Carceral archipelagos (n.) have no outside: they take back with one hand what they seem to exclude with the other, saving everything, even what they punish, wasting not even what they disqualify.
The Carceral archipelagos (n.) is the chain of institutions far beyond criminal law — orphanages, reformatories, almshouses, factory-convents, charities — in which the prison form slowly fades but never disappears.
The Carceral archipelagos (n.) naturalizes the legal power to punish as it legalizes the technical power to discipline — the prison seems no different in kind from the school or clinic, and punishing no different from curing or educating.
Carceral archipelagos (n.) have at their centre no 'centre of power', no king's body, no contract of wills, but a strategic distribution of walls, spaces, rules and discourses — governed in the end by the necessity of combat and the rules of strategy.
Carceral archipelagos (n.) run without a break from disorder to offence: 'You will end up in the convict-ship,' the slightest indiscipline seems to say; and the harshest prison tells the lifer, 'I shall note the slightest irregularity in your conduct.'
Carceral archipelagos (n.) are not the prison's walls but a fourfold ensemble: disciplinary super-power, auxiliary knowledge, the inverted efficiency of reproducing crime, and the utopian duplication of endless reform — programmes to correct delinquents and mechanisms that reinforce them, in one figure.