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Discipline and Punish (subtitled The Birth of the Prison) is a book written by the philosopher Michel Foucault. Originally published in 1975 in France under the title Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison, it was translated into English in 1977. It is an examination of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the massive changes that occurred in western penal systems during the modern age. It focusses on historical documents from France, but the issues it examines are relevant to every modern western society. It is considered a seminal work, and has influenced many theorists and artists.
The book challenges the commonly accepted idea that the prison became the consistent form of punishment due to humanitarian concerns of reformists. It does so by meticulously tracing out the shifts in culture that lead to the prison's dominance, focussing on the body and questions of power. It contains many complex ideas that cannot be fully described in a single article, however, the larger ideas of the book can be grouped according to its four parts: torture, punishment, discipline and prison.
Torture
Foucault begins the book by contrasting two forms of penalty: the violent and chaotic public torture of a man convicted of regicide in the 18th century, and the highly regimented daily schedule for inmates from a 19th century prison. These examples provide a picture of just how profound the change in western penal systems were after just one century. Foucault wants the reader to consider what led to these changes. How did western culture shift so radically?
To answer this question he begins by examining public torture itself. He argues that the public spectacle of torture was a theatrical forum which served several intended and unintended purposes for society. The intended purposes were:
- Reflecting the violence of the original crime onto the convict's body for all to see.
- Enacting the revenge upon the convict's body which the sovereign seeks for having been injured by the crime. Foucault argues that the law was considered an extension of the sovereign's body, and so the revenge must take the form of harming the convict's body.
The unintended purposes were:
- Providing a forum for the convict's body to become a locus of sympathy and admiration.
- Creating a site of conflict between the masses and the sovereign at the convict's body. Foucault notes that public executions often led to riots in support of the prisoner.
Thus, he argues, the public execution was ultimately an ineffective use of the body. As well, it was applied non-uniformly and haphazardly. It was the antithesis of the more modern concerns of the state: order and generalization.
Punishment
The switch to prison was not immediate. There was a more graded change, though it ran its course rapidly. Prison was preceded by a different form of public spectacle. The theatre of public torture gave way to public work gangs. Punishment became "gentle", not for humanitarian reasons Foucault suggests. He argues that reformists were unhappy with the unpredictable, unevenly distributed nature of the violence which the sovereign would focus on the body of the convict. The sovereign's right to punish was so disproportionate that it was ineffective and uncontrolled. Reformists felt that the power to punish and judge should become more evenly distributed, the state's power must be a form of public power. This, according to Foucault, was of more concern to reformists than humanitarian arguments.
Out of this movement towards generalized punishment, a thousand "mini-theatres" of punishment were created wherein the convicts' bodies were put on display in a more ubiquotous, controlled, and effective spectacle. Prisoners were forced to do work which reflected their crime, thus repaying society for their infractions. This allowed the public to see the convicts' bodies enacting their punishment, and thus to reflect on the crime.
Foucault argues that this use of "gentle" punishment represented the first step away from the excessive force of the sovereign, and towards more generalized and controlled means of punishment. But, he suggests that the shift towards prison which followed was the result of a new "technology" and ontology for the body being developed in the 18th century, the "technology" of discipline, and the ontology of "man as machine".
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