Sociology synopsis - To what degree is torture considered cruel and unnatural?

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Siobhain Bowen

Sociology Synopsis

3/11/03

AOC12MA

Within Foucault's article we see the horrific ways in which Damien's was punished and tortured for the killing of the king in 1757, giving the gruesome details of his torture Foucault is showing us the changes in which punishment and discipline has changed over the past 250 years. Regardless of what a person does for a crime no one has the right to treat one of Gods creatures in such a cruel and vicious manner. Damien's case was and still is a popular case that is studied in many areas but to what degree is torture considered cruel and unnatural? Who has the right to say no! After viewing Damien's account of the public ways in which punishment is dished out we get an example of a typical daily routine for a prisoner in the early 19th century. The "police" or the high courts may see themselves as having the last and final word but under no circumstances can someone have the so called "right" to treat the human body in such a manner just to prove a point. Public executions were a big thing back in the 16th to late 19th century. They were there for personal amusement and game. They were there to make a standpoint as to what happens if certain crimes were committed or if you killed someone.

Throughout the history of public executions we see a pattern that occurred regularly and that continues today. The rich were spared torture and instead got beheaded to spare the family shame. When all torture was concluded, the criminals were just beheaded, for this was a movement away from the "body" of the criminal suffering and the repenting of the "soul" of the criminal instead. No one should ever have to go through such torture just because a crime they have committed. I am not saying that I don't agree with the crimes that were committed or whom they were committed by but indeed people do have to be punished, they just can't get off with a slap on the wrists; but who is to say or who has the right to say when one has been tortured enough? Some say today we just try and ignore the fact that it is going on behind closed doors and that no one wants to talk about it. The degrees of torture that the human body has gone through when reading the article was absolutely painful for me to even read. Common sense would tell a person that after a body has been removed all its flesh, then have its hands in which the crimes were committed burnt and cut off... have the body quartered to then burn after; absolutely does constitute torture and its absolutely a different kind of torture that goes on today. In our society, such practices would be considered uncivil or cruelty to man and human nature. One would not get away with such practices.

Continuing on through the article we see various situations on which people have put on trial for committing a crime yet not been of sane mind. In the 1810 code of Article 64 tells that if they are not tried and found guilty what should be done to them, should they be let back into society. This article however does not concern responsibility. When judging, the judge therefore needs to look at other factors and not just the crime itself and that punishment of all kinds are enforced because we wish to find a cure. According to Foucault, the penal system as a whole is a form of power relations giving judges the right to judge and give the power to dicatate what is wrong and what is right. But in short this power is exercised rather than possessed. He says that punishment should not be a form of power over the criminal, which would mean that the criminal in a position of victimisation. But instead use the technology of power to understand why he commits the crime. What constitutes torture as being the final say or how mush torture is? Punishment is not just for a 'sentence' but indeed for its "very materiality as an instrument and vector of power; it is this whole technology of the 'soul' ..." Therefore it is not the subject of knowledge that produces the knowledgeable person but the power knowledge relations the way in which this knowledge comes to be, through experience that determines knowledge.
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Pierre Bourdieu's 'Distinction' is how he thought society is stratified or more or less how it should be. The dominant class is an autonomous space whose structure is defined by the distribution of economic and cultural capital among its members. There are fractions within each class that correspond to different lifestyles through habitus. The habitus is a system of choices that are influenced by inherited asset structures. Furthermore, different sets of preferences come from systems of dispositions and the social conditions of production, which create relationships between them. He tells us that cultural goods and the way we ...

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