Prison: the Brilliant Career of a Troublesome Political Object

Pierre Lascoumes (1)

1 CEE - Centre d'études européennes et de politique comparée (Sciences Po, CNRS)

Prison, that is the use of imprisonment as penal sanction became in two centuries a universal solution. All political regimes use it. Of course, forms ofjailing are different. But the privation of liberty and the stigmatisation provoked by imprisonment are used in all political and cultural contexts. The author uses Foucault's analysis to explain the paradoxal success of this institution. He demonstrates also that prison is a very difficult political stake. Criticizing and reforming it always keeps on the second rank on the political agenda. It is a very contradictory issue: everybody wishes to reform it, but in the same time no government has been able to implement a innovative agenda on it. Prisons remain partial, unfinished and questionable answers

Keywords: Prison; Abolitionism; Foucault

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Sociology

Pierre Lascoumes. Prison: the Brilliant Career of a Troublesome Political Object. Japanese Journal of Sociological Criminology, 2012, 37, pp.77-86. ⟨10.20621/jjscrim.37.0_77⟩. ⟨hal-02403207⟩