The new target of punishment was no longer the body - it was to be the soul - “the apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality.” (Foucault 17) This was aided by the fact that technology was improved and that it no longer sought to punish the body. “It is intended to apply the law not so much to a real body capable of feeling pain as to a juridical subject… It had to have the abstraction of the law itself.” (Foucault 13) The law itself was to be “more regular, more effective, more constant and more detailed in its effects” (Foucault 80) with the intent “to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body.” (Foucault 82)
Modern punishment shifts the focus away from the violence itself and rather focuses on emphasizing to the criminal and the rest of society that those who break the law are not accepted in society. Punishment is not to simply punish the offence, “but to supervise the individual, to neutralize his dangerous state of mind, to alter his criminal tendencies, and to continue even which this change has been achieved.” (Foucault 18) It shifts the attention away from the punishment to the legalities behind punishment - the trial and the sentence; within a systematized carceral system it leads to the inevitability and the legitimacy of punishment. It also creates categories within society to place the criminal, and this is done through a distribution and creation of knowledge of human nature and behavior. Thus, punishment should be regarded as a social function as well as a political tactic, as it “make[s] the technology of power the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and of the knowledge of man.” (Foucault 23) Power has thus been re-distributed into more efficient means through better knowledge of the delinquent with laws better tailored to more efficiently punish.
The new system was created with the pretense of discouraging people from crime, as well as to reform those who do commit crime. It aimed to discourage people from crime by portraying it as disadvantageous and therefore undesirable, by instilling an apprehension of the inevitability of punishment, by lateral effects into society so as to “leave the most lasting impression on the minds of the people,” (Foucault 95) as well as through optimal specification of what is a criminal and what is a crime.
The carceral system is “a great enclosed, complex and hierarchized structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus.” (Foucault 116) It develops as a way to control an observe the prisoner, as characterized by the power-knowledge dynamic. Control is thus the exertion of power, while observation is the process of gathering knowledge of the prisoner and of “a closer penal mapping of the social body.” (Foucault 78) The individual is divided up into categories according to the human sciences “by a whole set of regulations and by empirical and calculated methods relating to the army, the school, and the hospital, for controlling or correcting the operations of the body. (Foucault 136) Here it is determined what is the norm of behavior - anything that is outside of the norm is subject to the carceral system, “making the slightest departures from correct behavior subject to punishment, and of giving a punitive function to the apparently indifferent elements of the disciplinary apparatus.” (Foucault 178) The individual is thus “the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society” as well as a “reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that [Foucault] has called ‘discipline’.” (Foucault 194) The modern system of punishment thus defines what is the accepted citizen of the penal state and what is the delinquent - it proceeds to reform the delinquent through discipline.
“Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience.)” (Foucault 138) Discipline turns subjects into individuals, and those individuals are objectified, analyzed, and observed such that power can control the undesirable aspects of human nature whilst bringing out and encouraging the more useful and desirable characteristics. The goal of discipline is “to construct a machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the elementary parts of which it is composed.” (Foucault 164) This is achieved through division and regulation of the human body, and this is maintained through strict observance.
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon exemplifies this concept of discipline - in which people are observed and their behavior is regulated. “It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify, and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates and judges them.” (Foucault 184) This leads to a “multiplication of the effects of power through the formation and accumulation of new forms of knowledge.” (Foucault 224) This directly speaks to the expansion of the human sciences of psychiatry, criminology, sociology, psychology and medicine. The more categories for humans, the more efficiently can power be exercised so as to establish what is the norm for humanity. In doing so, however, power diffuses through these institutions and into the rest of the society.
It would be impossible to take the penal system out of society simply because it has been so ingrained into society - while society focuses on liberty, the obvious punishment would be to deny liberty and that is what the carceral system is about. Thus, discourse does not allow for changes in the system - humans determine the values of a culture as well as the rules of a culture, and only they can unmake them. This is not a process that happens immediately or even quickly - it is a slow process of development and redistribution over time. If anything, the modern system of punishment has ensured greater successes in ensuring liberty for others as well as to enforce order - there cannot be imagined a more efficient system within the present discourse of punishment. Furthermore, to want to change the system would be to question power and to oppose authority - this only leads to marginalization. It is nigh impossible to escape power, so it is it even worth fighting the system? Power has shaped not only the prisons, but also the rest of society by determining what is the norm - “it is [not] surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons.” (Foucault 228) Thus, disciplinary power does not merely affect the delinquent, but it also affects the average citizen. The penal system is actually a carceral network that penetrates everywhere.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York:
Vintage Books, 1977. Print.
