Opinion: What If the Prison Was Never Meant to Work?

Key points:

• The American prison system perpetuates cycles of harm despite evidence against its effectiveness.
• Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish argues that the prison system is a disciplinary regime.
• Angela Davis argues that the prison system was designed to contain marginalized populations.

The American prison system has long been haunted by a paradox. Despite mounting evidence that incarceration fails to rehabilitate, deter crime, or ensure public safety, the system endures—expanding budgets, filling cages, and reproducing cycles of harm. We call it a crisis. But what if, as Michel Foucault warned nearly 50 years ago, the crisis is the system?

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traces the modern prison not as a neutral response to crime but as the centerpiece of a broader “carceral continuum”—a disciplinary regime that turns failure into function. “The proclamation of the failure of the prison,” he writes, “has always been accompanied by its maintenance.”

Reform doesn’t dismantle the prison; it reinforces it.

This isn’t just historical reflection. It explains why even the most well-intentioned reforms—restorative units, reentry programs, educational pods—often remain embedded within institutions designed to punish, isolate, and surveil.

As Foucault puts it: “Penal detention must have as its essential function the transformation of the individual’s behaviour.” But transformation, under carceral logic, is inseparable from subjugation.

We’re told prison exists to prevent crime. But Foucault flips the premise: “The prison cannot fail to produce delinquents.” Surveillance, stigma, poverty, family separation, and civic exclusion all ensure that those released remain vulnerable to re-incarceration. The system doesn’t fail to stop recidivism—it depends on it.

Yet as powerful as Foucault’s critique remains, it is incomplete.

Angela Davis takes us further. She shows that the prison was not simply designed to fail—it was designed to contain specific populations, especially Black people, poor people, and those rendered surplus by racial capitalism.

“The prison has become a surrogate for the disappearance of slavery, segregation, and poverty,” she writes in Are Prisons Obsolete? Davis insists we cannot understand the persistence of incarceration without confronting the racial and economic forces it serves.

Where Foucault unmasked the prison’s ideological function, Davis links it to material history: the convict lease system, the war on drugs, and the corporate interests profiting from mass incarceration. She centers the lived experience of those most affected—especially Black women, queer people, and the unhoused—who are often left out of more abstract philosophical critiques.

Crucially, Davis pushes beyond diagnosis. She reminds us that abolition is not about tearing down a system with nothing in its place. It’s about imagining a world where harm is addressed through healing and accountability, not cages.

“Abolition,” she writes, “is not primarily about getting rid of buildings full of cages. It’s about reimagining the kind of society that could produce prisons in the first place.”

Most damning is the idea that punishment has become normalized—almost natural. Foucault calls this the “carceral texture of society,” where disciplinary power spreads through schools, hospitals, housing systems, and the courts, transforming deviance into pathology and control into care. “The carceral ‘naturalizes’ the legal power to punish, as it ‘legalizes’ the technical power to discipline.”

We now live in the society Foucault diagnosed—and Davis organizes against. A society that equates justice with confinement, and deviance with disposability. A society where millions are locked in cages, not because prisons work, but because they were never supposed to.

Today, reformers face a choice.

Do we keep fine-tuning the gears of a machine built to fail? Or do we start asking more dangerous questions—about why this machine was built at all, and who profits from its ongoing operation?

As Davis and a growing abolitionist movement remind us, the true alternative to prison is not just better jails—it’s a radically different society. Foucault didn’t offer blueprints, but he left us with a warning. Davis hands us a vision.

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