"....the bodily life that the prison regulates inevitably provides opportunities for prisoners—and, he might have added, staff to interrupt the fusion of abstract order and material practice on which the operation depends. Some of the early prisons turned out to be “defective” because prisoners could hear one another through the walls. In control units—staying for the moment with mealtime—prisoners describe having their food spat on or their meals withheld, being falsely accused of sharpening spoons into weapons, and being unable to eat on some days because stinging gas saturates the air. Officers describe prisoners who decline their food, refuse to return their trays, make shanks out of the dull plastic, or throw urine out the port as the tray is handed through. Because prison rules do not allow trays to be kept in cells for fear they will be fashioned into weapons, the tray itself, one of the few items exchanged at the cell door, becomes an opportunity. How is a desperate or lethargic prisoner to respond to the demand to return it? If he acquiesces, he shrinks into a debilitating visible anonymity, a tacit acknowledgment that he has been tamed or broken. If he refuses, a team of officers organized into the prison version of a SWAT team and encased in protective gear will forcibly extract him from his cell.
... [These are] struggles in which both sides are compelled to respond to the symbolic as well as the overt content of the gestures of antagonism that gather around their points of contact. The apparently trivial tray—the only thing the prisoner can get his hands on—takes on a charge of defiance. This is a “power struggle,” as prison workers often say. But in what sense? The control prison is already structured around an intense form of power. These struggles indicate a certain “extra,” a surplus generated at the point where the full force of institutional domination meets the oblique resistance of the prisoner. Both prisoners and officers can be seized by the possibility of engaging one another’s attention in this way, as though this surplus power exerts a kind of uncanny hold on them. Each side, obeying its respective “code,” moves forward with a sense of inevitability to “make the statement” that affirms the boundary between them.
A control unit does produce a “tame” prisoner, in the sense that it is difficult for him to affect the world beyond his cell no matter what he does inside it. The plan put forth by Bentham and the architects of the silent prisons was intended to make this taming effect reach all the way into the prisoner’s mind and soul—to change him—though the strategy did not necessarily work. The question of whether this is still the prison’s purpose—and whether, if it happens, it constitutes rehabilitation or what prisoners call being “institutionalized”—haunts the contemporary prison and will come up repeatedly in this account."
- Lorna Rhodes, Total confinement: madness and reason in the maximum security prison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. p. 40, 43.
