The following research is part of our series of publications of architecture student theses. In it, Adéla Vavříková describes the carceral continuum in Czechia, then in Czechoslovakia, during the Socialist Republic’s rule to the capitalist present, despite the turning point the 1989 Velvet Revolution embodied. Despite an evident lack of intellectual investment in prison abolitionism in today’s Czechia, she tries to apply this political horizon to the specificities of Czech carceralism.
Prisons constitute a durable infrastructure of power: they outlive changes of regime, ideology, and economic models. The trajectory of Czech (formerly Czechoslovak) prisons is no exception, including the shift from a centrally planned regime (1968–1989, a Communist dictatorship within the Soviet sphere) to neoliberal democracy.
Where the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia once invoked prisons as a shield protecting “the working people” from politically non-conforming individuals and “subversives,” today’s capitalist discourse frames them as protecting “democracy” from the poor and the “idle.”
This text sketches how the ethos of the prison’s indispensability persists within the Czech state apparatus through a small set of variables, and how carceral structure has been integrated into the Czech landscape from Eastern Bloc policy, through the unruly rise of capitalism after the Velvet Revolution, to the present era of crises. This article emerges from the artistic research project Notes on Prison: Archiving Carcerality Towards Abolition, developed as my diploma thesis at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. The project examined the material, spatial, and strategic aspects of the prison typology emphasizing the ways architectural elements exceed the perimeter wall and shape carceral power. Formed as a digital archive of prison matter and principles, the aim is to analyze the power dynamics within the system of incarceration. The outcome aligns with the prison-abolitionist discourse and, simultaneously, poses an ethical challenge to the architectural profession: to recognize and refuse participation in the design of carceral spaces.