Incarceration as Institutionalized Violence

Understanding violence as the violation of persons, this paper argues that prisons do violence to incarcerated people in three ways that are not physical but that nonetheless can be very harmful. Specifically, prisons: (1) undermine people’s autonomy and limit their freedom causing what we call agential violence; (2) damage incarcerated people’s identities (affecting who and what they are and can become) causing what we call identify violence; and (3) cut incarcerated people off from important identity-constituting relationships, causing what we call relational violence. The paper concludes by suggesting that prisons ought to be abolished, but in the meantime, they ought to work to reduce the practices that produce such violence, and that others in the lives of incarcerated people can also help to reduce the impact of such violence.