And what is the nature of punishment now? The automated assessment and collection of fines and the industrialization of incarceration sustains the separated life of a legal body, which necessitates the perpetual violence wrought on the public, a volume that constantly grows in size, complexity, and precarity.
This form of punishment serves to inflame the fault lines between communities that are already set against each other. This domestic phenomenon has its counterpart in military practice as well.
One is reminded of the mechanisms behind counterinsurgency, where an incentive system is repurposed to fuel centuries-old ethnic or tribal disputes, which often owe their genesis, or at least their complication, to modernity's incessant "rationalization" of state borders and the asymmetric flow of resources that occur within those states.
The "good guys," and "freedom fighters" are awarded resources in the form of incentives for doing God's work, that is, of streamlining the flow of resources that are leaving the stricken country, while the "bad guys," and "terrorists" are punished for their transgressions. The incentive system was the neoliberal answer to the hearts and minds approach of the insurgent, who wanted to swim as a fish among the people, as Mao put it. In the same way, the fee system could be seen to be the stick to that carrot.
We see that a collection of Enlightenment-era principles and concepts have been used to construct the tools and weapons regularly used to further cleave communities apart, so as to smooth out extraction and reduce the violence and reaction around those sites.
To go back further, such principles and concepts are the ideological movers behind old social constructs. The prison system - the "penitentiary" - itself arose out of the Christian conceptions surrounding "penitence." One's social isolation would produce the environment of reflection wherein one could think about one's errors and mend them. This form of meditation, which may have very well benefited its share of monks, became an abomination of itself in its coerced and industrialized form.
An abomination that is quite widespread - and increasingly obvious - among the various tools and constructs we've built to administrate ourselves over the course of thousands of years.
