Publisher's Synopsis
This thesis seeks to address a number of serious problems in the prison theories of Michel Foucault. It argues that no explanation for the rise of corrective penalty in the United States can be sufficient without inclusion of the topic of Christian salvation. By applying the work of Charles Taylor to this problem, it argues that the current mass incarceration regime was the inevitable byproduct of a system of punishment that was designed not to create a more socially useful bourgeois citizen but rather to subject the convict to the most Gothically hellish environment imaginable for the purpose of spiritual salvation. Instead of relying on the utopian, sentimental and ultimately empirically dubious discourse of the prison reformers, this thesis analyzes autobiographical sources for evidence of the precise sort of subjectivity created by the prison environment. In particular, it explores the ways that the panoptic regime can produce resistance instead of salvation.Please note: All proceeds from the sale of this thesis are received by Minutes Before Six, a tax-exempt non-profit organization, as described in Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
