We must think that prisons and punishments, in general, are not intended to eliminate crimes; they are mostly intended to differentiate crimes and to distribute and use them. Prisons and punishments do not only aim to discipline violators of the law, but they also aim to control violations of the law through a general tactic, and to organize them. In this case, punishment will be the method of managing lawbreakers. The method of defining the boundaries of tolerance and leniency, the method of giving orders to one group and exerting pressure on another group, the method of excluding a part of this group and benefiting another part, the method of neutralizing those who have been excluded, and the method of taking advantage of them. In short, punishment does not only punish lawbreakers, but it also differentiates and guarantees the public economy of lawbreaking. (1)

Modern urban design systems, based on dominant discourse and disciplinary policies, divide the social life of people and define the identity of individuals within walls and fences.

Power distributes and organizes space among institutions, organizations, and individuals in different temporal forms according to its own logic, and in the process, it solidifies and establishes its dominance. As a result, the division of space serves as a tool for systems of knowledge and power to subjugate and colonize humans and institutions, keeping them bound and enslaved to the dominant order. Among these institutions are prisons, which, like prisoners, are unwelcome guests in urban spaces that do not reflect the presence of power networks and instead try to reject and make them invisible.

The first principle of governing prisons is to isolate the convicts from the outside world, separate them from each other, suppress and eliminate all individual characteristics, manage the violent bodies, and produce a shapeless and separated mass, which is only a wide horizon ahead, and that is reform within the rigid framework of the prison. The prerequisite for this process of expulsion and rejection of prisoners is an unnecessary burden on society. So when cities expand and the streets, alleys, and houses take the shape of prisons, this unjust link that has cut off all its connections with society and removed it from normal relationships, must be removed from the free population and not burden the minds of the community. As much as in the conversations of officials in justifying the necessity of transferring prisons outside the cities, the ugliness of the city’s face, the city’s confrontation with the rupture of cognitive beauty created by prison walls, the threat of the city by the space that holds the command of a bomb, the betrayal and

These processes begin with imprisonment and calling the “individual” a “prisoner”, which is done through a process of “grouping”; a process in which a group defines its identity based on its conflicts with “others” and distinguishes and expels all possible forms except for itself, and sets the stage and foundation for social hostilities, domination, and subjugation, and produces and organizes social identities. These processes are always fundamentally and inseparably linked to space and time, and place humans in specific spaces, times, and ideologies, and assign them a place and identity. The grouping of “humans” under the label of “prisoner” is equivalent to violently excluding and subjugating an individual within a defined structure that manages all moments of the prisoner’s social life.

The necessity of all of this is a type of separation from the perspective and visibility of citizens, and making the spaces of prisons mysterious and inaccessible; the same thing that has been discussed for years under the title of the inevitable necessity of transferring prisons outside of cities in the Islamic Republic, but it has not been put into action.

The first action of the Islamic Republic to remove prisons from cities was the approval of the law on the transfer of prisons and correctional and rehabilitation centers outside of cities by the then Islamic Consultative Assembly in Azar 1380 (December 2001). According to this law, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development was required to start building new prisons according to specified regulations. However, the approval of this law did not result in any practical response from the Ministry of Housing, Prisons Organization, and other relevant institutions. Officials only gave interviews for the next six years and emphasized the need to transfer prisons from cities to remote areas. Six years later, the Cabinet approved the executive regulations of the law on the transfer of prisons and correctional and rehabilitation centers outside of cities, and according to these regulations, the Organization for Management and Planning of the country was responsible for allocating the necessary funds for the construction of new prisons based on the priorities set by the Prisons Organization and the country’s correctional and

The approval of Article P of Law 113 of the Sixth Development Plan has been four years ago, and so far no action has been taken to transfer large prisons outside of cities, and all the measures taken in this regulation have faced a deadlock. It is not clear which authorities have stopped all their efforts to implement these resolutions and why the system has not been able to provide the cost of transferring prisons. A system whose prison capacity has been several times higher than the usual standards for years, and in many prisons in big cities, prisoners not only do not have a bed to sleep on, but there is also no space on the floor, and they sometimes break the doors of the toilets and sleep on the cold stone floors. A system that, in the months of Mehr, Aban, and Azar of 1401, brought in waves of street protesters who were injured, bloody, and tortured into its prison system, to the extent that many of them spent days and nights without being able to

Undoubtedly, there is an inverse relationship between the astonishing increase in the number of prisoners in a system and its ability to govern properly. A system that cannot enforce its own regulations, which have been approved through a 16-year legislative process, will manage the country in a way that its people will take to the streets in revolution and then fall into the clutches of a harsh and unjust oppressive regime.

Note:

1- Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Nikoo Sorkhosh and Afshin Jahandideh, Tehran: Nashr-e Ney, first edition: 1378.