Summary Of The Culture Of Control And Prisons By David Garland

‘The Culture of Control’ and Prisons
There are many neo-Foucauldian scholars who expanded on Foucault’s critique of the prison and the prison system. David Garland’s perspective about the prison posits a cultural understanding towards penal systems. However, Garland believes that the sociology of punishment has to be understood in both ways, in term of how penal culture shapes and reflect both the larger society, and how the larger society affect the penal culture (Garland 1990, p.22). Furthermore, penality and the institutions responsible should not be viewed as an isolated factor producing correlations with the larger societal norm. As Garland argues in the concluding remarks of the first chapter of his work, Punishment and Modern Society:
In this penal culture, there are many smaller pockets of cultures which combined together form the larger penal culture. For instance, cultural products such as the design of a heavily guarded and privately managed prison building serve to tell us the intent of the pursuit of securitization and privatisation from the society. The method of capital punishment used, be it lethal injection as a more humane method of killing a person, or the efficient and quick death of hanging, or the less humane and fear inducing firing squad, it serves to provide an explanation of the wider societal norm for the opinion towards capital punishment. The various cultures and methods employed by penal practices serve the purposes intended by the penal institution against the prisoners. The penal culture thus provides us insights of the “linkages which tie penal culture in the frameworks and categories of the world
It contributed fundamentally to the theorization of surveillance. As Haggerty and Ericson (2000) argues, the Surveillant Assemblage was largely motivated by recognizing the limitations of Foucault’s panoptic principles and in an effort to accurately capture the contemporary surveillance landscape with precision. Contemporary theories of surveillance often share fundamental similarities with Foucault’s panoptic principles and it seems as though they are the offspring of Foucault’s work (Hier 2003; Coleman & McCahill 2011; Haggerty et al. 2011; Welch 2011). Governmentality is also another neo-Foucauldian inspired workings. Although Foucault did not explicitly discuss governmentality, it is still something developed from the works of Foucault. Governmentality is a way analyzing the methods in which institutions manage and control people made to behave in a certain way in an efficient, subtle and more sophisticated manner (Newburn 2012, p. 334). It does not reside only to the elites, class register, taking attendance, torture and hurt, to a shift to prisons, as it is a more efficient and arguably harsher punishments in a way of tormenting a person’s freedom and fixed routine. Governmentality scholars seek to understand the effort in which institutions diffuse the responsibilities and create a culture of discipline and self-regulation (Mincke &