The permacrisis prison: Why the carceral state is too fast to learn and too cyclical to change

This article offers a new theoretical account of permacrisis as a governing rationale within the carceral state in England and Wales. Synthesising Virilio’s dromology with Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, it reconceptualises crisis as a temporally structured, self-perpetuating phenomenon in which the system moves too fast to learn yet is too cyclical to change. Crisis is analysed as a durable logic which normalises failure and disguises institutional inertia as innovation. Drawing on 44 interviews with rare elite access to senior policymakers and penal leaders, the analysis maps the mechanics of permacrisis. It identifies the routinisation of emergency as a ‘Sisyphean’ governance mode (cyclical, self-defeating labour repeated without cumulative progress) and isolates epistemic drift, a process whereby speed produces institutional amnesia, as a core driver exploited by populist politics. These forces entrench regressive prisoner containment as the system’s permanent ‘solution’—a regime of organised neglect beyond Foucauldian discipline. The elites governing the system are themselves trapped by the temporal logic they perpetuate. The article advances the criminology of crisis by demonstrating that existing frameworks explain that prisons fail but not why they cannot stop failing, and that genuine reform is not merely politically difficult but temporally foreclosed by the architecture of permacrisis itself.