#prisoncomplex

Mihael Ruja

Alan Ruiz

Architecture without the Architect

The Prison Industrial Complex

The prison industrial complex is a rhizome of capitalist ideologies and their sources of power. The term ‘rhizome’ fitting for examining the relational space that is created through the different points of power and effect. The industrial complex so adheres to our society that a society without it seems inconceivable. In reference to this, a rhizome is inescapable from its convoluted nodes of power-points of formation. These nodes, in turn, are apart of a rhizome, a system, a from. This form is best visualized as the rhizome by Deleuze and Guattari, which exemplifies the dimensional complexity of relational space created by an enforced capitalistic ideology. In exploring this node and their segments, we come across important aspects such as the architecture of the industrial complex, societal ideologies, and the relationship between sources of power which enforce these ideologies.

The architecture of the prison industrial complex reflects the function of the theory of a prison and the powers that own it. The function of the prison is to correct and punish the prisoner. The prisoner is viewed as a danger in the eyes of citizens and thus must be corrected of their dangerous nature. With this in mind, the architecture of the prison must then cure the prisoner of their dangerous nature. In order to do so, the architecture of the prison must assume a binary and decide what is right and wrong-which is contingent to the powers that erect these prisons. As a result, the architecture of the prison creates a subject that is both denied of individuality through the scope of capitalism but is accepted in the eyes of the society that surrounds it. An example of this is the Panopticon which tries to enforce a perfect subject that is controlled by their own visibility of authority-which is to say that the subject is self-inflicting “a state of conscious and permanent visibility.” As described by Angela Davis this allows the prison to be controlled by corporations such as the pharmaceutical companies that test products or manufacturers that utilize the cheap labor cost of prisons. This reveals the relational aspect of the prison space, the relationship to power (who owns it) and the way it controlled the ideology of societies which in turn allows the erection of prisons.