The concept of a carceral archipelago was first used by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 publication, Surveiller et Punir,[1][2] to describe the modern penal system of the 1970s, embodied by the well-known penal institution at Mettray in France.[2] The phrase combines the adjective "carceral", which means that which is related to jail or prison, with archipelago—a group of islands. Foucault referred to the "island" units of the "archipelago" as a metaphor for the mechanisms, technologies, knowledge systems and networks related to a carceral continuum. The 1973 English publication of the book by Solzhenitsyn called The Gulag Archipelago referred to the forced labor camps and prisons that composed the sprawling carceral network of the Soviet Gulag.
Concepts developed in Foucault's Discipline and Punish have been widely used by researchers in the growing, multi-disciplinary field of "carceral state" studies, as part of the "carceral turn" in the 1990s.[3] Foucault, who died in the 1980s, did not witness the "unparalleled escalation of prison populations"[4]: 391 of the carceral state in the United States. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the incarceration rate in the US increased by a factor of five, reaching an incarceration rate of 1 in 100 by 2008.[5] Until the carceral turn, scholars propose how what they describe as the American mass incarcerations and prison-industrial complex were almost invisible.[6] In 1993, the international criminologist, Nils Christie, who was one of the first to warn of the perceived dangers of the alarming growth and danger of the crime control industry in the United States, compared the size and scope of the industry to Western style gulags.[4]: 391
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