How do you make a prison?

We like to imagine things being built from scratch. Perhaps stone and mortar heaped up by little computer game figurines, or Lego building blocks piled high. Most of the time, we have a simple idea of how our world is constructed, falling back on the games we played as children. Maybe this was occasionally the case when colonizers built their outposts. Perhaps they, too, were children once. But today’s world is already too built up for such endeavors — too full of things. Capitalists prefer to use what they find lying around, rather than invest in start-ups.

On the Mediterranean island of Sicily, the material at hand was the cruise ship — and the prison it has been converted into is the so-called quarantine ship, on which newly arriving immigrants are forcibly kept. These new prisons are the single piece of technology that most succinctly sums up the transformations underway in Italy’s COVID-19 capitalism. Doubtless, other islands and continents have their own landmarks strewn across the landscape of contagion, from the New York hotel rooms packed with the homeless, to the food warehouses of central Nigeria. (And to each monument, its resistance: the lawsuits being filed in US courts, or the looting of stockpiles by Nigerian protesters).