Foucault Discipline And Punishment

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

Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman’s work was centralised around there two different concepts of how your identity is formed through the process of power and expert knowledge. This Essay will discuss the ideas of Michel Foucault who was a French Social Theorist. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge and how both of these are used as a form of social control through society. The essay will look at Foucault’s work in The Body and Sexuality, Madness and Civilisation and Discipline and Punish which displays how he conceptualised Power and identity on a Marxist and macro basis of study. The Essay will also address the Ideas of Erving Goffman who was A Canadian Born Sociologist who’s key study was what

In 1560, Arnaud du Tilh - the imposter who posed as Martin Guerre - was hanged, with his body burned after his death. Today, execution is a controversial issue, and mediaeval and early modern executions (especially public executions) are viewed through the lens of enlightenment rationalism. However, this is not how public execution was always seen. When studying history, it is important that the historian does not view history through the lens of their own time, but instead the lens of the time they are viewing. This is one of the aims of studying microhistory - to provide the lens through which to observe a place and time. This is how I shall endeavour to use the fascinating case of the faux Martin Guerre - as a lens through which to view the attitudes, methods and reasoning behind public executions, including the execution that claimed the life of Arnaud du Tilh. It was the attitudes towards and legal philosophy of the time towards crime and punishment that led to Arnaud du Tilh’s sentence, so the fundamental question that this essay seeks to answer is why Arnaud was given the sentence that he was. Execution as an institution was not an extension of the state, as it is often seen today, but was instead an extension of the community that was seen as a normal part of the ‘divine order’. Arnaud du Tilh was executed by hanging and then burned due to the specific Christian and folk beliefs and symbolism surround methods of execution, and the execution was public not as a

Humiliation, Pain and Death: The Execution of Criminals in New France,” is an article that puts

The execution or punishment itself is most often carried out by a state-appointed executioner, working as a direct representative of the sovereign’s power in order to further dissuade the public witnessing the execution of committing other crimes (DP, 9). Around a hundred years later, there was a shift away from these public displays of power and violence to a more corrective and rehabilitating process. Foucault defines disciplinary power as the power to return a wrongdoer to the normative standards of society (DP, 179). As the years go on, power is taken away from a central body and is exhibited through institutions such as schools, prisons, and hospitals where power and knowledge is maintained through the sciences (e.g. psychology, sociology, and psychiatry) rather than laws. This new form of power is exercised over the individual’s soul rather by disciplining their body (DP, 30). In other words, these new houses of power prefer a correctional approach in order to rehabilitate the wrongdoer and cut down on the amount of individuals not adhering to the norms of society (DP, 19). By doing this, disciplinary power and punishment is exercised over subjects through hierarchical

In the chapter, “The body of the Condemned,” Foucault addresses the evolution of the punishment system and how it has gone from being a public spectacle to something that is done behind closed doors. Foucault opens the chapter with an extremely descriptive and gory representation of a public execution. The purpose of this was to display how execution have changed from being in the public eye to behind closed doors using the electric chair and legal injections. It was done in this fashion to deter individuals from committing heinous crimes. Today, the cost of prison time, fines, etc.. deter individuals instead. Punishment has become less about effecting the body and more about the changing the souls and integrating them back into society.

Prisons have barbaric beginnings from the medieval dungeon and torture chamber in the late 18th century. They have always combined punishment with rehabilitation. The only difference is the way in which they are punished. French philosopher Michel Foucault said, “Punishment has changed from disciplining of the body to disciplining of the soul”. In 1779 the British government agreed to the Penitentiary Act which

According to Foucault, individualism is harmful and is constructed through the acts of disciplinary power. Thus, Foucault describes disciplinary power as a new from of governance that modern society uses to exercise power through the use of constant surveillance (Rabinow, 1984). Disciplinary power works by conditioning, training and supervising individuals to behave in a publically accepted manner. Prior to the emergence of disciplinary power, traditional sovereign power was demonstrated which encouraged physical violence and strict rules and regulations to control individual (Rabinow, 1984). Controversially, disciplinary power is now a subtle form of physical power which renders more control but strays away from corporal punishment.

The historical forms of punishments included extreme forms of punishment, such as hanging, the stake and breaking on the wheel. Prison systems became ruled by disciplinary power. Discipline is the term Michel Foucault uses to designate a particular kind of power that operated “directly on individual bodies and that may be used as an anchoring point for other types of power” (Havis, 2014, p. 110) this was founded during the eighteenth century. Michel Foucault is a well-known social theorist and philosopher who focused on the concept of discipline, its role in society and prison system. Foucault explained that prisoners are put through correct training which is hierarchical observation, normalization, and examination. These three factors outlined the continual process of surveillance, examination, judgement and correction which is needed in order to get the best out of training individuals. Foucault’s view of the panopticon within the institutional prison will be explained in order to understand the type of punishment individuals received. The panopticon helped authoritative figures have an overall view of what the prisoners were doing within their own cells. Prisoners were under the impression that they are being watched 24-7 which exemplified hierarchical observation, this regulated their behaviour. There was a standard behaviour that prisoners must follow within the prison and any abnormal

Prisons were created with the intention of correcting and reforming those who have committed wrongful acts but this article implies that the prison system is not living up to its original purpose. Foucault was a big believer in understanding the intent behind an individual’s criminal acts. He was also in favour of training individuals to become disciplined people by manipulating the circumstances around them. A good example of this would be his opinion on the panopticon. He believed that a panopticon would benefit the people inside prisons because it would teach them discipline.

In Part 3 Chapter of Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault indicates that modern discipline and obedience is not a trait that humans have developed naturally. Instead, he suggests that this is the work of societies around the world, explaining that through institutions such as schools, hospitals, and prisons, society has, in a way, “brainwashed” us to become the ideal person.

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

In Discipline and Punishment, Foucault does an interpretation and expose of the implicit power relationship that has been pervasive throughout society. Foucault undertakes this task through a genealogy that attempts to track the metamorphosis of power using the penal system as a conduit. For Foucault, it seems that the relationship between the disciplinary form of punishment and the carceral archipelago is not only fundamental to understanding contemporary power, but they integrally related. By the end of the paper not only will the link between the carceral archipelago and punishment become evident, but how it has also infested the internet and its culture.

Stability in terms of society can be defined as the state in which power is clear and defined, and the constituents abide to those in power. In modern day institutions, a certain amount of stability must exist or people would lack the motivation to get work done and would not respond to authority. To ensure motivation, employers will install cameras, or use other techniques to always keep an eye on their workers. If people are doing nothing wrong, there is no reason to have a problem with being watched. For this reason, it is not surprising that employers set their work station similar to a Panopticon, an institutional building that is step up with someone in the middle watching everyone, but the workers don’t know if they are being

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.