discipline & punish the birth of the prison

Prison seemed better equipped to address these kinds of crimes. People didn’t just want to punish crime, but also protect their possessions. This is part of a larger trend in the rise of everyday people understanding their own power apart from the king. As societies shifted to prisons, they were more interested in crimes against property, such as theft.

In torture, the crimes people cared about were especially physically violent crimes, such as murder. Discipline and Punish, 77Ĭorrelated with the shift from torture to imprisonment is another shift in the nature of crimes themselves. In fact, the shift from a criminality of blood to a criminality of fraud forms part of a whole complex mechanism, embracing the development of production, the increase of wealth, a higher juridical and moral value placed on property relations, stricter methods of surveillance, a tighter partitioning of the population, more efficient techniques of locating and obtaining information: the shift in illegal practices is correlative with an extension and a refinement of punitive practices. Discipline and Punish is about the rise of different bodies of knowledge that facilitated this shift, including the rise of psychological sciences that gave us types of people, rather than just types of crimes. This is a radical shift, because it means that the entire person has to be reformed, rather than just an action being punished. If the body disappears from punishment by the mid 1800s, then what becomes the target of punishment in its place? Foucault’s answer is that justice starts to aim at reforming the “soul” rather than punishing the body. Punishment started to be thought of as something more spiritual than physical.ĭuring the 150 or 200 years that Europe has been setting up its new penal systems, the judges have gradually, by means of a process that goes back very far indeed, taken to judging something other than crimes, namely, the “soul” of the criminal. His point is that this shift was also a change in the importance people placed on the physical body. Criminals went from being tortured in public to being imprisoned in private.

In this quote, Foucault describes the major shift he theorizes in Discipline and Punish: from punishment as a public spectacle to a private confinement. The body as the major target of penal repression disappeared. Few decades saw the disappearance of the tortured, dismembered, amputated body, symbolically branded on face or shoulder, exposed alive or dead to public view.

Discipline & punish the birth of the prison