The Hidden Functions of Prison

Why "Failure" Is Actually Success

What if the prison system isn't broken at all? What if high recidivism, racial disparities, and social harm aren't bugs in the system—but features? Understanding the true purpose of incarceration reveals why reform isn't working and what real transformation requires.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Prison doesn't fail at reducing crime because it was never designed to reduce crime. It succeeds brilliantly at its actual function: maintaining social hierarchies, dividing the working class, and protecting existing power structures from challenge.
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Surveillance & Control

Modern power doesn't rule through spectacle but through constant observation. Prison extends this logic—those inside are watched, and those outside police themselves to avoid joining them.
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Creating "Normal"

By defining some behaviors as criminal and others as normal, the system creates categories of acceptable citizens versus dangerous others—usually along lines of class and race.
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The Scapegoat Function

Prison creates a visible enemy—"criminals"—that working people can blame for social problems, deflecting attention from policies that actually create inequality and harm.
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Selective Enforcement

Laws are written to appear universal but enforced to target specific populations. White-collar crime gets fines; street crime gets cages. Same harm, different treatment.

How the System Really Works

1

Create Conditions for Crime

Implement policies that increase poverty, eliminate social services, defund education, and destroy communities—creating desperation and social breakdown.
2

Criminalize Survival

Pass laws that make poverty itself illegal: sleeping outside, drug use, sex work, theft for survival. Turn social problems into criminal problems.
3

Target Selectively

Enforce laws primarily in poor communities of color while ignoring similar crimes in wealthy areas. Create the illusion that only certain types of people commit crimes.
4

Manufacture Consent

Use media to present criminalized people as inherently dangerous, deserving punishment. Make prison seem like the only reasonable response to social problems.
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Profit & Control
Extract profit from incarceration while using the threat of prison to discipline the entire working class. "Behave, or you could end up like them."

The Media's Role in Manufacturing Fear

Media doesn't just report on crime—it shapes how we understand what crime is and who criminals are. But journalists aren't the primary storytellers; they're dependent on official sources who have their own agendas.

What Gets Coverage

  • Individual acts of street violence
  • Dramatic "stranger danger" stories
  • Prison escapes and security fears
  • Repeat offender narratives
  • Sensational trials and sentencing

What Gets Ignored

  • Corporate crimes that harm thousands
  • Environmental destruction
  • Wage theft and labor violations
  • Social conditions that create harm
  • Successful rehabilitation programs

This selective reporting creates a distorted reality where the greatest threats appear to come from the powerless, while the powerful remain invisible.

Prison is not intended to eliminate offences, but rather to distinguish them, to distribute them, to use them... to assimilate the transgression of laws in a general tactics of subjection.
— Michel Foucault

Breaking Free From the Illusion

Once we see prison for what it really is—a system of social control disguised as public safety—we can begin to imagine real alternatives. The question isn't how to reform a broken system, but how to build something entirely different.
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