“Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition” explores the Prison Information Group (GIP), an organization founded by notable academics, including Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, to expose the deplorable conditions of the French Prison system.
“Little information is published on prisons,” Foucault announced on behalf of the GIP. “It is one of the hidden regions of our social system, one of the dark zones of our life. We have the right to know; we want to know.”
In this interview, I spoke with the book’s editors, Perry Zurn and Andrew Dilts, about the legacy and lessons of the GIP.
Eugene Wolters: What was the GIP?
Perry Zurn: The GIP (or Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons, the Prisons Information Group) was a prison activist organization in France, conceived of in 1970 and operational well into 1973. Beyond this simple description, the GIP can be characterized in a number of competing ways.
First, it was, certainly, an information group; it did not expressly pursue reform measures, nor did it understand itself as working toward the abolition of the prison. It aimed to relay information about prisons between prisoners themselves, as well as from prisoners to the outside world. However, a constitutive element of the prison is silencing—the silencing of lives, of pain, of political voice. Insofar as silence, then, is an essential component of carceral logic, the GIP was an abolitionist enterprise, a voice-magnifying attack on the prison’s own foundations.
Second, it was a vibrant collaboration between prisoners, ex-prisoners, their families, social activists, academics, and professionals; it invoked a powerful network of visible and anonymous forces to build horizontal community, awareness, and support. Now, however, the GIP is best remembered as being founded by Daniel Defert, directed by Michel Foucault, and forming the basis of the latter’s Punitive Society lectures and, ultimately, his book Discipline and Punish. It is re-constituted as an event that galvanized leading intellectuals of the time, including Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Genet.
So, what is the GIP? Today, the GIP is the sign of both an archive and a spirit. And it is for this reason that its legacy remains as changeable as it is powerful.
EW: Foucault described the GIP as a failure – should we accept this statement at face value?
PZ: The GIP officially disbanded at the end of 1972, although its final publication and several tracts appeared the next year. The organization folded in favor of the Comité d’action des prisonniers (Prisons Action Committee [CAP]), led entirely by ex-prisoners. As Foucault would reflect in 1980, this is exactly as it should be: an outgrowth of the GIP’s own principle of donner la parole or giving the floor to prisoners. But it was Deleuze who captured Foucault’s sense of defeat right after the GIP disbanded. As he recalls, “Foucault only remembered the fact that he had lost […] he thought he had lost because everything closed down again […] things returned to exactly the way they were”[1]. The prison—as a failure of justice, education, and social management—remained steadfast and even grew stronger.
It is not uncommon for social justice advocates to feel they have failed; nor is it uncommon for prison activists in particular to see the prison as a failure or the justice system itself as constituted by failure. As I argue, however, in my chapter, “Work and Failure: Assessing the Prisons Information Group,” these attributions of failure are imprecise. Rather than rely on the simple term “failure”—within which so many elisions, assumptions, and ideological commitments are comfortably ensconced—let’s unpack it and say more of what we mean. I identify five modalities of failure: discursive, structural, systemic, deconstructive, and productive. In developing an account of each one, I decouple failure from any moralizing schemas and define its multiple modes simply as the relationship of an act to itself, discourse, systems, and effects. Greater precision at the conceptual register should equip us to by turns resist or harness the work of failure in our attempts to address the multi-modal reality of the prison itself.
EW: While the connection between the GIP and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish seems fairly straightforward, can you elaborate on the connection described between Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo-analysis and the GIP?
PZ: The relationship between the GIP and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is in fact not straightforward. It raises a number of difficult, as yet unanswered questions. First, many academics were involved in the GIP, but only Foucault went on to write a major work on the prison. Why Foucault?
Second, how does one go from an activist effort hell-bent on amplifying prisoners’ voices to writing a scholarly book that relies primarily on histories, legislation, and instructional codes?[2] Why not, for instance, cite Serge Livrozet, previously incarcerated co-founder of the CAP, whose first book, De la Prison à la révolte, was released in 1973? Foucault wrote a preface to the book, critiquing the tendency to dismiss prisoners’ ideas in favor of their stories, and yet, Livrozet’s own ideas—many of which, like the production of delinquency, are consonant with Foucault’s project—do not appear in Discipline and Punish. Relatedly, why, in the opening pages, does Foucault not mention the GIP’s work in France, but does mention the recent “prison revolts” “throughout the world”[3]?
Third, how does one go from organizing around contemporary social exigencies to exploring penal developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Well, some might say that the GIP, like many activist efforts, was an act of intolerance, whereas Discipline and Punish is a work of genealogy. This is to oversimplify. The GIP takes an institution, unquestioned on the social horizon, and traces the current conditions that make it possible, identifies the formations of power-knowledge that undergird it, and explores other thinkable configurations. Is this not something activism can do? In turn, Discipline and Punish does in fact identify intolerable realities and facilitate the production of active intolerance, by “mak[ing] the skin more irritable and the sensibilities more recalcitrant, sharpening an intolerance to effects of power and the habits that muffle them”[4]. Is this not something scholarship can do?
EW: Daniel Defert lamented the “suffocating role of public intellectuals” in the GIP. You explore in the introduction Gayatri’s Spivak’s concept of speaking for others, and Dylan Rodriguez’s chapter specifically attacks the use of white intellectuals in prison abolition. What is your assessment of this?
Andrew Dilts: The study of the GIP, its practices, and its legacy ought to call to our attention how systems of knowledge production are deeply invested in who is making knowledge claims, which is to say: to whom is epistemic credibility granted automatically and who is epistemically silenced.[5] Moreover, it should direct our attention to the ways that institutional conditions under which claims are authorized as “knowledge” are largely (if not entirely) political, a point made even more clearly by women of color feminists, such as Patricia Hill Collins [6]. And this is something that Rodríguez’s contribution does in our volume.
But first, I think it’s important not to collapse “academics” and “intellectuals,” something that Rodríguez (along with Joy James in particular) has noted in earlier work [7]. One of the things that the GIP sought to do was to draw attention to how the conditions of “knowing” about prisons in France, in the early 1970s, was entirely controlled by the state. And in contrast to U.S. prisons, French prisons were entirely closed off to the public, to the press, to individuals who were not family members or lawyers for incarcerated persons. Foucault himself never actually set foot inside a prison until he visited Attica in April of 1972 (not even a year after the uprisings there). So, the GIP’s focus on “donner la parole” (to give prisoners the floor) and its self-characterization as an “information group” was specifically a political attack on what could and would count as knowledge about the prison and who should be heard as “prison experts.”
Rodríguez takes up this work and pushes it, arguing that Foucault (and other high profile members of the GIP who were also tied to the academy) never overcame the conditions of academic knowledge production to which they were tied, even as they may have fought against it. This is why Rodríguez frames his essay as a “rejoinder” to the GIP’s practice, paying attention to the particular social position that Foucault inhabited and the particular conditions of the French prison which ought not be taken up as some abstract “site” or “location” that is divorced from its particular racial logic(s). As Rodríguez puts it, “A modest rejoinder to this position [that the GIP was only interested in bringing attention to the prison as a problem] is necessary, one that both appreciates the worldly work accomplished by the most incisive critical practices of white academic raciality while pointing to the limits of its necessary alienation from the violence that is the normative condition of white raciality’s ascendance as such” (157).
That is to say, it is at the heart of the position of white academic raciality (that knowledge is “objective” or could be merely descriptive) that knowledge of “the prison” or “the police” becomes divorced from its political character, and in turn, granted supremacy and authority over other knowledges (and other persons). So, it is important to note that Rodríguez is not really taking on the “intellectual” per se in this essay, but more specifically academics who work under the terms of what he calls “white academic raciality.” White academic raciality is “both an epochal, disciplining knowledge-project and a laboriously contrived, transparent racial position. It is this nexus of disciplinarity and transparency… that positions white academic raciality as the veritable monopoly position for the making of proper knowledge as such” (147).
Rodríguez argues that the GIP was unable to disrupt the practices of white academic raciality and was therefore limited in the work it could do for liberation. That is, even if the GIP was able to disrupt how knowledge about the prison was being produced and authorized in France, they did not disrupt the deeper investments that many of its members had to the politics of academic knowledge production. I take this to mean that Rodriguez is zeroing in not simply on who takes part in knowledge production about “the prison” and “the police,” but the assumptions of knowledge production themselves tied up in who does that work. Even as the GIP deferred to the voices of incarcerated persons and their families, Rodríguez argues that they (and Foucault in particular) never escaped their attachment to racialized forms of academic knowledge production and failed to systematically disrupt such academic raciality itself.
In contrast, Rodríguez gives us the example of the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) which operated as an entirely poor Black and working-class organization in Los Angeles during the 1970s, gathering information on police and carceral violence perpetrated by the state against folks in South Central LA. What the GIP and Foucault may have sought to do, escape the “suffocating role of public intellectuals,” Rodríguez argues, the CAPA is able to do. It is not, as he notes, simply a matter of the role of “white intellectuals” that is at stake here, but the epistemic conditions under which white supremacy functions and is reinscribed, even in much radical anti-prison work and theory.
So, the question for white academics, white intellectuals, and frankly anyone at all who is “white” (in at least the political sense of occupying a positions of privilege and authority that are based on racial identification) who claim to be prison abolitionists, is whether their abolitionist work is itself reinscribing white supremacy as a political system. And this is going to be especially the case for well-positioned academics (like myself) who work in the academy, which is historically and presently a white supremacist institution.
Or, to put it differently: if we are going to tear down the prisons, but not also the university-as-such, haven’t we missed the point entirely?
EW: It also seems ironic, given the idea of the suffocating role of public intellectuals, that Foucault himself would overshadow the rest of the GIP. Even the book focuses on Foucault’s role, though it acknowledges this. Is there still much to be explored from the GIP’s other contributors: Deleuze, Cixous, Rancière, the prisoners themselves?
PZ: Honestly, there is still much work to be done exploring the GIP’s role in Foucault’s thought and life, particularly with the release of his earliest lecture courses. In fact, Andrew Dilts and I are editing a special issue of the Carceral Notebooks, titled, “Challenging the Punitive Society.” We have fantastic contributions from Natalie Cisneros, Nicolas Drolc, Lisa Guenther, Michael Hames-García, Bernard Harcourt, Joy James, Kevin Thompson, Janos Toevs, and Jesus R. Velasco. The issue is set to be released late this year.
That said, there is even more work to be done to unearth and analyze the GIP’s relation to other members of the group. I am particularly interested, for example, in the case of Hélène Cixous. Many of the GIP’s meetings were held in her apartment. In the aftermath of the Nancy prison revolt, February 1972, at a demonstration in support of the Nancy mutineers, she was beaten and left unconscious by the police. In April 1972, she co-edited one of the five Intolerable booklets, Cahiers de revendications [Lists of Demands]. Together with Ariane Mnouchkine, of Theatre du Soleil, a troupe with which she remains active today, Cixous organized various instances of political theatre as a component of the GIP’s work. Moreover, she understands her haunting novel Dedans [Inside] to express the themes of confinement so prominent at this time in her life. But all of this needs to be put in the context of her relationship to activism and literature, the correlations she sees between prison issues and feminism, as well as the background of the Algerian War. This is one of my current projects.
Other scholars are pursuing equally rich lines of inquiry. Kalinka Alvarez, PhD candidate at Columbia University, is developing a multi-faceted analysis of the relationship between Michel Foucault and Jean Genet, anchored specifically in the GIP years. Michael Rembis, Associate Professor at the University of Buffalo, is revisiting the debate between Gayatri Spivak’s subaltern and Foucault’s specific intellectual to explore the representation of mad and disabled subjectivities and the positionality of the poststructuralist intellectual. And Nicolas Drolc, director of Sur les toits [On the Roofs](2014), a documentary on the Nancy prison revolt of 1972, is currently putting the finishing touches on his second production, La Mort se mérite [Death Must be Earned]. The film is an intimate portrait of Serge Livrozet, telling, in an experimental format, the story of his life, from his incarceration and the birth of his activist fervor to his retirement and the death of his political hopes.
New GIP-related projects among Anglophone scholars, moreover, will be well-served by another volume I am co-editing with Kevin Thompson (DePaul University): Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, 1970-1980 (University of Minnesota Press, under contract). This will be the first authoritative collection of GIP documents available in English translation.
EW: In Foucault’s conception of the prison system, many of us seem to get caught up in its normalizing and punitive function. Natalie Cisneros’ chapter explores Foucault’s idea of “massive elimination,” especially in the context of immigrant detention centers. Could you elaborate on this?
AD: I think that Cisneros’ chapter shows how the work of punitive normalization is deeply connected to the genocidal logic of modern racism. What I see Cisneros doing masterfully in her essay, in part, is linking together three powerful strands of thought through Foucault’s remarks about visiting Attica in 1972 (where the terms “massive elimination” and “eliminative process” are used): first, Angela Davis’ critique that Discipline and Punish fails to account for the racial violence constitutive of the prison; second, that practices of deportation and detention employed against migrants into the United States are forms of racial violence; and third, that the prison operates through the elimination of populations. Taken together, Cisneros shows us an inseparable link between incarceration and genocide. This is not a thought that is comfortable for prison or immigration reformers, in that it pushes us to recognize that the terms of political membership (specifically state-based citizenship) themselves are linked to a form of biopolitics that readily exposes specific populations to premature death (to borrow Ruth Gilmore’s definition of “racism”)[8].
The link is in Davis’ attention to Foucault’s comment that the “prison is not only punitive; it is also part of an eliminative process. Prison is the physical elimination of people who come out of it, who die sometimes directly, and almost always indirectly”[9]. Cisneros argues that Foucault’s experience at Attica and his work with the GIP shaped his analysis of the prison in terms that escape the normalization framework of Discipline and Punish and arguably prefigure the later work on biopower and biopolitics. This is one way of showing how, even in Foucault’s lexicon, the prison functions as an instrument of modern racism (as he terms it in Society Must Be Defended) even if he didn’t make that connection explicit. As he put it the same year as the Attica interview, “The whole penal system is essentially pointed toward and governed by death. A verdict of conviction does not lead, as people think, to a sentence of prison or death; if it prescribes prison, this is always with a possible added bonus: death”[10]. As a description of the prison, this really shouldn’t sound odd to us, and it takes remarkable efforts of refusal and denial to think about jails, detention centers, and prisons as places where death isn’t always present. But if we think about what happened to Sandra Bland in Texas, or to Wakiesha Wilson in Los Angeles, or to Freddie Gray in Baltimore, or if we listen to the experiences of gender-non-conforming and trans* persons in prisons, we ought to have no such delusions. And it calls us, Cisneros argues, to center the knowledges of immigrants themselves as a way of generating an active intolerance to immigrant detention and deportation.
And even though Foucault didn’t directly take up the questions of migration and deportation in his work, that we see the prison-form used so centrally in US immigration “policy” (through immigrant detention and deportation) ought to not simply give us pause, but rather, it should reveal to us the genocidal nature of that policy, and serve as a reminder that the incarceration of persons is always a project of death. And when it targets populations (as Davis rightly notes US incarceration does, and Cisneros rightly notes that US immigration policy does), it is a project of mass death: a project of genocide.
EW: Lisa Guenther’s chapter argues that in their struggle to have their mundane desires heard (such as flush toilets, access to newspapers, exercise equipment, etc.), the prisoners of the GIP were breaking down the notion of guilt and innocence. Can you elaborate on this?
AD: There is a very common misreading of Foucault’s work on the prison that constantly frustrates me: the idea that Foucault was somehow a “prison reformer” interested in getting punishment “right.” Now, there are good reasons for this misreading in that, under current conditions (roughly liberalism as a moral system, in its various forms), it is hard to think outside of the terms of “reform” and the given terms of morality through which existing institutions are evaluated. But, as I think that Guenther’s essay here helps make clear, Foucault and the GIP were engaged in the work of rethinking the grounds of morality itself, of resisting the idea that guilt and innocence are conditions attached simply to actions or to persons’ characters and not, as an analysis of prisons themselves demonstrates, the outcomes of specific force-relations, of power. Simply: “guilt” and “innocence” are political categories which, under liberalism(s) at least, are constitutive of “humanist” reforms. The GIP’s action, as Foucault described it in a 1971 interview (which Guenther cites in her piece), “isn’t concerned with the soul or the man behind the convict, but it seeks to obliterate the deep division that lies between innocence and guilt” [11].
What Guenther’s chapter foregrounds here is how the discourse of “human rights” has been largely insufficient to resist the state violence of the prison precisely because the prison operates through this discourse. The rise of the era of “mass incarceration” in the United States, we ought to remember, is also the era of “human rights” as the dominant frame for claims against the state. As Guenther argues, the discourse of rights brings with it the requirement that to be a barer of such rights requires one to “rise above ‘mere’ animality’” and make claims from the very position that is denied to incarcerated persons. As such, and drawing (in a very Foucauldian fashion) from concrete organizing work both inside and outside the prison, Guenther argues for a “creaturely politics” of resistance that does not require individuals to entirely (or at all) frame their demands under the terms offered by the state. As she puts it:
The movement from inarticulate grumbling or whimpering, to a collective articulation of the intolerable, and ultimately toward active intolerance, is not a movement of transcendence from the animal to the human, or from apolitical passivity to political action, but rather an intensification of the creaturely needs, desires, and capacities that motivate and sustain political life as such (227).
And this means taking up the notions of guilt and innocence requires us to follow the GIP’s insistence to give incarcerated persons the floor and listen to them in ways that are themselves refusals to accept the refusal of epistemic credibility granted to prisoners about what matters to them. And vice-versa: taking seriously what incarcerated persons say requires us to take up the notions of guilt and innocence upon which they have been subjected to incarceration.
This is also what Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman, Derrick Quinterro, and Donald Middlebrooks speak to in their “intolerable” statements included in the book. These three men are incarcerated on death-row in Tennessee and are members of the REACH-Coalition. Their short reflections trace the esoteric, the mundane, the material, and the philosophic objects that are intolerable, and in doing so resist the notions that they are not themselves the most reliable experts on the prison to whom we ought to listen. Naming the intolerable as such, the GIP argued, was a specific step in cultivating active intolerance to those intolerable things. And the notion that these things can be named for others is something that the GIP (and we) sought to question. Guenther reminds us that the claims of incarcerated persons matter. They matter in no small part because it is through the confinement of the body, through the complete management of the individual as a creature that incarceration functions. The demand that many prison reformers and prison advocates alike make, that incarcerated persons must make their appeals on already intelligibly “political” terms, is to require them to make demands on the very terms that they have already been denied agency over.
EW: What is an academic’s role, if any, in prison abolition these days?
PZ: It is relatively easy, for a scholar who has not been previously incarcerated, to study the prison as a space separate from the scholar’s everyday life. And it does not require much from the academic to purport abolition as an intellectual position. To really do it, however, or to really do it well, demands a different level of engagement. It means speaking with prisoners and formerly incarcerated people, and reading and citing their works. It means undertaking a deep and ongoing analysis of the ways in which systems of inequality (e.g. racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism and ableism) construct and maintain the prison system. It means disabusing oneself and others of the notion that prisons are a natural and necessary part of our social landscape. It means creating radical forms of community accountability and transformation. For the academic, prison abolition involves doing genealogical work, doing critical work, and doing the work of political imagination.
But this is not all. The role of the academic in prison resistance efforts must also start at home, interrogating the very spaces in which we speak and write. It must begin by seeing carceral logics at work in the university today. How does the university exclude? How does it confine? How is it, like the prison, also structured and supported by systems of inequality? How is academic knowledge and development inextricably tied to penal labor, through capitalist production and scientific experimentation? It means asking ourselves what we’re doing here. And not saying, in any case, that this is prima facie a place of education and social formation. It means committing to combating alienation, punitive isolation, structural oppression, and colonial knowledge-formation in favor of new strategies that support social and ecological flourishing, strategies already cultivated by marginalized communities all over the world.
AD: I would only add that the call to prison abolition is a call to think more broadly than a single institution or practice, but to recognize that the prison is a target for abolition (like chattel slavery before it) because it sits at the intersection between an entire series of institutions and practices that are predicated on the massive elimination of populations, of the marginalization of persons, and of the exposure to premature death of the many for the sake of the few. As Perry notes, prison abolition isn’t just about the prison. Or as Angela Davis reminds us (herself a formerly incarcerated philosopher):
[R]ather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society. Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition [12].
For Davis, an abolitionist practice that does not seek to deal with other structures of domination will fail to decarcerate because the goal of abolition is not simply to decarcerate, to achieve “negative” abolition, but to build the abolition-democracy: the world without prisons, a world without domination, a world of deep democratic practice. This must be not simply a goal, but an everyday practice and way of living, as S. Lamble puts it in the fantastic volume, Captive Genders, “In this way, ‘living abolition’ is part of the daily practice of creating a world without cages”[13].
So, what does it mean to take up such work from the relatively privileged position of the academy (even assuming that such a position exists for many academics, given the precarity of academic employment for the overwhelming majority of persons who teach)? One way to reframe the question is to become accomplices (rather than allies) in that work and do more than merely recognize that the institutions which currently support us (if they even do) are also carceral institutions in need of positive-abolition as well. As Indigenous Action Media put it:
Intellectuals are most often fixated on un-learning oppression. These lot generally don’t have their feet on the ground, but are quick to be critical of those who do. Should we desire to merely “unlearn” oppression, or to smash it to fucking pieces, and have it’s very existence gone? An accomplice as academic would seek ways to leverage resources and material support and/or betray their institution to further liberation struggles. An intellectual accomplice would strategize with, not for and not be afraid to pick up a hammer.
If prison abolition is really going to be the work of collective liberation, those of us in positions which enjoy and maintain the domination and marginalization of others are going to have lose those positions, actively work to undermine them, and build a world in which those positions simply no longer exist. To think, however, that such “losses” are going to be painful is to presume (wrongly, I think) that what far too many of us hold today is rightfully “ours” in the first place. Or, as the late Joel Olson puts it, it would be to embrace “a politics based on a simple principle: No privilege held can compare to a world in which privilege does not exist” [14].
Perry Zurn is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Curiosity at the University of Pennsylvania.
Andrew Dilts is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at Loyola Marymount University.
[1] Gilles Deleuze, “Foucault and the Prison” (1986), Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975-1995 (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2007), 277.
[2] The chief exception being Pierre Lacenaire’s Mémoires, révélations, et poesies (Paris: Poussin, 1836).
[3] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975; New York: Vintage, 1977), 30 and 268.
[4] Foucault, “Préface” to Les Juges kaki (1977), Dits et Ecrits II (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), no. 191, 139.
[5] See Linda Martín Alcoff, “On Judging Epistemic Credibility: Is Social Identity Relevant?” EnGendering Rationalities, ed. Nancy and Sandra Morgen (New York: SUNY Press, 2001), 53-80, and Kristie Dotson, “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011): 236–57.
[6] See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (London: HarperCollins, 1990).
[7] See Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), Joy James, ed., Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), and Joy James, The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005).
[8] See Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 28.
[9] Michel Foucault and John K. Simon, “Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview,” Social Justice 18, no. 3 (1991): 26–34, 30.
[10] Michel Foucault, “Pompidou’s Two Deaths,” in Power, ed. James Faubion, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984 (New York: The New Press, 2000), 419.
[11] Michel Foucault, “Revolutionary Action: ‘Until Now,’” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 227.
[12] Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 108.
[13] S. Lamble, “Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex through Queer/trans Analysis and Action,” in Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, ed. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith (Oakland: AK Press, 2011), 235–65, 254.
[14] Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 145.