Bare Life

Upon incarceration, the prisoners are stripped of their citizenship and become bodies, literally “property of the state”. Thus all subjective qualities in the lives of the prisoners are diminished, and they become a type of “bare life”. This idea of “bare life”, a study of Gorgio Agamben and quoted in “Public Secrets”, is a life involving no choices, no freedoms. This extends to the point where the prisoners have no control over what they do with their own bodies. Prisoners in the case study commented about how, if they even got sunburned out in the prison yard, they would receive a 105 from the system, giving them thirty more days in jail. And if prisoners are but the “property of the state”, an objective “body” living the barest of functional life, than how could they possibly act as agent?

When you limit someone‘s ability to choose or to even think and act for themselves, you simultaneously limit their agency. The prison system fully perverts this concept by completely stripping them of free choice. Thus the prisoners have no agency, no control of their own lives, which are considered, while in jail, completely controlled by the system. This creates and extremely unbalanced power dynamic between prisoners and prison system.

The prison system then has all agency, controlling every facet of the objective bodies (prisoner’s) day (from where they sleep to what they eat to how they spend each and every minute). When diminishing prisoners to a form of “bare life” they become easily manageable, simple objects to be given food, clothes, and shelter. The problem with this system, as one that is meant to inspire progress, is that, in treating its inhabitants like bodies, the prisoners are static and learn nothing.

One of the prisoners in the case study attributed this to the core way the prison system works. It is a “judge and punish” system, one that’s main intention is to prevent further incidents through punishment. A more effective system would involve “nurturing and rehabilitizing”, a system that digs deeper to find out why the crimes were committed.

It seems obvious that to have a productive penal system, one can’t strip all agency from its prisoners. Rather the system must give prisoners agency, letting them find out why they committed the crime and how not to repeat it. The system must educate or, in the extreme view of Daniels, be abolished completely.

Prisons, to prevent future crimes, mustn’t ask, how can we suppress these criminals? But rather dig deeper and ask, why were these crimes committed in the first place? The solution can only be found within the prisoners, and that will never be if they are only allowed to live a bare life.