution was a power move.
But leading into modernity, this approach to power collapsed. On the one hand, the gallows could very quickly transform into a stage of revolt. A particularly cruel punishment, or a harsh sentence levied against a just or well-liked individual, betrayed the sovereign’s “tyranny, excess, the thirst for revenge,” and other despotic qualities that might push a populace to anger, violence, and revolt (p. 73).
Likewise, a shift in economics made it necessary to treat crime not from the personal perspective of the sovereign but as an attack on property. Starting from the end of the 17th century, there is a marked decrease in murder and violent crimes (p. 75). However, there is an increase in personal and public wealth, particularly among the growing bourgeoisie. And while a monarchy based on land ownership might overlook certain forms of criminality, the growing industrial and commercial spheres--nascent capitalism--could not tolerate illegality that threatened the stability that businesses need to thrive (p. 85). Crimes were attacks on commercial equilibrium and, therefore, attacks on the society itself.
Concurrently, science started to eclipse religion as the central ordering principle within society. That’s not to say religion doesn’t play an important role in people’s lives, but that science’s ability to produce facts through logic and data displaced the church’s hegemony over the divine rights of power and knowledge.
To cut to chase, the answer to corporal punishment’s anachronistic qualities was the modern carceral state; the solution to modern criminality was the creation of prisons. It’s important to point out (because it’s not a thought we often have) that prisons needed to be invented. They were not inevitable; they’re not an eternal fixture in a “civilized society”. They were created and they can be abolished. Foucault goes into great detail about the slow development of prisons as a means to control disobedient bodies. I think of particular interest here is the idea that in treating leprosy, states developed a method of exclusion: the isolated leper colony gives us the penal colony. Similarly, the plague gave rise to its own disciplinary processes like isolation (i.e. lockdowns, quarantines), a practice common in modern prisons (p. 198). But the body, controlling its movements and possibilities (rather than injuring it through torture), defines the modern carceral state.
Perhaps the best example of prison’s ability to “solve” crime is Foucault’s description of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. The panopticon is the “perfect prison,” if such a thing could be said to exist. Criminals are isolated from each other in individual cells to reduce the infectious spread of criminality. The prison itself is a circular structure, with individual cells opening into a courtyard, the center of which is a watchtower. It is vitally important that this guard tower allow a sentry to see outward, but not allow the prisoners to see in. The thinking here is that if a prisoner knows they are being watched, they will behave well. But as soon as the guards look away, incarcerated individuals are able to drop the charade and commit nefarious acts, to plot and scheme and spread the criminal mindset. It is only in the ambivalence of never quite knowing when they’re being observed that the prisoners are, in effect, always being policed; they are, in fact, policing their own behavior. Therefore, “The public execution was the logical culmination of a procedure governed by the Inquisition. The practice of placing individuals under ‘observation’ is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures” (p. 227). This permanent surveillance plays a major role in both 1984 and The Hunger Games, but there’s one final topic worth dissecting before moving onto our dystopias.
Crucial to our understanding of Foucault’s work is the invention of the “delinquent.” This objectivization of the individual relies on the conclusions established by two historical processes. First, public torture had been applied to “‘monsters’, moral or political, who had fallen outside the social pact”; second, the notion, achieved through science and reason, that “the juridical subject [is capable of being] rehabilitated by punishment” (p. 256). In effect, those that commit crimes are not just striking the sovereign; by breaking the social contract, they are attacking the state itself. And the state is empowered to act in extreme ways with a perceived righteousness born of supposedly objective scientific methods to both prove guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt as well as perfect the rehabilitation process through observation, isolation, and exclusion. A delinquent, in this mode of scientific belief, is a pathological condition; criminals are born to be criminals. And that this pathology can be cured or corrected through punishment, specifically the extreme regulation of an individual’s bodily freedom or, in short, prison.
I’d like to pause here and say that none of this is a prescriptive assertion on crime or the social ills prison is meant to solve. This is merely the logical conclusion Foucault draws from the development and spread of the carceral system as it dug its claws into schools, factories, businesses, military barracks, and other social institutions. People are not born criminals. Prisons don’t cure criminals and do nothing to decrease the crime rate; instead, “prisons fabricated delinquents” (p. 255). The pathological delinquent serves a social function by pointing toward a type of clearly punishable criminality which obscures other forms: crimes are “differentiated” from one another, built into hierarchies, where the rich and powerful are able to steal millions and suffer no consequences while the bread thief or the drug addict is the target of abuse, isolation, and public scorn. The delinquent, the born criminal, is a scapegoat for the powerful, presented and punished to establish the veneer of a just society and an objective legal system that is anything but when one studies policing tactics, use of force figures, incarceration rates, and prison/death sentences.
So, Foucault spent about three hundred pages outlining in painful detail how dystopian our justice system is. Let’s escape into the fictional dystopias found in the works of Orwell and Collins. I read Discipline and Punish first, so when I got to 1984, I actually had a hard time believing that Orwell’s novel was written about twenty-five years prior to Foucault’s work. It reads like Orwell excised the injustices described by Foucault and built an entire fictional society around them.
The telescreens in 1984 are a salient similarity to Bentham’s panopticon as described by Foucault. And given the number of digital devices that listen to us, track our movements, and record our search histories, perhaps a demonstration of Orwell’s prescience. Here, Winston, the protagonist of 1984, describes their properties: “The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he would be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment . . . It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time” (p. 2). In this instance, the concept of panopticon has hopped over the prison walls and infected society, invading even the private space of an individual’s home. We certainly are given evidence that everyone is being watched. During required morning exercises, the instructor yells directly at Winston, ordering him to “bend lower” even as he strains to do so (p. 32). The surveillance state is real; it proves itself active and effective. And it ensures that everyone under its gaze police themselves even when they can’t be sure they’re being watched.
As an additional layer, Winston’s world is filled with posters of Big Brother: “an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black mustache and ruggedly handsome features . . . It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” (p. 1). I wouldn’t put it past the Party to install cameras in the eyes of any poster of Big Brother, but the effect of seeing another eyes, even if they’re not real, has been shown to have strong effects on human behavior.
Individuals are monitored at all times, even by their own children. Toward the end of the book, Winston meets one of his neighbors who was reported to be a traitor by a member of his immediate family: “Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep! . . . I started talking in my sleep . . . ‘Down with Big Brother!’ It was my little daughter [that denounced me]. She listened at the keyhole'' (p. 208). Individuals in this society can never forget--are made incapable of forgetting--that they’re being watched. They’ve internalized oppression.
The Hunger Games, likewise, utilizes dystopian surveillance tactics to control its people. Of particular interest is the fact that the games themselves are televised around Panem. Here, surveillance is not necessarily a means of social control, as in fact the tributes are being asked to break the social taboo of murder. Indeed, the surveillance is spectacle, a nationwide broadcast for millions to enjoy. But the primary question in Discipline and Punish is why did public executions disappear from much of the modern world? The Hunger Games and 1984 provide curiously divergent takes on execution as a form of control for a nation.
In The Hunger Games, the games themselves are explicitly a punishment. In this quote, the mayor of Katniss’ district describes their conception: “It’s the same story every year. He tells of the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a palace that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens. Then came the Dark Days, the uprising of the districts against the Capitol. Twelve were defeated, the thirteenth obliterated. The Treaty of Treason gave us the new laws to guarantee peace and, as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated, it gave us the Hunger Games” (p. 18). A pair of children from every district are to be hunted and killed every year, sacrificial offerings to the Capitol’s mercy, lest the whole district be bombed out of existence. In this way, Panem brought about its own destruction. As Foucault states, harsh punishments levied against the just, good, or innocent (children check all three boxes) inevitably foment revolt and rebellion. The Hunger Games were always going to be the catalyst to Panem’s annihilation. It was only a matter of time.
In 1984, there are actually public executions. Early on, Winston has a run in with his neighbor’s children, the same boy and girl that eventually snitch on their father. “You’re a traitor . . . You’re a thought-criminal!” yells the boy at Winston (who is arguably both of those things, not that the boy would know); their mother explains their excitability: “They’re disappointed they couldn’t go see the hanging” (p. 20). It’s important to note, however, that those scheduled to be executed here were, “Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes” (p. 21). These are not low class proles nor party members; these are not individuals outside of the social pact. The public execution here might be likened to the enjoyment derived by citizens of the Panem’s Capitol in watching the downtrodden from the districts fight to the death; it’s all fun and games.
The tributes in the Hunger Games are not even necessarily delinquents as Foucault might describe them. Katniss and the others are indeed considered guilty from birth, pathologically deviant from the Capitol’s perspective due to their unfortunate luck of being born in a geographic area that participated in a revolt a century earlier. But the goal is not their rehabilitation nor to reinsert them into the oppressive economy. The tributes stand on the gallows, as it were, and are evidence of both the Capitol’s might and the twelve districts’ complicity in these barbarous games. We can infer that the Hunger Games are a power play by the Capitol: the superior city as sovereign is daring the districts to defy its might.
Delinquency in 1984 comes in a different form, specifically “Two Minutes Hate.” In this daily ritual, members of the Party watch a two minute movie that heavily features, “Emmanuel Goldstein . . . the primal traitor” (p. 10). Goldstein is at the heart of delinquency, a “renegade backslider” who “had engaged in counterrevolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared” (p. 10). It’s never made clear if Goldstein is alive or dead, or even real, since the warping of history and reality itself is a core feature of Orwell’s dystopia. But his presence not only provides an eternal enemy upon which all of the pent up rage citizens feel can be directed, but also serves as a beacon for party members considering sedition, thereby laying a neat trap for any and all that might want to bring down Big Brother. Importantly, though, for these delinquents, for these traitors, when death finally comes, it is not broadcast on a telescreen.
For party members like Winston, the end tends to come far removed from the public eye: “People simply disappeared, always during the night . . . You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word” (p. 17). Likely most vanished into the Ministry of Love, a place surrounded by steel, barbed wire, and machine guns (p. 4). There he is tortured for a fearfully long time, but never publicly. His punishment is designed, in its way, to be rehabilitative, to restore in him the love of Big Brother and the Party. And it works. The final line of the book: “[Winston] loved Big Brother” (p. 266). Foucault, quoting Malby, writes: “Punishment . . . should strike the soul rather than the body” (p. 16).
In both worlds, the dystopian governments use execution as a means of control. But while The Hunger Games places the execution on full display, the Party in 1984 hides it away, locks the delinquent in a well lit room and tortures their mind, body, and soul until there is very little left. Once they’re sure--absolutely sure--they’ve crushed the person, they are released back into the world. Winston is given a crappy job and as much gin as he can stomach. And sits and waits. Waits for the death that he knows will come for him. This goes beyond death in an arena, which carries with it at least the chance of survival. This goes beyond the carceral state with its cruel wardens and vicious guards. The Party in 1984 is able to bind a person’s soul, squeeze it, drain it, pulverize it, until all that’s left is a fragile dust incapable of action save for the maintenance of daily corporeal needs. The dystopia is not in the future-fascit governments, ruined worlds, or violent social hierarchies; these are merely trappings. It is in the world where the individual can be weighed, examined, and broken until there is nothing left but the flesh machine willing and able to do the bidding of the sovereign force.
This is what I took away from this mini foray into punishment and dystopias. The institutions we need to watch out for, the ones that are really dangerous, are those that attempt to grind the individual’s soul or spirit or life force or whatever down to a nub. Everything else is aesthetic. Everything else is methodology. The danger we face, however, is that a culture or a society may itself grow into a prison, as it did in 1984. Winston and the other characters lack even the language or the history to refute the horrendous notions of the Party and its behavior. They are fish unable to see the water. And as easy as it is to see prisons, big brick buildings surrounded by barbed wire, thinking about all of this makes me ask: what are we missing? What walls bind our minds and our hearts? Perhaps we can only find them by stumbling in the dark, arms outstretched, knowing that reaching the edge may lead to a dark room where a cruel man waits with a car battery, or a mass grave with all the others who dared to ask, “What more might life offer beyond this cage?”
