CW: discussion of mass incarceration and abuse.



“To understand the social meaning of the prison today within the context of a developing prison industrial complex means that punishment has to be conceptually severed from its seemingly indissoluble link with crime. How often do we encounter the phrase “crime and punishment”? To what extent has the perpetual repetition of the phrase “crime and punishment” in literature, as titles of television shows, both fictional and documentary, and in everyday conversation made it extremely difficult to think about punishment beyond this connection? How have these portrayals located the prison in a causal relation to crime as a natural, necessary, and permanent effect, thus inhibiting serious debates about the viability of the prison today?” –Angela Davis

In Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Angela Davis traces the brief history and rapid expansion of the American prison system, which was initially endorsed by groups such as the Quakers as a progressive alternative to corporal and capital punishment. The innovation of the prison, or the penitentiary, was that it made detainment the punishment itself, rather than the period in which those convicted of crimes would wait to be punished. As industrial capitalism developed, prison sentences, doled out in units of time, would mirror the labor time contained in the commodity form. Now we use the terms “jail” and “prison” to help distinguish between short term or pre-trial detention and long term incarceration. The stated mission of the penitentiary would be rehabilitation, an idea grounded in Enlightenment-era Protestant ideologies of work ethic, isolated reflection, and individualist self-actualization. Solitary confinement, now widely and rightly considered a form of torture, was originally conceived of as a kind of monastic occasion for transformative penance. Prisoners would be confined and monitored as they considered their crimes in a quiet exile that would ostensibly lead to a reformation of the soul.

Davis observes that the prison became the main form of state-sponsored punishment because of economic conditions that allowed for the establishment of the bourgeoisie social class, and intellectual conditions that popularized the idea of inalienable individual rights. Without the concept of individual rights, the state’s removal of these rights could not have been understood as punishment. This is why slaves and even white women were generally not imprisoned in the emerging penitentiary system. Imprisoning them would not have made sense because they were not afforded the individual rights of white men. When slavery was legally abolished in the South, the southern white underclass became less threatening to the social order, and freedmen and women replaced poor whites as the primary targets for incarceration. During slavery, most people incarcerated in the American South were white. Soon after slavery was legally abolished, the majority of southern prisoners were black. The criminal justice system, essentially a tool for monitoring and suppressing the lower class under the auspices of crime and punishment, enabled white southerners to continue to perceive black people as slaves. Initially, the newly criminalized and no longer legally enslaved were contracted out in a convict lease system to work in coal and iron mines in Alabama, on roads in Georgia, and even on some of the same southern plantations where slavery had just been abolished. The convict lease system provided a free labor pool for the development of industrial capitalism in the American South. Once the convict lease system was abolished, prisoners were for the most part confined exclusively to the penitentiary, which would continue to prove a valuable source of profit. The implied ideal image of the prison as vessel for rehabilitation was still there, as it always had been, but now this image would be used to help legally justify the criminalization of blackness.

Any serious study of history reveals that the modern American prison system is a relic and continuation of slavery, maintained in the interest of capital. As Davis points out, “The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.” While the stated goal of the prison is restorative, its fundamental purpose and outcome is punitive. For Davis, this contradiction suggests that prisons are obsolete, and therefore our goal should be abolition, not reform. And ultimately, when we talk about “reforming” prisons, we talk about improvements that should be made to all of society: better food, education, healthcare, and overall living conditions. Whenever we talk about these “reforms,” we are actually talking about what should be alternative institutions to the prison system itself, or institutions which, fully supported, would render prisons obsolete.

In 2012, just a little under a decade after Are Prisons Obsolete? was first published, three men from the U.K. released a videogame called Prison Architect, a game about building and managing a private prison. The game was crowdfunded, with access to the alpha as a reward for pre-ordering the game. This means that it was essentially developed and tweaked publicly, as a response to feedback from its audience. Prison Architect has been widely successful by all measures. It sold over a million copies and made over ten million dollars in pre-order sales before its release was even made official on October 6, 2015. As of September 2015, the game had grossed over $19 million in sales. Prison Architect was entered in the Independent Games Festival, and it won a BAFTA award. Versions have been released for Xbox One and Playstation 4.

Prison Architect, commercially successful and widely discussed, is a useful illustration of how our myopic focus on prison reform allows the penitentiary to remain an immovable fixture of our collective social consciousness. In IGN’s review of the game, Richard Cobbett called it “one of the most in-depth, satisfying builder games in a long time,” and said “few other games have done such a good job at capturing not just the nature of the job they simulate, but also the mindset required to do it ‘properly’.” A piece that I still think about years after I first read it is Paolo Pedercini’s critique, published in Kotaku in 2014. Pedercini’s critique of Prison Architect is rigorous, but also generous. He concedes that many of the game’s treatments of what appears to be an American penitentiary, such as the ratio of violent to nonviolent offenders, could be improved with some thoughtful changes to the game’s mechanics and presentation. He offers helpful suggestions, but identifies no fundamental flaws in the game’s premise or subject matter.

The developers of Prison Architect posted a video response to Pedercini’s critique that is about thirty minutes long. In some ways their response is thoughtful. They at least acknowledge that prisons are a serious subject, not to be trifled with. They make it clear that they had hoped to avoid making a shallow or trivial game about prisons. But in watching their response, I felt an unsettling sense that they were selectively compiling useful feedback that would help them make a better prison game, as if it were simply a question of smoothing out bugs. It seemed as if the game’s fundamental premise and purpose remained uninterrogated by its creators. They talk a lot about their intentions: We never intended to set the game in America. We never intended for riots to be so frequent and bloody. We haven’t had time to balance the game yet. While the developers acknowledge that the image, or “myth,” of the American prison is so pervasive in global media as to be unavoidable, they also rebuff Pedercini’s assertion that they set the game in the United States, rather than deal directly with the implications of unintentionally or uncritically regurgitating this image. This is especially puzzling, considering the current promotional material for the game promises an opportunity to build a maximum security, or “supermax,” facility, a horrid invention which the United States has been instrumental in developing. Drawing from the realities of the American criminal justice system, Pedercini suggests in his piece that players could be given the option to lobby politicians to introduce legislation favoring their prison; they might push for mandatory minimum sentencing, for example, or harsher sentences for juveniles. In response, one of the Prison Architect developers says, “This is quite sinister…this is very dark stuff…if we put these options into the game, we’re treading into terribly terribly dark territory,” as if the chosen subject matter itself were not already sinister, as if the options of building execution chambers and sniper towers were not just as dark.

Though Prison Architect by no means idealizes the experience of managing a private prison, far from it, the game’s premise assumes a binary frame, “two sides” to an argument. It quickly becomes clear to the player that there is a good way and a bad way to run a prison, and that the motivations of each side will come into conflict. On the one side, the “bad” side, is the harsh punitive approach: mass surveillance, solitary confinement, execution chambers, armed guards, and sniper towers. On the other, the “good” side, is the rehabilitation approach: classrooms, drug and alcohol treatment, workshops, and free time. This conflict is dramatized in the game’s narrative campaign, which pits a tough on crime mayor against a bleeding heart academic. Interestingly, profits can be accrued through either approach. The most effective way to make money is to house a large number of prisoners and to keep them subdued, and this can be achieved through either suppression or rehabilitation or a combination of the two. Prisoners who have been deemed more dangerous, or “maximum security” present a greater challenge for suppression and reform, and are thus more lucrative. The fact that the game so easily combines reform and suppression in the interest of profit shows how the logic of rehabilitation is used to justify prisons as a fundamentally necessary part of our existence, like air. The punishment versus rehabilitation dichotomy of Prison Architect dismisses the possibility of abolition, the idea that prisons are fundamentally wrong. I think this comes through in Pedercini’s critique, though it’s sort of blunted in the way he offers it, as a series of helpful suggestions as to how the game might be improved.

The most unsettling thing about Prison Architect is that it feels like the way we think about, or refuse to think about, prisoners. Images of prison saturate our media and culture in a way that commoditizes and dehumanizes those who are incarcerated. An implied, ideal image of the reformed prison, based on a logic of efficiency and rehabilitation, renews the demand for prisons and allows the overall system to continue to accumulate value. Prison Architect is both a simulation and a collection of cartoonishly rendered narrative objects with no agency. Yussef Cole has pointed out that the game offers no outlet for prisoners to organize and take political action. When prisoners riot, they attack guards and break equipment, but do not attempt to make demands or run the facility themselves. In Prison Architect, riots exist to offer the player excitement, intrigue, and a bloody mess to clean up. The developers have since introduced an “escape mode,” which further reinforces violence as the prisoners’ only outlet for self-expression. Escape mode allows you to play from the perspective of a prisoner trying to escape the prison. The only way for the player to build the necessary reputation to recruit other members in their escape plan is to pick fights and break stuff. In their video response to Pedercini’s critique, the developers acknowledge the excessive violence as an unrealistic feedback mechanism that could possibly be smoothed out in the development process. The game itself would be reformed, even as the players simultaneously reformed and expanded their own prisons within the simulation: reform as expansion, reform as optimization.

In a forum discussion, a father describes the play style of his son, who had managed to build what he refers to as a “luxury prison”:

“My son has played Prison Architect for over 50 hours. He says that the mistake most people make on the game is that to maximise profits you need to minimise expenses. In fact, he runs what he calls a luxury prison: the rooms are 5x10 meters, have televisions, phone booths, a sofa, a desk, a shower, a bed, a toilet, a chair, a window and a weights bench; they have 6 pool tables to share; no compulsory work; 8 visitor tables; and 3x three course maximum variety meals a day. The principle advantage is that the prisoners are happy and never riot so you need far fewer guards and hence wage expenses. He also takes a personal approach in that if there has been a riot he notes which individuals were involved, tries to understand why they rioted, and makes sure he fixes it.” I think as with most games, it often shows more about your personality than that of the creators of the game.”

Note the assumed neutrality of the game: it often shows more about your personality than that of the creators of the game. Also noteworthy is the phrase “luxury prison,” which truly captures the contradiction inherent to the reformist imagining of the ideal prison. In my experience, it is true that Prison Architect allows you to create so-called luxury prisons. You are awarded cash grants for completing objectives such as educating prisoners or employing them as laborers, but the most lucrative commodities in the game are the prisoners themselves. Prison Architect makes a salient point about for-profit prisons in that it shows that they are paid per prisoner. In America, the hard labor of convicts was exploited initially in the form of chain gangs and convict leasing. Now, the bodies of prisoners produce value for corrections corporations whether or not they are coerced into performing labor. Furthermore, this profit incentive extends beyond the private into the public sector through the consumption and production of goods within the strictly controlled economy of the penitentiary: corporations sell goods in bulk to prisons for prisoners to consume, and they buy cheap goods and services that prisoners produce through their labor. The primary incentive to continue playing Prison Architect comes from expanding and bringing in more prisoners. Overly rapid expansion is likely to produce instability and riots, so the challenge of the game is learning to expand efficiently. The secondary incentive to keep playing is to see if prisoners re-offend once they are released back into society (this is represented numerically by a simple percentage). The rehabilitation incentive slots easily into the profit and expansion motive. Each individual prisoner is given a “reform” grade on a scale of one to ten, which shows how well the prisoner has been rehabilitated by programs the player has instituted, and how likely prisoners are to be released early on parole as a result. Employing the prisoners in workshops, for example, contributes to a better reform grade. You get a cash bonus for prisoners that are released early, plus another cash bonus for bringing in new prisoners to replace them. With the right system of reform programs in place, you can set up a profitable conveyor belt for releasing and bringing in new prisoners.

My intention is not to castigate the developers of Prison Architect. In many ways, the game’s chosen theme and aesthetic simply makes explicit the fantasy of regimentation, management, and control more subtly implied in other games like Dwarf Fortress. My intention, rather, is to highlight the overwhelming dominance of the reformist ideology underlying Prison Architect and other media like it. It cannot be overstated how difficult it is for people, Americans especially, to imagine life without prisons. While images of the prison are ubiquitous in culture, the prison system makes those who have been incarcerated invisible: relationships are severed, labor anonymized, and voting rights revoked. Although, as Davis notes, the prison is in some ways more humane than some of the punishments that predate it, incarceration hasn’t completely replaced corporal and capital punishment either. Physical abuse is common in prisons, and the death penalty is still legal in thirty-one American states. What prisons have undeniably achieved is they have managed to remove these punishments and their recipients from the public eye.

Every time I’ve brought up the concept of prison abolition in personal conversations, the question immediately posed is always “What’s the alternative?”, and I am reminded of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), which argues that we have become incapable of imagining a society outside the framework of capitalism. As late capitalist, neoliberal institutions continue to buckle and fracture, one could certainly make the case that we are now living in a post-capitalist realist society. For many, imagining something beyond capitalism is becoming less and less optional and theoretical. However, the suffocating realism of incarceration, an essential component of global capitalism, is alive and well. With some prodding, this question of “What’s the alternative?” is usually translated to mean “What would we do with the murderers and rapists?” What about those who commit unforgivable violence, those who are fundamentally incapable of living in society? What does one do with such people if one does not have prisons to contain them? It’s always a difficult conversation because it is impossible to answer such a question in the abstract. Trying to come up with a one-to-one substitute for prison derails conversations about what an alternative society should actually look like. Criminalization is based on who we decide is violent and how. The question of the alternative assumes that there is a clear distinction between violent and nonviolent members of society. Such a question only betrays more underlying questions: What violence was committed and why? How did this person become violent? What responsibility do we have to someone who has committed violence? What would you do with this person if it were up to you, or your community? How do we participate in violence? Can you imagine becoming a violent person? What causes people to commit violence? How does our culture produce violence, and how do we treat it?

A recent article in the New Inquiry by Victoria Law discusses how the violent versus nonviolent dichotomy that typically defines conversations around criminal justice reform falls short. How do we keep more “nonviolent” offenders out of prison, so goes the logic, and how do we reform the violent ones? This binary frame is similar to the one used to categorize undocumented people as either criminals or “good” immigrants who “deserve” to stay in the country. It’s a framework that encourages society to criminalize more people as violent, especially victims of abuse, while neglecting the root causes of violence. For example, Bresha Meadows is a fifteen-year-old girl from Ohio who was first incarcerated at age fourteen. She was charged with the aggravated murder of her father after she shot and killed him. Bresha’s mother Brandi says that her daughter had been struggling with mental health, and was defending herself and her family. According to the mother, Bresha’s father had been abusing them for years. Bresha was detained before receiving a trial, spent most of her time in a juvenile jail, and was eventually transferred to a state facility for a mental health evaluation, which her family was forced to pay for out of pocket. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for May 8, and a trial is scheduled for May 22, which will be Day 297 of Bresha’s confinement. There is an active campaign to #FreeBresha, return her to her family, and have all charges dropped. The logic of incarceration has deemed this girl violent, and I don’t think cases like this one can be written off as exceptions or “mistakes” because there are many similar cases (of both minors and adults) in which victims of violence and abuse are criminalized as irredeemably violent themselves. This is what the prison industrial complex is designed to do: perpetuate violence in order to fill up cells. Every prison built is a covenant to fill it.



Democracy 3 (2013) is another game that illustrates how prisons remain a permanent fixture of society, how the notion of their elimination is off limits even to our imaginations. This game simulates government, budgets, and policy on a more macro level than Prison Architect. You play as the head of one of six Western nations: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the U.S., or the U.K. When you load the game up, the title screen music sounds like something right out of the West Wing. Your job is to run the country as you see fit, get reelected, and avoid assassination. For the purposes of this analysis, I mostly played as the U.S.



In Democracy 3 “crime” and “violent crime” are separate categories. The more general category of crime includes “car crime, burglary, etc., but also covers fraud and other similar crimes,” while violent crime includes “murder, rape, and muggings.” The distinction the game makes between violence and nonviolence is worth further consideration. Consider how fraud is seen as a nonviolent crime, even though it can cause a relatively large number of people to experience real suffering in the form of crushing debt or loss of a home. The significant physical and mental suffering inflicted on poor populations by corporate fraud is not considered a violent crime because it is generally committed by rich people from the comfort of a fine office chair.

What becomes clear from these definitions is that crime is obscured by the simulation, rather than defined by the player through policy. Crime is an output, an effect. It is something the player must reign in, rather than define. Drug addiction increases general crime, especially if drugs are legalized, which increases consumption. Alcohol abuse increases violent crime, which can be reduced by investing in education, or by instituting a death penalty. There is something called “racial tension” (racism?) that also increases violent crime. A “racial profiling” policy, though unpopular, reduces both violent crime and general crime.

Laws and institutions work in pretty much the same way in Democracy 3. It costs a certain amount of political capital to institute new policies or discard ones that are already in place. The more controversial a policy, the more political capital it requires to legislate or eliminate. Many policies, such as “armed police” can be cancelled, or removed entirely with enough political capital, while some can be defunded, but never removed. Here are some examples of policies that you can “cancel”: foreign aid, income tax, state schools, state healthcare. Those institutions which cannot be cancelled include border controls, military funding, intelligence services, prisons, and police. One would be hard pressed to find a more illustrative example of how the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the surveillance state work in concert to reinforce the logic of crime and punishment. In the world of Democracy 3, diverting resources away from prisons objectively increases unemployment and crime. There is no voting block for which diverting funds away from prisons is popular, while increased funding for prisons is popular with both liberals and conservatives. In the world envisioned by Democracy 3, nearly every policy and institution can be eliminated, except for prisons, police, surveillance, and the military. While the game does offer alternative avenues for reducing crime, such as education and youth club subsidies, prisons and police can never be abolished, even once crime has been pretty much eliminated.

The text description of the “private prison” policy reads, “Liberals will have ethical concerns about profiting from incarceration, but still be pleased if spending is high enough to promote rehabilitation.” In other words, spending money on prisons translates directly to rehabilitation. Minimal funding of prisons is described as “overcrowded cells,” while maximum funding is described as “extensive rehabilitation.” Though crime increases as a response to poverty, unemployment, and drug abuse, the prison system itself never expands or contracts. It is either funded or underfunded. Devoting more capital to prisons means offering greater support to the prisoners that exist. There is no acknowledgement of the fact that pouring resources into the prison industrial complex increases demand for prisoners and incentivizes criminalization.

The game also includes assassination, as feedback which discourages players from becoming overly ambitious in their pursuit of radical governance. Constituents are fairly trigger happy, so one of the most difficult challenges is learning how to institute policies that solve problems and get you re-elected while avoiding the wrath of radical groups alienated by these policies. In a first playthrough, both a black power group and a conservative reactionary militia were plotting my assassination after I had disarmed the police, defunded the military, and all but eliminated border controls. Conservatives were angry because less soldiers and more immigrants, while ethnic minorities were angry because of the rise in unemployment, so-called racial tension, and crime, all results of my diversion of resources away from the military, police, and border control. Based on the game’s modeling, I concluded that the most effective way to pursue revolutionary governance would be to bulk up the surveillance state with cameras, wiretaps, and curfews in order to protect myself from assassination.

There are no concrete resources in Democracy 3 such as food or water, only dollars. As John Brindle has pointed out, it is a purely economic model. The game positions itself as an arbiter of competing ideologies, adopting a rhetorical position of neutrality. This is not unusual for games. Games are pure ideology, in that they force you to observe the world through a lens. The lens, hidden in the plain sight of a user interface, is the necessary fiction that allows you to play the game.

The ideological vision of Democracy 3 brings us back to the “two sides” frame described earlier in reference to Prison Architect. The promotional flier for the game reads “socialist paradise?” or “capitalist utopia?”. This techno-utopian vision asserts that there are two clear sides to consider in every debate. Surprising no one, I played with the intention of creating a socialist paradise. I wasn’t awarded the official “Socialist Paradise” achievement until I maxed out funding for the police, the prison system, border security, and intelligence services. Maximizing funding for border security was necessary for eliminating unemployment and ghettos. Another indirect result was reduced “racial tension” because of a decrease in immigration and the ethnic minority population. Fully funding surveillance also eliminated organized crime, which had persisted despite the legalization and taxation of all drugs.

Democracy 3, through the logics of capitalist realism and mass incarceration, allowed me to create a neoliberal imperialist “socialism,” a utopia that would make U.S. policy proud. In a sense, it models the neoliberal dream that some would argue has been shattered by the election of Donald Trump, and which for America reached its height with the institution of “Great Society” programs such as Medicare. My popularity at the polls after fully funding all crime and punishment institutions was literally 100%. The opposition party had been eliminated, so I ran unopposed. Since the game doesn’t model voter suppression (only voter apathy), I can only assume the people’s support for the effects of these institutions, across all competing ideologies and voting blocks, was genuine.

What the systems of both Prison Architect and Democracy 3 obscure is that crime is more of an act of pathologizing than an objective output or effect. We pathologize some communities as criminal, while we depathologize others. Left to its own devices, the U.S. criminal justice system will likely never do anything to punish the bureaucrats responsible for the Flint water crisis, an act of unforgivable, irreparable violence that affects multiple generations and is still ongoing, much more consequential than the effects of any gang or drug dealer. Nor will the U.S. president be held accountable by the criminal justice system for casually bombing Syria or Afghanistan. The pathologizing of criminal behavior works in the interest of capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. This is why prisons don’t work. They fail to rehabilitate because that’s not what they’re for, and they fail to reduce violence because that’s not what they’re for. Punishment does not solve crime because punishment is the very act of identifying and producing criminals. Prisons are containers for our pathology, not a natural “effect” of crime. They are not solutions to fundamental character flaws or learned behaviors. They were always obsolete.