Challenge to What Is: The Effect and Aftermath of Exposing Intolerable Conditions of Confinement

Abstract

This collection could not have come in a more prescient time. As the editors suggest, “The present volume is, at once, then, a historical archive, a conceptual challenge, and a tactical tool kit.”1 I will focus my comments on some tactical questions regarding the effect and aftermath of the GIP investigation on the intolerability of incarceration. What effect did it have on those incarcerated? On prison conditions? On the rationale of confinement? My own work focuses on the connections between prison abolition and anti-disability confinement, especially the movements of deinstitutionalization and anti-psychiatry. To me, this monumental collection/translation project highlights again the continuity of disability confinement – mental crisis in prison is a general condition not an exception, as seen by many testimonies; in addition, “prison suicides in France marked not only a symptom of these desperate conditions, but also a final form of protest and escape;”2 and the GIP, through Foucault’s work, also saw the connections to psych incarceration outside the walls of the prison (the psych information groups that I hope someone translates next..). The GIP (Prisons Information Group) “sought to make the intolerable physical, mental, and emotional conditions of incarceration visible in ways that provoked and supported public intolerance of them.”3 The role of the GIP, then, was: “to unite the interior and exterior of the prison in the same struggle.”4 In my work,5 I discuss the cumulative effect