Explorando a metaprisão

After the mid-1970s, instead of rehabilitating convicts, the United States rehabilitated the prison and turned it into a device for the punitive containment of marginality and the reassertion of state sovereignty on the outside. Then it fashioned the “Supermax”, a new neutralizing “prison within the prison”, to discharge the same function inside the bloated penal system. Just as the penitentiary is massively overused as a vacuum cleaner for the social detritus of a society ravaged by economic deregulation, welfare retrenchment, and ethnoracial anxiety, supermax facilities are grotesquely overused inside to subdue and store the refuse and the refuseniks of carceral rule. The supermax prison thus stands as the hyperbolic product and iconic expression of the ravenous remaking of the American penal state and of the contradictions of neoliberal penality. Its study can contributes to our understanding of the internal and external politics of punishment in contemporary society.