Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault
Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault (trans. Robert Hurley)
Part One: Torture
1. The body of the condemned
This first section of Part One serves as an introduction to the entire book. Examples of eighteenth-century torture provide Foucault with many colorful episodes to relate in his account of how penality changed in modernity. Foucault relates an explicit account of Damien's torture to introduce his subject (3-5) and compares that account of penality to Faucher's timetable for prisoners published in approximately 1837 (6-7).
The period separating these two accounts is a "new age for penal justice" in Europe and the United States that saw changes in the following areas:
-- Economy of punishment
-- Numerous projects for reform
-- New theories of law and crime
-- New moral and political justifications of the right to punish
-- The disappearance of old laws and customs (7).
In the span of only a few decades between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, torture as public spectacle disappeared (7) as did "the body as the major target of penal repression" (8). Two processes were at work in this transformation:
(1) Disappearance of punishment as spectacle (8); and
(2) Slackening of the hold on the body (10)
Disappearance of punishment as spectacle (8)
Punishment becomes a hidden part of the penal process with several consequences:
(1) It leaves the domain of everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness;
(2) Its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity;
(3) It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime;
(4) The mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms; thus, "justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice . . .[and] is difficult to account for" (9).
Public spectacle turned the tables, enveloping the executioner, judge, and other associated parties in
Part One: Torture
1. The body of the condemned
This first section of Part One serves as an introduction to the entire book. Examples of eighteenth-century torture provide Foucault with many colorful episodes to relate in his account of how penality changed in modernity. Foucault relates an explicit account of Damien's torture to introduce his subject (3-5) and compares that account of penality to Faucher's timetable for prisoners published in approximately 1837 (6-7).
The period separating these two accounts is a "new age for penal justice" in Europe and the United States that saw changes in the following areas:
-- Economy of punishment
-- Numerous projects for reform
-- New theories of law and crime
-- New moral and political justifications of the right to punish
-- The disappearance of old laws and customs (7).
In the span of only a few decades between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, torture as public spectacle disappeared (7) as did "the body as the major target of penal repression" (8). Two processes were at work in this transformation:
(1) Disappearance of punishment as spectacle (8); and
(2) Slackening of the hold on the body (10)
Disappearance of punishment as spectacle (8)
Punishment becomes a hidden part of the penal process with several consequences:
(1) It leaves the domain of everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness;
(2) Its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity;
(3) It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime;
(4) The mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms; thus, "justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice . . .[and] is difficult to account for" (9).
Public spectacle turned the tables, enveloping the executioner, judge, and other associated parties in