Discipline And Punish: The Birth Of Prisons

Between 1700 and 1900 a system familiar to our eyes emerged as a result of important changes. The 1800s very harsh and a lot of crime was done in that time. The laws, punishment and jail were similar, also very different from today's. In the 1800s the punishment was much more survivor and stick to it more than now. If you lived back in that time, it was usual to walk the streets and you see a hanging happening. This showing the cruelty and none caring of the people and how harsh the punishment was.

Change over time; that is a common theme with everything in the world. The concept of punishment is no different in that regard. In the 16th and 17th century the common view for punishing people was retaliation from the king and to be done in the town square. In what seemed to be all of a sudden, there was a change in human thinking, the concept of punishment changed to a more psychological approach compared to a public embarrassment/torture approach. The following paragraphs will discuss the development of prisons and what in fact gives people gives people the right to punish; as well as the overall meaning and function of prisons. The work by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison will help with the arguments

Imprisonment is one of the primary ways in which social control may be achieved; the Sage Dictionary of Criminology defines social control as a concept used to describe all the ways in which conformity may be achieved. Throughout time imprisonment and its ideas around social control have varied. Imprisonment has not always been used for punishment, nor has it always thought about the prisoners themselves. However when looking at imprisonment it is important to consider the new penology. Therefore, it needs to be clear what the new penology is. The new penology is said, not to be about punishing individuals or about rehabilitating them, but about identifying and managing unruly groups in society. It is concerned with the managerial

The delivery of punishment has changed significantly over the centuries. Up until the 19th century in England, imprisonment was not regarded as a punishment, it was merely used while the offender waited to be sentenced to their ‘real’ punishment (Bull, 2010; Hirst, 1998). Corporal punishment such as flogging, branding and mutilation, death by hanging, and transportation to other continents such as America and Australia were common punitive measures through the ages, until well into the 1800’s (Newburn, 2003). Although these extreme penalties are no longer acceptable or practised by criminal courts in England or Australia, in some ways, the past has

This part of the paper will provide a comparison with a theorist previously discussed in a lecture. The theorist with whom Michael Foucault’s arguments will be compared to is Emile Durkheim. Durkheim sees crime as functional. He says that if there was no crime, all our values would be dispersed--these values are laws. These laws are observed by sanctions and punishments attached to it. However, in order for these laws to exist, there must be a punishment, thus, for there to be a punishment, there has to be crime. Repressive law, according to this classical theorist was based on punishing for the evil doing of the criminal through revenge. Durkheim believes that a crime is not collective and when one goes against the core values of society, one threatens the entire order of society. Therefore, this theorist would agree with Foucault that when disciplining a criminal, he or she should be stripped of their freedom and when

In this essay I will be looking at the key developments of the British penal system since the early nineteenth century. I will also discuss how the main objectives of the prison system have changed over this period of time.

Public shaming, among other punishment options that existed during these times, was one of the most heavily relied upon punishments used. In using this approach, law enforcers hoped to teach a lesson to the offender and also reduce the likeliness of that person committing the same crime. Other very common forms of punishment included the following: placing people in the pillory, cutting off ears, whipping, and branding; the more severe and violent crimes such as rape and murder were punished through some type of execution ending the criminal’s life in death (Social Welfare History Project, 2012).

In Michael Foucault’s work, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, he discusses how we are always being watched. That the way society has been structured has forced us to always think someone with more power is watching us therefore we should behave better. In his work he puts forward his main ideas and arguments which are power and knowledge, the body, the history of the soul, prison and society, and paradox and contrast. He observes and or studies the relationship between each term and elaborates on each one of his

The penal theory and the architectural design of England’s correctional system began in the eighteenth century. This time period was the benchmark for the emergence of the modern development of English corrections. Prior to the eighteenth century, it is assumed that during the Anglo-Saxon period and the medieval period some type of prison existed (Terrill, 2016). For France their correctional system

He examines this through different phases of discipline. The first phase of discipline is placed in the 17th and 18th century, where public corporal practices were used for punishment. This included torture, public hangings and body disfiguration. All of these methods were executed by the orders of the king or a monarch, a centralized, visible power. A defining occurrence of this time was the plague, it provided order for society, and the sick are separated from the healthy. This discipline of separation through institutions provides mechanisms of power to start to manifest, “power opposed it’s perpetual death (page #)”, these manifestations through structures were built in the fear of death by the plague. With these graphic and public displays

Michel Foucault is a very famous French intellectual who practiced the knowledge of sociology. Foucault analyzed how knowledge related to social structures, in particular the concept of punishment within the penal system. His theory through, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, is a detailed outline of the disciplinary society; in which organizes populations, their relations to power formations, and the corresponding conceptions of the subjects themselves. Previously, this type of punishment focused on torture and dismemberment, in which was applied directly to bodies. Foucault mentions through his literary piece, “the soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy: the soul is the prison of the body (p.30). However, today, the notion of punishment involves public appearances in a court and much more humane sentences. However, it is important to note and to understand the idea of power and knowledge; it is fundamental to understand the social system as a whole.

French scholar Michel Foucault, in chapter 20 of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, titled ‘Panopticism’ discusses his position on the panopticon ability to be a form of surveillance. The following piece will summarize chapter 20 of Foucault’s work, and discuss the creation of panopticism as a figure of societies transition into disciplinary forms of surveillance. Additionally, providing contemporary examples with the creation of Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV), and employ monitoring programs.

In Foucault 's Discipline and Punish, one is exposed to the form of punishment a criminal was to experience for example, the public execution of Robert Damien’s to the institutional timetable later then the modern maximum security prison. Prison creates a lens of exercising power through punishment. In this essay I shall evaluate the purpose of prison through the theory of power and punishment by, the French philosopher, Michael Foucault. I shall primarily focus on his book Discipline and Punish (1975). His studies are primarily focused on power, details of discipline and punishment within the four walls of the modern day penal system, with the understanding of power not in terms of ``right, ' ' but in terms of normative disciplinarily techniques, and not in terms of law. Further, he presents a phenomenological account of how the prison system is structured, the exercise of power and the use of knowledge and

I woke up to the loud thud of a police officer hitting the side of the rusty old white van we were sitting inside. I looked out the window and stared at the Helicoide, a frightening, spiral-shaped building cut into a mountainside where the headquarters of the Venezuelan political police reside. My mom tugged my arm abruptly as she dragged me out of the van and into the somber building, snapping me out of my momentary trance and back into reality. Fear began eating away at my stomach. The uncertainty of what lay ahead was killing me. As I walked inside, I could feel the walls of this dark and cold prison closing in on me, making it feel frightening like a morgue. The flickering lights deepened the shadows of the police officers as they

This is a summary of Michel Foucault's seminal work on the history of criminal punishment and social discipline as it transformed from punitive to correctional models during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.