In Democracy in Captivity: Prisoners, Patients, and the Limits of Self-Government, Christopher D. Berk does a remarkable job of conveying a refreshing outlook on incarcerated people’s and institutionalized people’s participation. While institutions such as asylums and prisons are rarely considered as worthy sites for an examination of participatory politics, Berk offers his readers a counterintuitive articulation of the advantages of such examination. At its best, the book thus suggests lessons for what analyses of participation in asylums and prisons teach us about participation outside of these institutions. If, as Berk cites Ervin Goffman, custodial institutions are “forcing houses for changing persons,” and “each is a natural experiment on what can be done to the self” (83), then looking at the participatory politics of subject formation within these spaces can yield conclusions on democratic politics writ-large.

The book’s central theoretical contribution is its differentiation between what Berk calls “democracy as treatment” and “democracy in treatment.” By the former, Berk designates the use of democratic practices such as councils, systems of representation, grievances committees, and the like for the purpose of advancing control. By the latter, Berk signifies the ability of incarcerated people to “exert actual influence over the conditions of their confinement and care” (2). Another contribution is a division of the literature on carceral participation into what Berk calls the “united” and “divided” visions. Here, Berk delineates the understandings of scholars and practitioners (John J. DiIulio is one prominent example) that understand incarcerated people’s participation in anything more than grievance committees as a nuisance and threat toward security and order. Berk calls this “the exclusion thesis” that places custodial populations outside the borders of civil society. It is this thesis that Berk sets out to refute. On the other side of the spectrum, Berk places the analyses of scholars and practitioners (here, former warden J. E. Baker is one example) who underscore the merits of incarcerated people’s participation. While Berk places the insights of this camp under scrutiny as well, it is clear that Democracy in Captivity is intended as a contribution to these sets of ideas.

The book’s two highlights of grounded political theory are the chapters on St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. (Chapter 3) and the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Walpole (Chapter 5). In the case of the asylum St. Elizabeths between 1947 and 1965, Berk convincingly demonstrates how “democracy as treatment” and “democracy in treatment” can work in tandem. The hero of this story, as Berk recounts it, is Dr. Joseph Abrahams, who organized group meetings where day-to-day matters of the ward were discussed for the declared purpose of improving the welfare of the institutionalized people. The core psychoanalytic belief of patient participation or therapeutic community approaches was that getting along better in a group setting would assist institutionalized people in getting along better in the outside world. According to Abrahams, institutionalized people “gained a sense of personal participation and a sense of responsibility for their own contributions to the welfare of the whole” (35). Institutionalized people collectively deliberated and advocated for policy changes. The conclusion was that democracy was good medicine. For Berk, Abrahams’ practices were meant to mold the institutionalized people into molds they had no effect on; yet, for the institutionalized people themselves, participation was “a way to navigate their precarious existence and the unsettling of foundational questions about who ought to govern asylum life” (46). In other words, yes, participation was another tool of control. Yet, it did not exclude the possibility of institutionalized people to bring about actual positive changes in their lives.

In the example of the maximum-security prison MCI Walpole, Berk understands it as a case of what he refers to as “the united narrative” (69) as an experiment in participatory democracy and community control. The main events at Walpole took place between March 15 and May 18, 1973, when the prison guards’ union called a strike and all guards left their posts. Instead of disorder, the incarcerated people took control through the National Prisoner Reform Association and formed various committees to conduct prison affairs. They elected a council, ran educational programs, operated the foundry, and adjudicated conflicts (9). Among the effects of the prisoner-run period was a truce between factions that turned Walpole’s position of the most violent prison in the country into an island of calm. In Berk’s reading, citing a response to an incarcerated people’s newspaper editorial, this was a case of “citizens in a community taking responsibility for changing their own circumstances and achieving their own goals” (80). Once again, for Berk, the events at Walpole refute the “exclusion thesis” in that they demonstrate not only the real-life advantages of incarcerated people’s participation but, on a theoretical level as well, that prisons are not outside the pale of democracy.

If there is a weakness in Democracy in Captivity, it is in its portrayal of some of the criticisms toward incarcerated people’s participation. In Berk’s reading of some of these criticisms, self-government by incarcerated people is viewed as “an insidious extension of totalitarian rule” (26). Elsewhere, Berk’s reading of similar criticisms warns of “repression” (4, 90). In other words, the warning here is that incarcerated people’s participation might only be a more sophisticated way to advance carceral objectives (for example, prevent riots or form more disciplined subjects) and that these processes should be read as forms of totalitarianism or repression. The problem with such framings is that they do not take into account the ways more sophisticated forms of government than totalitarian rule can make use of people’s actions, even democratic actions. In so doing, the framings of totalitarianism and repression limit the possible contributions of the book. One of the assumptions of Democracy in Captivity is that prisons and asylums should not be viewed as completely isolated from the world outside. For Berk, prisons and asylums are continuations of the politics that are also located outside of their walls. However, the distinctions between inside and outside are strengthened when Berk reads criticisms of incarcerated people’s participation as equating the use of this participation to advance control with totalitarianism. Berk’s interpretation of such criticisms limits the possibility to learn from the ways in which doctors or wardens attempt to harness institutionalized or incarcerated people’s actions for the purpose of controlling them. The basic principle of such control is that the incarcerated person can get to meaningfully affect their surroundings (for example, create a system where the prison is cleaned more often), but at the same time they cannot affect the values according to which they should be corrected. For Berk, what counts is, again, “patients’ and prisoners’ ability to exert actual influence over the conditions of their confinement and care” (2). However, one can still imagine a situation in which incarcerated people’s participation meets this benchmark yet is nevertheless only a tool for systems of confinements to achieve greater control. This reality is not necessarily one where totalitarianism or repression are the main traits. One can imagine an alleged “enlightened” carceral regime that would use such tools. The benchmark should then be placed elsewhere. Instead of examining whether institutionalized or incarcerated people have actual effects on their daily lives, democratic critics of carceral participation would be better off examining where some definitions, for example, what it means to be “rehabilitated,” are left beyond the incarcerated people’s reach. Instead of the examples of the Nazi-era judenrat or Gulag-related sovety aktiva (48), better candidates for historical comparison would be the kinds of carceral participatory experiments within democracies.

This point does not dim the substantial importance of this book nor its unique methodology of grounding political theory in a thorough empirical investigation. Democracy in Captivity is a significant contribution to the understudied space of participation in prisons and asylums. It is a worthwhile response to the dominant view of thinking custodial institutions solely as spaces of exclusion. As such, it is indispensable reading for those who wish to better understand the relations between carcerality and participation.