Prison As Power: Being and State Contra Negativity and Notion

Tony Robert Cochran (b. 1987) is a prison abolitionist, philosopher and social critic.Prison as Power is a personal and philosophical investigation of the prison-industrial complex. Building on Michel Foucault's 'Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison' (1975) and Hannah Arendt's 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' (1951), Cochran's debut book is a searing indictment of racist, classist State power. The central thesis of Prison as Power is that no one is prison because of what they have done, but rather because of who they are. While weapons dealers, Western war criminals (including US presidents) and corrupt financial oligarchs get away with - literally - murder, the vast majority of the population is submitted and sutured into the disciplinary possibilities the Law. These disciplinary mechanisms intensify for Black, Brown, Indigenous and Latinx peoples in Western nations and previously colonized nations. The Law is not parametrically, or equally applied, and if it were, it would dismantle the entire system. As a former prisoner, Cochran's book is a call for further critique of the prison-industrial complex, racism, the State and Capitalism.