history of punishment

History Of Punishment

Critically assess Foucault's thesis on the birth of the prison; is his argument a convincing one?

Disciplinary punishment gives professionals like psychologists, program administrators, and parole officers power over the prisoner, most particularly in that the prisoner's length of stay depends on the professionals' judgment. Foucault argues that disciplinary punishment leads to self-policing by the public as opposed to brutal displays of power from the Monarchical period. Foucault says that between the 17th and 18th centuries a new, more restrained form of power was being exercised across nations. He calls this form of power discipline. Soldiers could be made and shaped rather than just being chosen because of their natural characteristics. Knowledge and power are fundamental to Foucault's analysis. He questions ordinary concepts like justice or equality and asks where these concepts came from and who they benefit. The process of observing and evaluating people leads to more and more knowledge about them (Prisons and Surveillance, n.d.).

Incarceration, as the main form of punishment, deterrence, reform, or rehabilitation of criminal offenders, has a history of over two hundred years. At different times and in different places, the modern prison has displaced pre-modern types of punishment such as bodily mutilation, banishment, slavery, fines, and execution. Over the years the contemporary prison has emerged in a global historical context as articulated, situated, and informed by local circumstances (Pincince, 2008).

Ancient prisons have been replaced by clear and visible ones, but Foucault believed that this was nothing more than a visibility trap. He felt that is was through this visibility that modern society exercises its controlling systems of power and knowledge. Increasing visibility leads to power situated on an increasingly individualized level, shown by the likelihood for institutions to track people throughout their lives. "Foucault suggests that a "carceral continuum" runs through modern society, from the maximum security prison, through secure accommodation, probation, social workers, police, and teachers, to our everyday working and domestic lives. All are connected by the (witting or unwitting) supervision (surveillance, application of norms of acceptable behaviour) of some humans by others" (Prisons and Surveillance, n.d.).

Foucault described the modern history of the European prison as a small part of the development of an immense system of incarceration. For Foucault, the new social sciences were a basis for disciplinary administrative structures which separated and restrained newly recognized and classified groups of people who were said to differ from the rational and politically desirable character type. "Foucault warned that a carceral nightmare was unfolding upon earth with humanity caught, like a fly within a web, as disciplinary institution built upon disciplinary institution, all on the false, lurid promise of a fabricated knowledge promising a rational, liberated and beneficent future" (Koh, 1999).

What Foucault calls discipline is best understood as an outline or configuration in power and knowledge relations which has come to characterise the organisation of a diversity of institutions including not only disciplinary like those such as the prison but also the workplace. Disciplinary institutions share a quantity of common features: the classification of groups of people, their understanding in relations of dependence and loyalty, the ordering of personal activity and time, joined with thorough monitoring and surveillance which is a form of power that persuades compliant but industrious performance (Barratt, 2002).

Foucault states that during the mid-18th Century the right to punish was directly associated to the power of the King. Crimes committed throughout this time were not crimes against the public good, but a personal disrespect to the King himself. The public displays of torture and execution were public confirmations of the King's power to rule and to punish. As public tortures and executions continued, the people subjected to torture became heroes, particularly if the punishment was too extreme for the crime committed. The convicted person was given an opportunity to speak prior to the execution. This gave him a chance to apologize for his crimes, but frequently it was used as a time to speak against the throne and the executioners. On a lot of occasions the crowds gathered around to view the event would riot against the executioner, stopping the event from continuing (Panopticism, n.d.).

Near the end of the 18th Century, protests against public execution and torture continued. The public wanted punishment with no torture, which led to the invention of prison. Deprivation of liberty became the main type of punishment. Liberty is the one thing that is alike to everyone. Fines hurt the poor more than the rich, but taking away freedom caused the same intensity of discomfort to everyone. Prisons became more than just places were liberty was taken away; they were places where discipline could be encouraged. Discipline was a drive to implant useful, social qualities into the criminals. It was an effort to reform the criminal so upon their release, they would be less likely to re-offend and more likely to be a productive member of society (Panopticism, n.d.).

The discipline that prisons tried to install in criminals was comparable to the discipline in military units. The basic notion of discipline is that one will be rewarded for accomplishment, and be punished for lack of accomplishment or non-conformity. Forcing the prisoners to live and work under strict rules instilled discipline. The prisoners were forced to use every minute that they were awake constructively. This was social training to prepare people for a life of productivity when released (Panopticism, n.d.).

In order to observe the progress of prisoners constant supervision was required. A prison warder watched criminals at all time to make sure they followed the rules. Constant supervision led to the development of institutional designs like Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. The panopticon had cells built around a central tower. The cells opened in the front so the guards in the tower could see inside. The cells had windows in the rear of the cell illuminating the prisoner making him easy to see. The windows of the tower had Venetian blinds permitting the guards to see out, but stopping the prisoners from seeing inside. The prisoner never knew at any given point in time if they were being watched or not, therefore they continually obeyed the rules (Panopticism, n.d.).

The principal on which Bentham's Panopticon was based was at the edge there was an annular building; in the center there was a tower that contained wide windows that opened onto the inner side of the ring; on the peripheral there was a building divided into cells, each of which extended the whole width of the building; all having two windows, one on the inside, parallel to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allowing the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that was needed was to place a supervisor in a central tower. This panoptic mechanism arranged spatial unities that made it possible to see continually and to recognize people right away. This concept was the complete opposite of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions, to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide. It preserved only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor captured better than darkness, which in the end protected. Visibility was a trap (Alford, 2000).

This set up made it possible to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were often found in places of imprisonment. Each person was in their place, securely confined to a cell from which they could be seen from the front by the supervisor. The side walls prevented them from coming into contact with other prisoners, so essentially they could be seen but they could not see. The arrangement of this room, opposite the central tower, imposed on the prisoner an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, implied a sideways invisibility. And this invisibility was the guarantee of order. The inmates were in no danger of plotting an attempt to escape or planning new crimes for the future. The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, was abolished and replaced by a compilation of separated individualities. From the point-of-view of the guard, it was a multiplicity that could be numbered and supervised; from the point-of-view of the inmates it was sequestered and observed solitude (Alford, 2000).

For this reason the major effect of the Panopticon was to induce in the prisoner a state of mindful and permanent visibility that promises the automatic functioning of power. So to position things that the observation is permanent in its effects, even if it is irregular in its action is that the precision of power should tend to provide its actual exercise unnecessary. This architectural apparatus was a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it. In short, the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. In order to achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be continually observed by a guard. Too little, for what matters is that he knows he is being watched and too much, because he has no need in fact of being so (Alford, 2000).

Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible in that the inmate would constantly have before him the tall outline of the central tower from which he was watched. Unverifiable in that the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at or not, but he must be sure that there is always the possibility. In order to make the attendance or nonattendance of the guard unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham visualized not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, zigzag opening instead of doors. For even the slightest noise, or gleam of light, would betray the presence of the guard. "The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheral ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen" (Alford, 2000).

The Panopticon was an important mechanism, for it automated and de-individualized power. Power has its principle in a certain concentrated distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes and not so much in the person. In this case it was an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which people were caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals and the marks by which the monarch's excess power was manifested were useless. There was machinery that assured dissymmetry, disequilibrium and dissimilarity. As a result, it did not matter who exercised the power. Any person, taken at random, could operate the machine. The Panopticon was a great machine and no matter what one used it for it produced uniform effects of power (Alford, 2000).

Foucault said unvarying supervision and forced discipline broke the will of the criminal and made him into a passive body and the passive body was easy to control by people in power. Prison's major goal was to decrease crime by punishing the criminal. It was also thought that prisons should deter others from committing crimes. According to Foucault, prisons did not meet this goal; in fact he thought they made criminals worse. Foucault believed the prison system was not a system designed to decrease crime by punishing criminals and deterring others. He believed the prison system instead functioned very effectively at accomplishing other goals. The prison system allowed the upper class to carry on the subjugation of the lower class. The prison system efficiently incarcerated, isolated and economically controlled the most dynamic members of the lower class. The nonstop cycle of isolation and supervision rendered this most volatile group both politically and socially harmless. The discipline of the prison system spilled out into all of society causing a struggle for each member of society. People either struggled and resisted the discipline of society and were labeled as criminal or the submitted to it and lost their own identity. For Foucault the losing of ones own identity to the discipline of the state was the real crime (McGaha, n.d.).

Foucault sought to look at punishment in its social context, and to see how altering power relations affected punishment. He began by looking at the situation before the eighteenth century, when public execution and corporal punishment were key punishments, and torture was used in most criminal investigations. Punishment was ritual and directed at the prisoner's body. It was a ceremony in which the spectators were important. Public execution re-established the power and authority of the King. Popular literature recounted the details of executions, and the public was greatly involved in them (Discipline and Punish, 2011).

The eighteenth century saw a variety of calls for reform of punishment. The reformers, according to Foucault, were not motivated by a concern for the well-being of prisoners. Rather, they wanted to make authority operate more resourcefully. They proposed a theater of punishment, in which a multifaceted system of representations and signs were displayed publicly. Punishments correlated obviously to their crimes, and served as an obstruction to lawbreaking (Discipline and Punish, 2011).

Prison was not yet imaginable as a penalty. Three new form of penalty helped to surmount resistance to it. Nonetheless, great differences existed between this kind of coercive institution and the early, punitive city. The path for the prison was laid by the developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the disciplines. Discipline was thought to be a series of methods by which the body's operations could be controlled. Discipline worked by intimidating and arranging the people's movements and their experience of space and time. This was achieved by devices such as timetables and military drills, and the process of exercise. Through discipline, individual people were created out of a mass. Disciplinary power had three elements: hierarchical surveillance, stabilizing judgment and assessment. Surveillance and the gaze were key instruments of power. By these processes, and through the human sciences, the notion of the norm was developed (Discipline and Punish, 2011).

Disciplinary power was exemplified by Bentham's Panopticon. Institutions were modeled on the panopticon and begin to spread throughout society. Prison developed from this idea of discipline. It aimed both to deprive the person of his freedom and to reform him at the same time. The penitentiary was the next development. It combined the prison with the workshop and the hospital. The penitentiary replaced the prisoner with the delinquent. The delinquent was created as a reaction to changes in popular illegality, in order to marginalize and control popular behavior. Disapproval of the failure of prisons missed the point, because failure was part of its very nature. The process by which failure and operation were combined was the carceral system. The goal of prison, and of the carceral system, was to produce delinquency as a means of arranging and controlling crime. From this viewpoint, they succeeded. The prison was part of a network of power that spread throughout society, and which was controlled by the rules of strategy alone. Calls for its elimination failed to recognize the depth at which it was embedded in modern society, or even its real function (Discipline and Punish, 2011).

The ruling class placed a brand on the delinquent class posing them as a detached group from the normal lower class. This permitted for the separation of the most dynamic group from the rest of the masses of demoralized, further restricting the likelihood the lowest class could shape social change. To this was added an enduring attempt to impose a highly specific grid on the common perception of delinquents: to present them as close by, everywhere and everywhere to be feared. The ruling class accomplished this through the newspapers and printed novels about crime (McGaha, n.d.).

Foucault believed the dominant class used the delinquent class as a means of profiting themselves. Delinquency was a means for the illegality of the dominant groups. The setting up of prostitution networks in the nineteenth century was characteristic of this. Police checks and checks on the prostitutes' health, their regular stay in prison, the significant organization in the prostitution setting, and its control by delinquent-informers, all made it possible to recuperate by a series of mediators, the enormous profits from a sexual pleasure. Setting a price for pleasure, in creating a profit from repressed sexuality and in collecting this profit, the delinquent environment was in collusion with a self-interested Puritanism who was an illicit agent operating over illegal practices (McGaha, n.d.).

Foucault related how the penal system with its long arms affects society as a whole. Foucault believed other governmental programs, such as welfare and new educational methods, expanded from the penal system. He called this development of disciplinary control the carceral archipelago. It created a whole society of passive bodies submitting to the will of the state. It has been seen in the penal justice, that the prison transformed the punitive procedure into a penitentiary technique; the carceral archipelago transported this technique from penal institutions to the whole social body (McGaha, n.d.).

Foucault distinguishes the changes in punishment, by the State upon its criminals, between the 18th and the 19th Century. The transition from monarch power to disciplinary power is shown in the figure of the criminal, who is first tortured upon the scaffold and then confined in the prison institution. Yet, the power relations, positional locations, points of application, and methods utilized against the criminal have in general been reduced to the institution of the prison and its approach of coercion. For Foucault, the prison represented the move from monarch power to disciplinary power, but these strategies of coercion were not unique to prison institutions. The strategies of the prison were present in the strategies used by the military, by hospitals, by schools, and in factories. The prison, thus, represented a system of control, but the strategies that reinforce this control are similar to various other measures adopted by the State: that is, the steady surveillance of an enclosed area and the nonstop normalization of a productive populace (Johnson, n.d.).

The art of punishment rests on a skill of representation. To find an appropriate punishment is to find a deterrent that robs the crime of all draw. It is the art of founding representations of pairs of opposing values or obstacle-signs. Obstacle-signs must obey certain conditions in order to function. They must not be random. An instant link between the crime and punishment is necessary. The complex of signs must reduce the desire for crime and increase the fear of the penalty. Temporal modulation is needed. Penalties cannot be permanent. The more serious the crime, the longer the penalty has to be. The punishment should be directed at others, not just the criminal. Obstacle-signs must circulate widely. A learned economy of publicity has to exist. The penalty has to be a representation of public morality. The code of the laws has to be evident in punishment (Discipline and Punish, 2011).

For Foucault, the prison could not be reduced simply to the prison building. Instead, it was a field of multiple forces. It organized space, it controlled actions and bodies, and it watched and analyzed its population. The prison, as exemplified by Bentham's Panopticon, was an architectural blueprint. It was a strategy of normalization, and, in effect, an educational and moralizing power. It was a legal annex and a compound of police intervention. The prison served a social function. The prison posed as a laboratory for new studies in the human sciences, and thus perpetuated a process known as discipline. The prison was an experiment in managing an excluded and dangerous population, but also took the knowledge that it derived as a way in which to manage the population outside the prison. The criminal consequently became a model in which to distinguish patterns of delinquent deviation in the larger population. At the same time, the prison practiced tactics of social and corporeal control and then utilized this knowledge in nurturing a passive society (Johnson, n.d.).

Foucault resolved all of these various intuitional mechanisms and political strategies into an analysis of the social organization of illegalities. He called this the 'police-prison system.' The prison was an institution of the police no doubt. It served so to house, punish, and discipline criminals. This was a police action. In doing so, it not only analyzed delinquency it created the concept. Consequently, by confining criminals, a profile of the delinquent could be created. The prisoner never stayed a prisoner for long. Once released into the general population the prisoner routinely reproduced criminal behavior. This was because the prison was not used for rehabilitation, but for punishment. The prisoner was released into freedom in which he stood little chance of employment, faced certain discrimination in finding a place to live and was controlled by probation programs (Johnson, n.d.).

Once the delinquent was no longer a prisoner they became the object of the police. The ways in which the prison governed its population became mobilized against the civilian population. The organization of a remote illegality, enclosed in delinquency, would not have been likely without the development of police supervision. Foucault asserted that the strategies of the Panopticon were organized throughout society. What is important to Foucault's analysis is that he conceived of the police as mobilizing the delinquent in a larger effort at social surveillance. The delinquent had a choice of either repeating criminal activity or becoming a spy for the police. Foucault provocatively alludes to an entire history of secret police forces made up of ex-convicts and prostitutes. Once imprisoned and subsequently released, the delinquent was counted upon to either reproduce patterns of criminal behavior or to spy upon the criminal underworld. Either way, the ex-convict became an important tool for the police by internalizing the disciplinary techniques of surveillance. A properly disciplined delinquent became a medium for a larger policy of social supervision (Johnson, n.d.).