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.
Foucault said that Mettray was the "most famous of a whole series of institutions which, well beyond the frontiers of criminal law, constituted what one might call the carceral archipelago.
[7] The book described the Russian Gulag's vast network of dozens of camps and hundreds of labour colonies scattered across the Soviet Union.
It has been described as the book that "brought down an empire",[9] the most powerful indictment of a "political regime...in modern times",[10] and "a head-on challenge to the Soviet state.
In both Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault developed archaeological and genealogical methods which emphasized the role that power plays in society.
The carceral network, with its mechanisms of normalizing social control,[2]: 304 made the human sciences "historically possible" through its analytical investment into "knowable man"—his "soul, individuality, consciousness, and conduct.
[2]: 300 "Medicine, psychology, education, public assistance", and social work began to assume "judicial functions" with an "ever greater share of the powers of supervision and assessment".
He said that the knowledge generated by the disciplines of "psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, criminology, and so many other strange sciences" have a "terrible power of investigation" that developed the technologies and procedures of panopticism.
American historian, Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century[15] wrote that Foucault's "great confinement"[2]: 198 —was a contemporary form of "'enclosure', an important interpretative idea for understanding neoliberalism."
[15] In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traced the genealogy of contemporary forms of the penal or carceral system, from the eighteenth century until the mid-1970s in the Western world.
"[2]: 116 The modern carceral system, was taking form with the publication by 1838, of books on prison reform by Charles Lucas, Louis-Mathurin Moreau-Christophe,[19] and Léon Faucher.
[20][2]: 5–7 The carceral society—in which "punishment and discipline" was "internalized and directed to the constitution and, when necessary, rehabilitation of social subjects"—had replaced the culture of spectacle.
Foucault described Mettray as the "most famous of a whole series of institutions which, well beyond the frontiers of criminal law, constituted what one might call the carceral archipelago."
"[17] Foucault used Jeremy Bentham's prison reforms, which included architectural plans for the Panopticon as a "representative model for what happens to society in the nineteenth century.
[2]: 199 Foucault explains how the "panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body" and to "become a generalized function.
[citation needed] Foucault elaborated the notion of Biopower and Biopolitics to describe the practice of modern nation states and their regulation of their subjects through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations".
Author Robert Chase called this the "'Sunbelt' militarized carceral state approach that became exemplary of national prison trends.
"[27] Nils Christie, a criminology professor at the University of Oslo in Norway, in his 1993 book Crime control as industry: towards gulags, Western style?
[28] In his 1994 review of Crime control as industry, Andrew Rutherford described Christie as a criminologist of "international renown", who has written prolifically about punishment and the role of law for decades.
As it sunders families and communities and radically reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship, the carceral state poses a formidable political and social challenge."
Carceral-state scholarship, an area of study whose "boundaries are notoriously difficult to map", includes "cognate disciplines" such as history and sociology, as well as critical theory, journalism and literature.
[3][35] Geographer Anne Bonds investigated how social and criminal justice policies had become "increasingly punitive" as class and race inequalities became more entrenched.
[36] By 2017, the concept of a penal or carceral state - with varying definitions and parameters - had become widely used in "punishment and criminal justice literature".
According to Berger, while there is much disagreement about the definition of the term "carceral state", analyses of the topic all agree "that the United States has a lot of people in prison, that a disproportionate number of them are people of color, that police exert too much power with too much weaponry, and that the country's prison system is held together by an overriding investment in harsh and degrading punishment."
For geographers Stefano Bloch and Enrique Olivares-Pelayo and sociologists Loïc Wacquant, Robert Weide, and Patrick Lopez-Aguado, the Carceral State maintains racial segregation as part of enforcing prison control.