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Foucault begins the book by contrasting two forms of penalty: the violent and
chaotic public torture of Robert-François Damiens who was
convicted of regicide in the late
18th century, and the highly regimented daily schedule for inmates from an early
19th century prison. These examples provide a picture of just how profound the
change in western penal systems were after less than a 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 that served
several intended and unintended purposes for society. The intended purposes
were:
Some unintended consequences were:
Thus, he argues, the public execution was ultimately an ineffective use of
the body, qualified as non-economical. As well, it was applied non-uniformly and
haphazardly. Hence, its political cost was too high. It was the antithesis of
the more modern concerns of the state: order and generalization.
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 chain gangs. Punishment became
"gentle", though not for humanitarian reasons, Foucault suggests. He argues
that reformists were unhappy with the unpredictable, unevenly distributed nature
of the violence the sovereign would inflict on the convict. The sovereign's
right to punish was so disproportionate that it was ineffective and
uncontrolled. Reformists felt 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 would have been created wherein the convicts'
bodies would have been put on display in a more ubiquitous, controlled, and
effective spectacle. Prisoners would have been forced to do work that reflected
their crime, thus repaying society for their infractions. This would have
allowed the public to see the convicts' bodies enacting their punishment, and
thus to reflect on the crime. But these experiments lasted less than twenty
years.
Foucault argues that this theory 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 that 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."
The emergence of prison as the form of punishment for every crime grew out of
the development of discipline in the 18th and 19th centuries, according to
Foucault. He looks at the development of highly refined forms of discipline, of
discipline concerned with the smallest and most precise aspects of a person's
body. Discipline, he suggests, developed a new economy and politics for bodies.
Modern institutions required that bodies must be individuated according to their
tasks, as well as for training, observation, and control. Therefore, he argues,
discipline created a whole new form of individuality for bodies, which enabled
them to perform their duty within the new forms of economic, political, and
military organizations emerging in the modern age and continuing to today.
The individuality that discipline constructs (for the bodies it controls) has
four characteristics, namely it makes individuality which is:
Foucault suggests this individuality can be implemented in systems that are
officially egalitarian, but use discipline to construct non-egalitarian power
relations:
- Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course
of the eighteenth century the politically dominant class was masked by the
establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical
framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative
regime. But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms
constituted the other, dark side of these processes. The general juridical form
that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was
supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of
micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call
the disciplines. (222)
Foucault's argument is that discipline creates "docile bodies", ideal for the
new economics, politics and warfare of the modern industrial age—bodies
that function in factories, ordered military regiments, and school classrooms.
But, to construct docile bodies the disciplinary institutions must be able to a)
constantly observe and record the bodies they control, b) ensure the
internalization of the disciplinary individuality within the bodies being
controlled. That is, discipline must come about without excessive force through
careful observation, and molding of the bodies into the correct form through
this observation. This requires a particular form of institution, which Foucault
argues, was exemplified by Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, which was never actually built.
The Panopticon was the ultimate realization of a modern disciplinary
institution. It allowed for constant observation characterized by an "unequal gaze"; the constant possibility of observation.
Perhaps the most important feature of the panopticon was that it was
specifically designed so that the prisoner could never be sure whether s/he was
being observed. The unequal gaze caused the internalization of disciplinary
individuality, and the docile body required of its inmates. This means one is
less likely to break rules or laws if they believe they are being watched, even
if they are not. Thus, prison, and specifically those that follow the model of
the Panopticon, provide the ideal form of modern punishment. Foucault argues
that this is why the generalized, "gentle" punishment of public work gangs gave
way to the prison. It was the ideal modernization of punishment, so its eventual
dominance was natural.
Having laid out the emergence of the prison as the dominant form of
punishment, Foucault devotes the rest of the book to examining its precise form
and function in our society, to lay bare the reasons for its continued use, and
question the assumed results of its use.
In examining the construction of the prison as the central means of criminal
punishment, Foucault builds a case for the idea that prison became part of a
larger “carceral system” that has become an all-encompassing sovereign
institution in modern society. Prison is one part of a vast network, including
schools, military institutions, hospitals, and factories, which build a panoptic
society for its members. This system creates “disciplinary careers” (Discipline
and Punish, 300) for those locked within its corridors. It is operated under the
scientific authority of medicine, psychology, and criminology. Moreover, it
operates according to principles that ensure that it “cannot fail to produce
delinquents.” (Discipline and Punish, 266). Delinquency, indeed, is produced
when social petty crime (such as taking wood in the lord's lands) is no longer
tolerated, creating a class of specialized "delinquents" acting as the police's
proxy in surveillance of society.
The structures Foucault chooses to use as his starting positions help
highlight his conclusions. In particular, his choice as a perfect prison of the
penal institution at Mettray helps
personify the carceral system. Within it is included the Prison, the School, the
Church, and the work-house (industry)—all of which feature heavily in his
argument. The prisons at Neufchatel, Mettray, and Mettray Netherlands were
perfect examples for Foucault, because they, even in their original state, began
to show the traits Foucault was searching for. They showed the body of knowledge
being developed about the prisoners, the creation of the 'delinquent' class, and
the disciplinary careers emerging.
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