The Everyday Life of the State: A State-in-Society Approach

4. Prison as a Space of State-Society Contestation: The Case of Turkish F-Type Prisons

60 4 Prison as a Space of State-Society Contestation The Case of Turkish F-Type Prisons ArdA ibikoglu Michel Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish (1977) that the punitive control mechanisms used in prison to shape prisoners’ lives are reflective of trends in broader society. In other words, the ways in which the prison controls prisoners is similar to how schools control students or how the military controls soldiers in the barracks. Prison is a place of control, and control in prison reflects control in society. However, what Foucault fails to emphasize in his work on the prison is how control in the prison is daily resisted, corrupted, and subverted. Prisoners are not mere docile bodies (as one of Foucault’s chapters is titled), simply helpless against overwhelming official control. Prison is a contested space in which numerous official and nonofficial actors are in constant struggle with each other. Social forces from both inside and outside prisons, such as prisoner organizations, correctional officers, human rights organizations, and prisoner solidarity networks, all play an important role in how control is sustained and challenged inside prisons. This leads to two central premises: first, prison is a place where power and control is reproduced; second, the type of control exercised in prisons is, at the same time, contested by various social forces. This two-sided approach aims to overcome the conceptual distance between prison and society. The first premise posits that prisons are integral to the reproduction of technologies of control within broader soci- 61 Prison as a Space of State-Society Contestation ety. Each control regime inside the prison makes certain assumptions about who the prisoner is and how he or she should behave. These control regimes and the images of the subject they engender are reflected in other facets of social life. In other words, even though prisons are physically separated from society through walls and electric fences on the ground, the control regimes that are practiced in prisons are conceptually linked to such regimes within broader society. However, this is not the only way in which prison and society are connected. As the second premise posits, prisons, as places with their own social dynamics, constitute a field for different actors to interact with one another. Even though prisons separate the criminal from society, they serve as a field of struggle where actors— both from inside and outside the walls of the prison—interact. Elsewhere, it has been illustrated how these two premises serve to explain the changing strategies of control in Turkish prisons between 1980 and 2000, with a close analysis of the evolution of the struggles between prisoner political organizations and official actors both inside and outside the prison wall (Ibikoglu 2010).1 During the 1980s, under the military junta, Turkish prisons faced an intrusive state that aimed to assert increased control over rules of daily life within the wards. The military took control of the prisons and imposed a strict regime, which sought to discipline the prisoner, much as one would discipline a soldier. Within this rather rudimentary disciplinary system, the prisoner/soldier had to follow the daily routine of a lay soldier. Anyone who failed or resisted was punished with high levels of violence. However, these extremely rudimentary and violent efforts to institutionalize military discipline in the prisons failed in the long run as a result of prisoners’ solidarity and cooperation. The prisoners relied on their communes and protests such as hunger strikes to resist the military discipline. The “political wards” of the 1990s were a great break from 1980s prisons under the military regime. Communes and hunger strikes turned out to be the most important sources of authority in the 1990s. Prisoner political organizations were able to force the state to recognize their relative autonomy within the prison walls to live in their communes according to their own rules: they were able to enforce a daily routine that prisoners were required to follow. There was an assigned custodian for every activity, from the use of a nail clipper to sending letters, and everything was observed. These prisoner political organizations were able to institutionalize a strong disciplinary regime within the wards by a meticulous scheduling of daily 62 Arda Ibikoglu life and constant communal supervision. Where the military regime failed, the political prisoner organizations succeeded. Through education sessions, commune principals, and party courts, where informants were identified and punished inside the prisons, the system...