Insular Segregation

If we are to accept Wacquant’s argument that places like Pruitt-Igoe are part of the architecture of “the ghetto” as “prison” (and vice versa) then the ghetto obtains a representation of Foucault’s Panopticon with intentions of maximizing black imprisonment for capital. Wacquant’s argument exposes the intimate link between “the ghetto” and “the prison” as fraternal twins (not identical). In every aspect of “the ghetto” there is a policing eye always fixed on the habitants’ actions. 

Architecturally, public housing projects often resemble prisons with “’random searches, segregation, curfews, and resident counts – all familiar procedures of efficient prison management’” (107 (Miller, 1997: 101). With families on welfare, the ‘necessity’ for government intervention is present. Management of financials, children, and lifestyle are taken on by the state. In this way the state enforces, with a seemingly hidden eye, “the disciplining of women from the lower class and caste [which] continues to operate primarily through the agencies of the social arm of the American state (namely, welfare and workfare)” (Note 1, p. 121). The state, just as in the Pruitt-Igoe case seems to lurk about so much so that parents educate their children on how to react when the state comes to ‘inspect’ (Freidrichs). Similarly the education systems that are in “the ghettos” operate “in the manner of institutions of confinement whose primary mission is not to educate but to ensure ‘custody and control’” (108). With this notion, Wacquant’s argument exposes that the future, the children of people (especially of color) who live in “the ghettos” lack a mainstreamed social education and are instead indoctrinated into a penal system. Instead of trained teachers, equipment, operational bathroom facilities, and textbooks schools in such areas fund “for more weapon scanners, cameras, emergency telephones, sign-in desks, and security personnel, whose duty is to repel unwanted intruders from the outside and hem students inside the school’s walls” (108). The dearth of rudimentary education for children in “the ghettos” and the immersion into a world of possibility of violence, being keenly watched, and lack of facility mirror the Panopticon. 

The economic and class aspects are interwoven in Wacquant’s theses as they are irrevocable from the complex problems surrounding the racialization of criminality, punishment, and penal systems in America. Too, the maximization of black labor for capital has been transfigured into a different type of labor for capital. “Denied access to valued cultural capital” (119), being subject to reimbursement to prisons, exclusion “from social redistribution and public aid” (119), (et al) promote an enclosed, circular economy between the penal system and minorities that live in “the ghettos”. The denial of opportunity for grants to educate one’s self, to pay off loans, to work, to eat, to shelter one’s self creates an insulated economy between “the ghettos” and “prisons” because this denied access excluded such people from society.