MICHEL FOUCAULT

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH

The Birth Of The Prison

TABLE OF CONTENTS

01 INTRODUCTION
Michel Foucault, Jeremy
04 EXAMPLES
Applications in
Bentham contemprorary society

02 SUMMARY
The Birth of the Prison
05 CONCLUSIONS

03 KEY IDEAS
Panopticism, power,
06 QUESTIONS

discipline, surveilance
01
Discipline and Punish is a history of the
modern penal system. Foucault seeks to
analyze punishment in its social context,
and to examine how changing power
relations affected punishment. He begins by
analyzing the situation before the eighteenth
century, when public execution and corporal
punishment were key punishments, and
torture was part of most criminal
investigations.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
History of the Prison
Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, is a
genealogical study of the development of the
“gentler” modern way of imprisoning criminals
rather than torturing or killing them.

While recognizing the element of genuinely enlightened

reform, Foucault particularly emphasizes how such reform
also becomes a vehicle of more effective control: “to
punish less, perhaps; but certainly to punish better.”

The main ideas of Discipline and Punish can be grouped

according to its four parts: torture, punishment, discipline,
and prison.
 “Punishment of a
less immediately physical kind, a certain discretion in
the art of inflicting pain, a combination of more
subtle, more subdued sufferings,
deprived of their visible display, should not all this be
treated as a special case, an incidental effect of
deeper changes. And yet the
fact remains that a few decades saw the disappearance
of the tortured, dismembered, amputated body,
symbolically branded on face
or shoulder, exposed alive or dead to public view. The
body as the major target of penal repression
disappeared.”
— PART ONE TORTURE
PUBLIC TORTURE

01 02 03 04
TO MAKE THE TO SHOW THE EFFECT
SECRET PUBLIC OF INVESTIGATION ON TO REFLECT THE TO ENACT THE
CONFESSION VIOLENCE OF THE REVENGE UPON THE
ORIGINAL CRIME CONVICT'S BODY

public torture as the outcome "of a certain mechanism of power"

 NINETEENTH CENTURY
● Unprecedented consequences: the convict's body is a focus
of sympathy and admiration; the executioner is condemned
and shamed; conflict arises 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.
● physical punishment disappeared; the tortured body was
avoided; the theatrical representation of pain was excluded
from punishment.
● BUT a punishment like forced labor (chain gangs) or even
imprisonment remained as punishment: rationing of food,
sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, solitary
confinement.
● substitution of objects: 'crime', the object with which penal
practice is concerned, has profoundly altered: the quality,
the nature, in a sense the substance of which the punishable
element is made, rather than its formal definition.
If the penalty in its most severe forms no longer addresses itself to the
body, on what does it lay hold? It seems to be contained in the question
itself: since it is no longer the body, it must be the soul.

“The man described for

us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a
subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul‘ inhabits him and brings
him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over
the body. The soul is the effect and
instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.”
 TRANSFORMATION OF PUNISHMENT
SYSTEM
CESARE
BECCARIA
01
'The penalty must be made to
conform as closely as possible to
02
the nature of the offence, so that
fear of punishment diverts the
mind from the road along which
the prospect of an advantageous
crime was leading it.'
03
reduce the desire that makes the
crime attractive; increase the
interest that makes the penalty be
feared.
'It is a triumph of civil liberty
the condemned man is the
property of society; the lesson, the
discourse, the representation of
when
the criminal laws derive each
public morality, the collective penalty from the particular
reinforcements of the link nature of each crime. In this
between the idea of crime and the
way all arbitrariness ceases;
idea of punishment.
. the penalty does not depend
on the caprice of the
the punishments must be a
school rather than a festival;
an ever-open book rather than
legislator, but on the nature of
the thing; it is not man who
a ceremony; discourse will
become the vehicle of the law: does violence to man, but the
the constant principle of man's own action‘.
universal recoding.
IMPRISONMENT
However, it had changed: strict
Imprisonment had a time-table, a system of
limited and marginal prohibitions and obligations,
continual supervision,
position in the penalty
exhortations, religious readings, a
system. whole complex of methods 'to
Imprisonment was not draw towards good' and 'to turn
considered a penalty. away from evil' held the prisoners
in its grip from day to day.
Imprisonment which included
isolation and day work was added
to civil laws.
A docile body is —
“something that can be
made; out of a formless
clay, an inapt body [from
which] the machine
required can be.
DOCILE BODIES

Training is important for docile bodies, and

there are a number of institutions that provide it ● The art of distributions;
— like military, schools and prisons. This
results in to the formation of “mechanics of ● Control of activity;
power” and a “political anatomy”.
● The organization of geneses;
A body is docile that may be subjected, used,
transformed and improved” — Foucault. ● The composition of forces.
THE MEANS OF CORRECT TRAINING

The chief functioning of disciplinary power is to

train. It links forces together to enhance and use
them; it creates individual units from a mass of
bodies.

hierarchical normalizing examination

observation judgement
Discipline operates Discipline rewards and It unites the processes of
by a calculated gaze, punishes by awarding observation and
not by force. ranks. It also traces the normalization..
abnormal.
 Bentham's Panopticon
He was an English philosopher, jurist, and social
reformer regarded as the founder of
modern utilitarianism.

The Panopticon induces a sense of permanent

visibility that ensures the functioning of power.
Bentham decreed that power should be visible yet
unverifiable. The prisoner can always see the tower
but never knows from where he is being observed.

Jeremy Bentham
(1748-1832)
 Foucault's point is that you can be coerced or
forced to do something by being observed
constantly. Not only do you feel self-conscious, but
your behavior changes. This is an excellent
example of the operation of power: an effect
occurs on your body without physical violence.
VISIBILITY IS A TRAP

Its aim is to induce in the inmate

a state of conscious and permanent visibility
that assures the automatic functioning of power.

Bentham develops the idea that disciplines

could be dispersed throughout society. He
provides a formula for the functioning of a
society that is penetrated by disciplinary
mechanisms.

It makes power more economic and effective. It

does this to develop the economy, spread
education and improve public morality, not to
save society.
MODERN DISCIPLINARY SYSTEM

A key idea in Foucault’s historical analysis of the modern penal

institutions is that they operate with markedly different rationality than
those that are aimed solely at retribution through pain. He effectively
reveals the double role of the present system: it aims at both punishing
and correcting, and therefore it mixes juridical and scientific practices.
Foucault argued that there was the gradual shift in penal practice from a
focus on the crime to a focus on the criminal, from the action to agency
and personality.

Prison, like the psychiatric hospital, marks out and isolates the
"abnormal" or illegal elements of society. In doing this it "creates"
something that can be controlled and which the state can put to various
uses. Foucault does not argue that prison creates crime, merely that
without prisons, crime and the criminal would be perceived in different
ways.
PART FOUR: PRISON

The integration of the prison into
society is an important point.
Abolishing the prison is unthinkable
because it is so deeply rooted in
society. In practical terms, Foucault
wants to argue that we have
developed no viable alternatives:
theoretically, the discourse of
punishment in which we operate
centers on imprisonment.
The explanation that Foucault gives for the rise
and continued existence of the carceral system
centers on illegality: a range of popular
behaviors that evade or fall outside the law.
There was a pressing need to control popular
revolts and illegality and delinquency was the
solution. The delinquent was not someone who
broke a particular law, but part of a group whose
very existence implied illegality and crime.

Foucault's last words suggest the real purpose of this account is not to
inspire rebellion against the modern disciplinary system, but to promote
understanding of its components and operation.
 QUESTIONS
There’s a conventional story about how we’ve made
progress in criminal punishment, which evolved brutal and
arbitrary measures to a more humane system with
allowances for handovers and setbacks. In what way does
Foucault challenge this view?

Hierarchical observation, normalizing

judgement, the examination. Are these kinds of
disciplinary power limited to prisons?

Do we have panopticon-like structures in the

modern society?
 THANKS!
DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY
QUESTIONS?

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INFORMATION SOURCES
“Discipline and Punish.” Sparknotes, SparkNotes,
www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/disciplinepunish/. Accessed 25 Apr. 2024.

"Discipline and Punish." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 6 Apr. 2024,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish. Accessed 24 Apr. 2024.

Gutting, Gary, and Johanna Oksala. “Michel Foucault.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Stanford University, 5 Aug. 2022, plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/#BiogSket.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1977.