Apparently Dutch prisons are suffering from a shortage of prisoners; prisons are to be closed, jobs lost, and it's possible a deal will be made with Belgium to import some of their surplus prisoners. European free trade in inmates? Prison inmates as valuable international commodity seems at odds with the toxic problem that Guantanamo detainees have become (though certain prison-dependent local economies in the US appear more divided on the issue). The US has already outsourced torture and below-the-legal-radar incarceration - how about the development of a large-scale international trade in bodies that legal systems have deemed it necessary to incarcerate? An above board globalization of the prison-industrial complex?
Meanwhile, in the architecture issue of the NYT Magazine, a profile of an Austrian prison, whose designer says crazy things like “The prisoners’ dignity is all I really care about” - the wall of the prison yard is inscribed with a line from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: “All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.” The article's author gestures vaguely in the direction of Foucault, and notes that "we punish people with architecture. The building is the method."
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