What form does this massive system take? Where did it come from? Before acquiring its current economic role, incarceration was a transitory state and punishment was ultimately enacted on the body via torture and execution. Model of the Bastille carved out of stone from the prison by an anonymous sculptor between 17 Lest the historical echoes resound too faintly, the largest American prison – Louisiana’s so-called Angola – is an operational cotton plantation. Prisoner numbers have grown by 500 per cent since the ‘war on drugs’ began in the 1980s, and prisoners are disproportionately black – indeed, nearly one third of black American men will spend time in prison at some point in their lives. (This is not, it should be noted, an exclusively American phenomenon: Britain has an even more disproportionately black prison population.) These vast immobilised armies supply labour to corporations, profits to private prison businesses, and captive markets to suppliers. Presently, 2.3 million Americans are incarcerated – that is, 0.7 per cent of the population. Pious reformers turned to mental torture, isolation and enforced reflection’Īngela Davis emphasises the economic function of prisons in her analysis of the present American context, where ‘punishment no longer constitutes a marginal area of the larger economy’. (In supermax prisons such as ADX Florence in Colorado, these furnishings are of cast concrete one thinks of the bathroom and adjacent daybed in Villa Savoye.) The disposition of these cells allows the constant supervision of inmates and their grading and categorisation, whether by gender, social status, dangerousness or crime. In a space reduced to the extent of the human proportions, there are facilities for bathing, the disposal of excreta, and sleeping all else is superfluous. The prison cell is the ultimate realisation of the Existenzminimum sought by Modernist architects. Within the perimeter of the prison itself, they produce a microscopically subdivided space, consisting of the regular repetition of its most basic element: the cell. Situated within the urban fabric, they admonish the citizenry with what Jacques-François Blondel called an architecture terrible when sequestered in distant rural sites (or further out in colonies) they act as cloaks of invisibility for the state’s secret human foundations. The walls of prisons are invested with a strange kind of energy: whether implacable or erotic, they are never simply structural. The Marquis de Sade wanted to beat his brains out against them, Jean Genet was moved to kiss them.

To confine, secure, rehabilitate or punish: the prison has several, sometimes contradictory aims, but however humane its approach, penal architecture is essentially cruel

Prison architect design