Negotiating a coercive turn: work discipline and prison reform in Ontario.

Introduction

If the welfare state is now dead or dying, what has replaced it? Thirty years ago, James O'Connor thought a 'social-industrial complex' might emerge to make the state's legitimation efforts profitable for corporate providers (1973: 54). Twenty years later, Bob Jessop (1993) foresaw a 'Schumpeterian workfare state' that would 'subordinate social policy to the demands of labour market flexibility and structural competitiveness' (pp. 9-10). Visions of this sort have become even darker lately. Michael Hallett (2002) is one of many who have linked multinational prison companies to the 'penal management of poverty and inequality' (p. 388). Older Keynesian strategies were built on material legitimation (the 'social wage'), accommodation with organised labour, and formal commitments to greater equality. The new path seems to lead backward to 'crimefare states' that criminalise poverty, intensify policing, imprison on a mass scale, and subject the poor to malign neglect (Nevins, 2002: 143-144; Neocleous, 2000: 19, 72). In a transition that is eerily reminiscent of the move from outdoor relief to workhouses, welfare programmes have been gutted, and penal confinement is back in vogue. Bribery and persuasion are everywhere yielding to force and fear as the preferred methods of dealing with marginal populations.

This article (1) presents a contextualised case study of one attempt to ratchet up state coercion and move toward the penal management of poverty. Between 1995 and 2003, Ontario's provincial government undertook an exceptionally ambitious administrative restructuring that included (and relied on) major changes in corrections. This article focuses on the exemplary aspect of that initiative, and shows how its generic appeal to 'discipline' and its restoration of old-style 'deterrence' evoke past efforts to intensify the work ethic. Both features are consistent with a neoconservative political agenda that seeks to make state programmes even less accommodating for subordinate groups, and even more profitable for business. Governments under the influence of this agenda have degraded the state's legitimation role for over thirty years, at every step adding some new element of coercion (economic, administrative and/or legal) to replace the benefits revoked (O'Connor, 1973; Panitch & Swartz, 2003). This process has now reached the point at which, to cutting-edge neoconservatives, major institutional changes seem possible and/or necessary.

The two sections that follow set the political stage for the Tory assault, and then examine the historical and contemporary role of prisons in instilling labour discipline. The third and fourth sections describe bow a coercive 'Southern strategy' migrated north, taking on particularly exemplary and demonstrative aspects as it crossed the border into Canada. The final section show how the chosen tools of this strategy--high-tech 'superjails'--concentrate and advertise state power, while also exposing its limits and vulnerabilities.

Background

The government under consideration here is that of Mike Harris, Conservative premier of Ontario between 1995 and 2003. His party had ruled the province without interruption for forty-three years between 1942 and 1985. During that period, the party had gained a reputation as a moderate, even 'bland' political force. But after ten years in exile, the revitalised Tories returned to power in 1995 with Harris's hard-line neoconservatives in charge. As had been the case in Britain, the ascent of an explicitly neoconservative party owed much to the failures of its social-democratic predecessor (Hall, 1987). Burdened by recession and fiscal crisis, Ontario's first New Democratic Party (NDP) government broke key promises, and avoided confrontations with international financiers by attacking its own supporters in the public sector. Upon its leaving office, its base--including most of the labour movement--was divided and demoralised.

Harris had promised a 'common sense revolution', and his government moved very quickly to remake schools, hospitals, and municipal government to fit the image and needs of private-sector restructuring.

Prison reform was an integral part of this programme, but it also reflected a century-long struggle to centralise and 'rationalise' provincial penal institutions. Centralisation and labour discipline were intertwined, because harsh sentences--hard labour was a notorious case--were often difficult to organise between the multiple jurisdictions involved (Oliver, 1998: 74, 354, 398, 402-403). In Harris's Ontario, dozens of local jails (holding inmates serving less than two years, or awaiting trial) were closed in favor of a few high-tech, 'supermax' facilities that were deliberately designed to be cheap and harsh. One of these was tendered out to a private contractor in 2002, and provided the first major beachhead for the corporate prison industry in Canada.

Conservative attempts to strengthen deterrence in corrections were aimed at guards as well as prisoners, and at workers in general as well as potential criminals. Like other reorganisations influenced by 'lean production' principles, this one eroded job security and enhanced fear among workers within its ambit. As elsewhere, threats of privatisation and subcontracting were prevalent.

But prisons have traditionally had a special role in reconstructing the work ethic among 'problem' populations in moments of social upheaval, and they took a prominent place in Harris's common-sense revolution. Stricter punishment and fortified administration in this domain were to demonstrate the virtues of hard work, and the certainty of punishment for those who shirked it. But they also provoked opposition from within, and protest outside, the province's jails.

Institutionalising the work ethic

Historically, prisons and capitalist workplaces have evolved in tandem, with management innovations in one often shaping developments in the other. The penitentiary was a product of the industrial revolution, originating alongside the earliest factories. Both institutions grappled with the problem of retraining people whose 'undisciplined' habits and attitudes were seen to be out of step with emerging social orders (Ignatieff, 1978: 215; Thompson, 1967; Schor, 1991: ch. 3). And both settled on quasi-military practices for their initial inspiration (Rothman, 2002: 105; Foucault, 1995: 171).

The first US penitentiaries were built around injunctions 'to labor diligently, to obey all orders, and preserve an unbroken silence' (cited in Rothman, 2002: 105, original emphasis). There were fierce debates about how this might best be arranged, with partisans of the Auburn system advocating 'congregate' work and strictly imposed silence, while supporters of the rival Philadelphia system argued for unending solitary confinement and 'separate' work (Rothman, 2002: ch. 4). Yet both systems made the novel assumption that routine and discipline--which could be seen as punishment in themselves--would eventually produce rehabilitation (Rothman, 1998: l02).

Patchesky (1993) notes that here, as in the factories, discipline 'meant willingness to work as exhibited in the doing of work' (p. 596, original emphasis). And rehabilitation was conceived in complementary terms. She describes it as an attempt to 'instill the values of discipline, work and "respect for order and authority" among those who defied the work ethic' (p. 597). Rescuing prisoners from such defiance would 'reduce idleness and propagate a strict work ethic in the society at large (a society whose dominant conception of deviance was idleness)' (p. 597). The model prisoner was also a model worker, and because criminality was intimately associated with idleness, 'improving' prisoners would bolster the work ethic elsewhere. The penitentiary would endure because 'its order was the order of industry' (Ignatieff, 1978: 215).

The social impact of rehabilitation was not just an abstract concern for those who ran the new institutions. Early prison officials were more than surrogate employers--they actually relied to a great degree on prison labour in order to build, operate, and fund their institutions. In fact, a great deal of the appeal of prison as an institutional innovation had to do with claims that it would be self-financing through means such as these (Feeley, 2002: 330-333). So even if outside forces did not demand it, wardens had good reason to organise their prisons as instruments and exemplars of the industrial work ethic. In prisons, the scourge of idleness would be banished through routine and discipline, obedience would be assured with new technologies of control, and the whole great machine would finance itself.

Such dreams of perfect control, exercised and instilled, have long tempted managers and investors. Jeremy Bentham's intricate plans for a 'panopticon' to replace England's local prisons were promoted tirelessly by their author, in part because he expected to derive immense personal wealth from the forced labour of the panopticon's prisoners (Ignatieff, 1978: 110). Malcolm Feeley (2002) has shown that 'entrepreneurs of punishment' like Bentham were influential in most periods of major penal reform. Whether pushing for transportation to the colonies or for prisons themselves, these forces inevitably hoped to profit from the innovations they sponsored. And although most private providers floundered in the long term, their duties were nearly always absorbed by the state (pp. 322-323).

Modern entrepreneurs who design supermax prison technologies may be following in this tradition; and in the process, 'they create demand for and then supply new forms of social control' (Feeley, 2002: 321). Critics of the prison-industrial complex use a very similar dynamic in order to explain its growth. They point to the strength of the prison-industry lobby in advancing law-and-order politics in the USA.

These interests have actively worked for more incarceration, longer sentences and more 'modern' prison facilities. So long as state-sponsored solutions are discredited, this sort of law and order tends to boost demand for private prison cells, whose numbers have grown by 300 per cent per year since 1989 (Schlosser, 1998; Parenti, 2000; Chang & Thompkins, 2002: 50). Inasmuch as it expands the capacity and efficacy of the penal system, privatisation completes the circle by making punitive law-and-order politics more plausible. The growing power of the corrections industry makes it easier for governments everywhere to take neoconservative restructuring to the next level. Of course, greater capacity also means that more and more people can be sent to jail.

In the USA, more than 2 million citizens are now imprisoned; and the proportion of Americans directly supervised by the criminal-justice system (including those on parole and probation) approaches figures comparable to those of Stalinist Russia, or--for black men--apartheid South Africa (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2004; 'Land of the free?' 2004: 8). Since the 1970s, redefined crime-and-enforcement priorities--the 'war on drugs', 'zero tolerance', and mandatory sentencing--have boosted the number of people in us prisons and jails by 650 per cent, and created 'an ever-rising sea of black people monitored by predominantly white overseers' (Hallett, 2002: 372; Wood, 2003: 17; Street, 2003: 34). Recent revelations of a 'global gulag' underpinning the 'war on terror' point to the possibility that these figures may take on an even more frightening dimension in the near future (Oziewicz, 2004). Critics are now speaking of mass imprisonment as a unique social and historical phenomenon, comparable to the 'Great Confinement' of Europe's poor in the seventeenth century (Garland, 2001; Wacquant, 2002: 19-30).

National incarceration rates in the USA are skewed somewhat by exceptionally high growth rates in the South, where jails and prisons have long been used as racially specialised means of social control (Platt, 2003; Morris, 2003; Wacquant, 2003). Indeed, some see Southern prisons as a de facto continuation of the slave system (Davis, 2003). At the very least, prisons are the cornerstone of what Phillip Wood (2003) calls a 'Southern strategy' based on 'low-wage, labor-intensive, high-exploitation production, and hostility to unions', and characterised by the extensive use of 'the law as a tool to build and protect a racialized political and economic order' (pp. 24-25). Wood argues that this model was the 'template' for the 'Dixification of America' under Ronald Reagan and his successors (ibid.).

The US crackdown has definitely targeted black men; but it has also had more generalised effects on the poor. They are disproportionately affected by tougher enforcement and sentencing, which make petty offenses more likely to result in jail time. Local jails handle even larger volumes than prisons, albeit for shorter periods. One estimate suggests that about 10 million Americans churn through the jails each year. Roughly 20 per cent of the citizenry is jailed at least once in a decade, and vastly larger numbers are touched indirectly by the jailing of relatives or friends (McConville, 1997: 291).

It is no accident, of course, that the imprisonment binge in the USA coincided with what Bill Clinton called 'the end of welfare as we know it'. As neoconservative governments around the world pared back their support for the poor, the welfare state became leaner, meaner and increasingly likely to be repackaged and sold off to private operators. Thousands of poor people were forced off the welfare rolls by lifetime limits, disentitlement campaigns targeting 'abuse', and workfare programmes that made work obligatory even if essential support (like childcare) was unavailable. At every stage, private providers were invited in--supplying, advising or administering for a share of the proceeds--usually after service standards had been reduced enough to allow a profit to be made (Platt, 2003; Quaid, 2002).

In a process that Barbara Ehrenreich (1997) aptly describes as 'spinning the poor into gold', welfare and other legitimation expenses have been transformed into corporate profits by the privatision of their provision (in part or in full), or by the contracting out of restructuring itself. In Ontario, Anderson Consulting (now 'Accenture Canada') made at least $284 million under the Conservatives on welfare reorganisation alone (Brennan & Benzie, 2004). Such direct transmutation of welfare into profits is complemented by the indirect benefits associated with welfare cuts and workfare programmes. Forcing thousands of state dependants into the low-wage workforce delivers benefits measured in corporate tax cuts, looser labour markets, and greater economic insecurity among workers. All of these have made it more difficult for workers to refuse precarious work or to resist the casualisation of existing jobs.

This combination of disentitlement and criminalisation echoes many previous episodes in which ruling strategies suddenly shifted, or management 'favours' were clawed back (Neocleous, 2000: 72). Like the Enclosures of pre-capitalist Britain, welfare reform has dispossessed the poor while enriching the influential. The 'great predators' of the former era ensured that more minor predations were classified as crimes, while the practice of long-established rights in common spaces became subject to a range of appalling penalties (Thompson, 1975: 188). Today, as consultants and 'entrepreneurs' pillage a threadbare welfare state, slogans such as 'zero tolerance' are being used to justify much more intense policing of shared public space, at a time when public space itself is under relentless assault (Parenti, 2000: ch. 4).

In a climate of high unemployment and deteriorating job quality, the growing emphasis on deterrence and cuts merely reinforces workers' fear of 'getting the sack' by stigmatising and impoverishing life outside the labour market. The erosion of the welfare 'commons' heightens fear among the economically insecure, and has disciplinary effects on the labour market as a whole. But these economic levers have clearly been insufficient in the eyes of many lawmakers, especially in the USA (Garland, 2001: 195-199; Beckett & Western, 2001; Street, 2003). In this context, the legal crackdown and the concurrent expansion of prison capacity amount to an endorsement of Hallett's 'penal management of poverty' (2002: 388). But the symbolism of this institutional shift may be as important as its practical effect.

Observers like Christian Parenti see mass imprisonment as part of a coercive repertoire that also includes capital punishment and 'counterinsurgency policing', whose force is magnified by 'reality' cop shows and the media's obsession with crime. This repertoire is organised into 'spectacular displays of violence' designed to 'distribute terror into the everyday lives of the poor'. The subtler, scientific means of creating 'docile bodies' described by Michel Foucault have now been cast aside in America, says Parenti, in favor of 'ritualised displays of terror' (2000: 135, 137, original emphasis).

The 'Southern strategy' goes north?

It is often argued that the USA has an exceptionally severe penal regime that sets it apart from most other developed nations (Downes, 2001). Canadians like to believe that theirs is a fundamentally different--and more peaceful--society. So if there is a turn to 'terror' in the USA, it will not automatically travel north. Yet the private interests that helped to sow this trend in the USA found fertile ground in Ontario after 1995. That province had a government committed to a programme very like the Southern strategy, emphasising cheap labour, virulent anti-unionism, and an exceptional reliance on legal coercion. Even the racialised nature of its appeal was clear from day one. A backlash against 'preferential hiring' helped to propel the Conservatives into office, and prompted one of its symbolic first acts--the total repeal of employment equity (affirmative action) legislation.

Ontario's provincial government also had a history of receptiveness to us ideas, and longstanding grievances with its local jails. If its prisons no longer aimed to 'terrorize the underclass' as they once did (Oliver, 1998: 399), the return to deterrence was at least a step in that direction. Exemplary punishment was accompanied by institutional changes that boosted the province's capacity for coercion, and the credibility of its sanctions. And whether or not the shift helped to tighten the grip on labour, it would enrich a bevy of corporate hangers-on.

The Conservative platform--the so-called 'common sense revolution'--harvested the anger nurtured by the dishonesty and incompetence of previous governments, and offered various sorts of discipline as the remedy. Dramatic tax cuts and ambitious restructuring plans would force the public sector to shed excess weight, and performance standards would be imposed on whatever remained. Fiscal discipline would be matched with a tougher approach to misbehaving youths (and welfare recipients, criminals, etc.), and the rigorous testing of students, teachers, schools, nurses and hospitals (Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, n.d.). Such rhetoric draws close parallels between the moral failings of all 'undisciplined' sectors of the population. And the Tory approach would be neither hesitant nor partial: 'Tinkering with the system will not be enough. It is time for fundamental change, and change is never easy' (ibid.). The language of discipline, self-discipline and vigorous action, and the desire to reign in miscreants--and workers in 'feminised' professions, as listed above--is heavily imbued with the values of traditional masculinity. If the Tories planned to clean house, they would restore a distinctly patriarchal sort of order.

The Conservatives seemed serious about self-discipline, and pledged themselves to a higher level of political accountability. At a formal level, the common-sense revolution was notably less vague than most Canadian party platforms, and the Conservatives portrayed it as a solemn contract with voters. And at a practical level, this document did in fact guide their actions in government, to a degree that contrasted sharply with their social-democratic and liberal predecessors. This does not mean that they had the 'mandate' they sometimes claimed to possess. Like nearly all Canadian governments, the Conservatives never won support from a majority of the voters.

Discipline was a generic Conservative promise; but it would have particular import for workers and the poor. Promising to make the province 'open for business' again, the Conservatives quickly rolled back anti-scab laws, made it harder to gain and maintain union representation, slashed welfare benefits by more than 20 per cent, and abolished rent controls.

Healthcare, law enforcement and 'classroom funding for education' were initially spared similar cuts; but as the years passed, only police budgets were consistently protected (ibid.). Other sectors of law enforcement--such as legal aid and the prison system--were disciplined along with the rest. However, the 'get tough' ethos was not uniformly applied. Corporate polluters and unsafe workplaces were to be increasingly self-regulated. Meanwhile, the harassment of welfare recipients was stepped up, and the public was invited to join in by reporting suspected welfare abuse through anonymous 'snitch lines'.

Canadian governments have frequently compelled public-sector workers to set an example for the private sector, modelling virtues like 'restraint' and 'sacrifice' (McElligott, 2001: ch. 5). The Conservatives continued and deepened the campaign against the public-sector workforce begun by their social-democratic predecessors. Successor rights--protection provided to workers whose jobs are transferred to another employer--were curtailed, and school administrators were pulled out of their unions as the government began massive reorganisations in health and education (its two most expensive obligations), and in the municipal governments that delivered many social services. Every reorganisation promised 'businesslike' efficiency, and each favoured centralised, privatised and capital-intensive solutions to the extent that these were politically and legally possible.

Layoffs, spin-offs and work intensification were a crucial part of this effort, as government managers sought to incorporate fashionable lean-production strategies. Yet the transition to a lean state inevitably fattened the wallets of imported executives and management consultants--to a degree that is only becoming apparent now that the Tories have left office. One former corporate executive made $772,400 annually for cutting payments to injured workers who made about $30,000 a year (Priest & Abraham, 2000).

The highly visible move towards a leaner, meaner state reinforced the impression that secure, full-time, permanent jobs were now obsolete. It thus contributed to the general degradation of work and life inherent in the trend toward casualised employment. The government was particularly accommodating in arranging for more 'flexible' working hours--a necessary ingredient for both lean production and old-fashioned work intensification. For the first time in decades, maximum working hours were increased--from 48 to 60 hours (or more) per week.

The government's fundamental commitment to cheap labour strategies was reflected not only in anti-union and anti-welfare measures, but also in a persistent refusal to raise the minimum wage (which remained unaltered for eight years), and in the mobilisation of welfare recipients into workfare programmes. First deployed to cushion the effect of funding cuts in the voluntary sector, this new army of 'involunteers' would eventually provide free labour for private businesses, and subsidies for private placement agencies. They would do so without the right to organise in unions and without basic legal protection, for benefits that were below the equivalent of the minimum wage. Although this programme ran into a variety of administrative and political difficulties--including a persuasive threat made by public-sector unions to boycott any charity that accepted its involunteers--its symbolic importance was not, and cannot be understated. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the government of Canada's biggest and richest province was sanctioning forced labour as an exemplary solution to its economic and social problems.

The government was clearly determined to reinforce the work ethic among those it considered idle, and its approach revealed a deep faith in the redemptive power of work--any work--to help them escape dependency (Swift & Birmingham, 2000). Its posture was reminiscent of governments south of the border, but also of those who built the first prisons. And, as Barbara Ehrenreich (2001) has pointed out, many low-wage workplaces still feel like prisons, as 'you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift' (p. 210).

Labouring diligently in silence, the idle would be transformed. And self-reliance would be fostered in petty tyrannies, where the chief motivational tool was fear.

Exemplary discipline: 'Common sense' corrections

It is not surprising to find that prisons would be instrumental in the transition to an economy based increasingly on cheap labour and fear. Critical criminologists tend to focus on the human-rights consequences of such approaches, and on the social damage generated by the rollback of more rehabilitative approaches (see Moore, Burton & Hannah-Moffat, 2003). But it may be more useful to look upon these as side-effects of an agenda larger than crime control. As Rusche and Kirchheimer (2003 [1939]) concluded pessimistically some 65 years ago, 'The futility of severe punishment and cruel treatment may be proven a thousand times, but so long as society is unable to solve its social problems, repression, the easy way out, will always be accepted' (p. 207).

According to these authors and many others, repression is comforting because it hides 'the symptoms of social disease' (ibid.). This use of the word 'repression' is almost Freudian: it implies a reflexive suppression of deeper, essentially subconscious problems. Ultimately, this is not a stable situation--the repressed will return, or produce new pathologies indirectly. But its short-term effects give repression a timeless appeal.

So whether or not the 'common sense' approach actually made sense as policy in corrections (or anywhere else it was tried), from a strategic perspective its appeal is understandable. Ratcheting up levels of fear among workers and marginal populations would comfort those more securely placed, and could always be justified in the language of deterrence.

From this perspective, it is fortunate that there are still limits to the potential 'Americanisation' of penal policy at the provincial level in Canada. The most important of these is that criminal law is a federal jurisdiction so that provinces, unlike us states, have no recourse to the death penalty (for example) as a tool of social control. However, the provinces do have authority over the administration of courts, parole eligibility and the incarceration of prisoners awaiting trial, or those serving sentences of less than two years. All of these provide opportunities for exemplary punishment.

Ontario's approach was to roll back anything resembling a 'privilege' for prisoners, while railing at Ottawa's alleged coddling of major offenders in 'Club Fed' institutions. Rehabilitative programmes, recreational facilities and 'perks' such as TVS, video games and smoking--and even time spent outside the cell--were drastically curtailed in provincial institutions. In scenes reminiscent of Southern chain gangs, inmates were dressed in bright orange jumpsuits to pick up trash from roadsides. Many of these measures affect those remanded for trial--and still legally innocent--as much as those who have actually been convicted (Moore, Burton & Hannah-Moffat, 2003: 155-56; Moore & Hannah-Moffat, 2002: 114-16).

The campaign against 'coddled' prisoners clearly has much in common with the one conducted against welfare recipients. In both cases, conservatives are outraged at the possibility that the lifestyles of these state dependants might begin to approach those of the working poor, and have sought to impose the principle of 'lesser eligibility' with more vigour. Driving down the living standards of the 'undeserving' is justified in terms of tax savings; but it also helps to suppress the expectations of the 'deserving' poor who work in the low-wage, contingent workforce. Needless to say, other sorts of state dependants--contracted consultants and corporate CEOs on loan to the state--are not expected to adopt similarly Spartan lifestyles (Klein & Montgomery, 2001; Swanson, 1997).

In the 1930s, Rusche and Kirchheimer saw lesser eligibility as the means by which the labour market regulated prison reform: the latter could not improve conditions inside prisons beyond the state of the worst jobs outside them (2003: 138-165). This meant that there was more hope for reform when labour markets were tight and workers had the leverage to demand more. The logic of 'common sense' corrections stands this process on its head. Where market trends are pushing work conditions downward, lesser eligibility demands that the state should degrade options outside waged work still further.

The Ontario Tories were particularly ambitious in this regard. Thousands of welfare recipients were forced into the lower ends of the job market by disentitlement or obligatory workfare. Life on the street was made even more unpleasant by the Safe Streets Act, which unleashed the police on squeegee kids and 'aggressive panhandlers' (O'Grady & Bright, 2002; Gordon, 2005). Truants and young offenders were increasingly funneled into 'strict discipline facilities' in a last-ditch effort to make them suitable citizens/workers (Government of Ontario, 2001). And those desperate enough to linger in jail rather than face the workday grind would find those facilities even less hospitable than before. The severity of each of these measures was trumpeted--not hidden--by the government, so each and every one needs to be seen as part of the deterrence-and-discipline campaign. They were clearly meant to address a variety of audiences for a variety of purposes (some quite partisan), but in combination they signaled at least a symbolic turn to the penal management of poverty. And inasmuch as jails (rather than prisons) seem to touch the lives of so many of the poor, it made sense to turn to them as the means of inscribing a new discipline on the bodies in question.

So far, this approach has not involved a systematic attempt to harvest prison labour, although private prisons are pioneering such efforts in the USA (Herivel & Wright, 2003: 112-135; Parenti, 2000: 230-238). In Ontario, prison work programmes are more often considered as 'perks' to be cut, and the province's workfare experience has demonstrated how difficult it can be to mobilise forced labour on a large scale. In the absence of a concerted effort in this regard, the Conservatives settled on highly visible 'community service' initiatives, which had prisoners working near highways and other public places. Prison labour at this point is largely exemplary, rather than systematically exploitative.

The accumulation of petty indignities is potentially explosive inside prison walls. Some Ontario facilities are fuelling a dangerous mix of 'boredom ... triple bunking and vermin infestations ... and unassisted "cold turkey" withdrawal from nicotine' (Moore, Burton & Hannah-Moffat, 2003: 155). In the USA, overcrowding and related Supreme Court rulings have been the major justification for a massive prison-building spree, and for the inclusion of private capital in order to help meet the demand for prison spaces (Hallett, 2002: 374).

In Canada, incarceration rates have risen since the 1970S, but nowhere nearly as dramatically as in the USA. Ontario's growth in incarceration rates has been primarily among remanded prisoners--whose numbers have risen even as the number of sentenced prisoners fell. So the pressures of overcrowding, while serious, do not approach those that have sustained the us prison boom (Government of Canada, 2002: 55-56).Why, then, did the Conservatives find it necessary to spend over $700 million in construction costs alone, in order to support a corrections policy that was supposed to stress 'no frills' efficiency? (2)

Panopticons and accidental democrats

In the 1830s, Ontario's colonial predecessors imported us technology (the Auburn system) and us expertise (Auburn's deputy warden) in order to construct Canada's first penitentiary, near Kingston (Oliver, 1998: 113). In the 1990s, Conservative reformers imported 'supermax' technology from south of the border and used private-sector expertise (Management and Training Corporation [MTC]) to run one of the new 'superjails' that were to replace local jails. Supermax institutions are high-tech panopticons that depend on video monitoring and remote-control gates to replace guards, and sparse, durable interiors to control inmates. Because supermax facilities are primarily designed to manage prisoners rather than trying to change them, they rely heavily on lockdowns and solitary confinement at the expense of programmes and counselling. At Alcatraz--the inspiration for the modern supermax--'the only "program" was work--a privilege that had to be earned' (Ward & Werlich, 2003: 55).

Alcatraz was initially built to intimidate mobsters in the 1930s (several high-profile ones became its first prisoners); the supermax model was resurrected in the 1980s in order to isolate gang members and prison 'troublemakers' (Ward & Werlich, 2003: 55-59). In both cases, the external effects of these institutions (demonstrable deterrence) were at least as important as the internal ones (keeping dangerous people securely confined). Supermax facilities not only concentrate coercive power: they put it on display.

Ontario adopted this high-security technology not in order to deal with killers and gang warriors--who were generally outside its jurisdiction--but to confine lesser offenders and those awaiting trial. Such punitive overkill may be attributed to zero-tolerance theories, or to political opportunism. But this application of coercive power also complemented broader efforts to intensify the work ethic. In the high-profile institutions that churned their way through the lower reaches of the labour force, the Tories were promising faster delivery of tougher punishment, and discipline that focused on frugal living and obedience.

The government's concern over the age and state of disrepair of local jails was not baseless, but it was focused on concerns that the latter did not provide 'clear lines of sight' for monitoring prisoners.

The jails were portrayed as fragile, insecure and potentially dangerous to the community. But architectural blind spots were their crucial flaw because they necessitated more staff, and the majority of long-term savings were expected to come from the reduction of labour costs. Initial estimates suggested that two-thirds of the corrections-officer workforce could be eliminated in the transition to new, centralised institutions. More savings would be achieved by the 'no-frills' approach to prisoners. One media account of the new superjails described 'cells with bleak walls, narrow bullet-proof plastic slits for windows, tiny stainless-steel toilets and bunk beds made of steel or concrete foundations' (Mittelstaedt, 1996; Tyler, 1996; Government of Ontario, Superbuild, n.d.).

The corrections workforce was already under pressure, and the new regime would embody lean-production principles that rely heavily on 'management by stress' (Lewchuk & Robertson, 1999). In older facilities like Toronto's Don jail, guards were working an average of sixty hours per week, and eighty-hour working weeks were not unusual. One guard worked sixteen hours a day for seventeen straight days (Lewchuk, 2003: 26). 'Get tough efficiency' would automate and intensify this pattern of understaffing. The minister promised that the superjails' design would eliminate hallway patrols and allow staff to 'see what's going on in a whole block of cells from a single vantage point' (Ryan, 2001).

In practice, the technology does not make good on this promise and there are many blind spots. As a result, the officer at the hub of each superjail 'pod' must monitor up to 192 inmates on two levels from an imperfect vantage point, while also keeping a watchful eye on three unarmed coworkers who may be circulating among the inmates (BI, 2006). Not sur-prisingly, many corrections officers feel that the new system leaves them exposed, vulnerable and less attuned to problems brewing among the inmate population.

In Ontario, corrections officers form one section of the much larger Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU). Despite limitations on their right to strike, they were militant participants in OPSEU's two intense confrontations with the Conservative government, in 1996 and 2002. It is probably no coincidence that provincial officials have settled on centralisation, automation and privatisation as the way to 'modernise' corrections.

These are the tools scientific management has traditionally deployed against recalcitrant workers thought to have too much power. And the government's public justification for this very expensive testing of new prison technology made frequent mention of its utility, when combined with private management, in disciplining guards. Referring to supposedly excessive rates of absenteeism and a raft of 'frivolous' work refusals, the minister repeatedly asked: 'Does anyone believe that a private operator would tolerate this abuse?' (Sampson, 2000).

The union responded to these charges with a campaign that blamed Conservative policies for creating unsafe prisons. The penal management of poverty was sending a growing number of high-maintenance prisoners into understaffed, under-serviced institutions. There, drugs, weapons and infectious diseases made the work of guards more stressful and dangerous--both for themselves and for the surrounding community (OPSEU, 2001: 1-2). This campaign did not convince the government, which instead considered depriving guards of their right to refuse unsafe work (Galloway, 2003). But it resonated in the towns hosting the new superjails, and helped to convince MTC's guards and its subcontracted food workers to unionise soon after the private facility opened. Just as the first factories helped to create the first industrial unions, the concentration of production in the public sector spawned new forms of solidarity and resistance (OPSEU, 2002; SEIU, 2000).

Christian Parenti sees us prison-guard unions as one of the prime impediments to the emergence of a 'prison-industrial complex' centred on private prisons. Like those representing police, these unions have a reputation for being conservative and overly indulgent of violent members. But 'in their fight against privatization', says Parenti (2000), 'the guards defend not only their own interests but inadvertently the larger agenda of public accountability and democratic control over state functions' (p. 229). OPSEU guards should be given at least this much credit. Whether 'accidental democrats' or more conscious political actors, they are now strategically placed at the heart of the battles that may consolidate or undermine the future of neoconservatism.

Conclusion

This article has depicted corrections reform in Ontario as part of a larger effort to intensify the work ethic and move toward a Southern strategy based on cheap labour, work intensification and fear. There are plenty of historical precedents for goals of this sort. But their pursuit continues to provoke resistance, and is complicated by the persistent presence of state unions.

Analyses of the Tory crackdown have so far conceptualised it as more or less confined to the realm of criminal justice, and motivated by social or political factors largely external to the state (moral panic, scapegoating, etc.). But the evidence presented above suggests that the timing of the upheaval in corrections--just at the moment when everything else was being restructured, and perhaps when a credible threat was most needed to undergird the transition--can only be understood if reference is also made to factors inside the state, and beyond criminal justice per se.

Prison guards were strategically placed to stall the larger social crackdown the provincial state had in mind, so the Tories decided on a preemptive strike. This was their approach to practically every other organised group of state workers except police, and it mimicked the examples set by Thatcher and Reagan early in their terms. It also followed in the footsteps of earlier prison reformers like Bentham and Howard, who addressed the crises of discipline that they saw enveloping both prisoners and guardians. In fact, the central elements of the modern coercive apparatus were all built in response to perceived crises of order. Hangings became secret so that unruly crowds could not counter the deterrence intended by public ones. Police were created in order to clear London streets of petty criminals. Prisons were reformed in order to squelch the power of inmates and custodians, who were operating more or less autonomously from central power. 'Each of these cases', Ignatieff says, 'can be interpreted as an attempt to establish state hegemony over collectivities of the poor whose defiance of public authority had long been tolerated or taken for granted' (1978: 90).

The current fascination with supermax solutions echoes that of earlier prison enthusiasts, for whom the first penitentiaries 'represented in microcosm the hierarchical, obedient and godly social order, which they felt was coming apart around them' (Ignatieff, 1978: 84). Yet the fantastical element of such plans, then and now, tends to exaggerate and disappoint the hopes placed in them.

The state has a unique responsibility for preserving social order and the appearance of order. This duty, in a capitalist society, must inevitably revolve around getting people to work. So what happens in prisons can tell us much about the way the work ethic is currently defined and enforced. On this score, recent developments in Ontario are profoundly disturbing, expressing as they do a much greater willingness on the part of the provincial state to employ coercion at the expense of democratic rights, and to dream of even more authoritarian solutions. Those dreams may yet be dashed, but they are disquieting nonetheless.

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Notes

(1.) An earlier version of this article was presented to the Socialist Studies Society, at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities in Winnipeg, June 2004. It is based on research funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, grant no. 4102003-0975. Their generosity, the research work of Greg Bird and Cindy Gangaram, and the useful advice of Wayne Lewchuk and the anonymous referees from Capital & Class are all very much appreciated.

(2.) Initially, $269 million was assigned to upgrade courts, and $447 million to build and retrofit jails (Government of Ontario, Superbuild, n.d.). By 2000, the cost of building the Penetang jail had risen from $83 to $92 million. At Lindsay, costs rose from $79 to $93 million (Mackie, 2000).