Punishment And Punishment Summary

In the article, Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault, he describes a social theory called panopticism. In Foucault’s panopticism he talks about the panopticon, an architectural plan that was created by Jeremy Bentham. The Prison structure of the twenty first century uses that same building design as the panopticon. We see how the plague town in the Panopticism shows a chain of authority. Prisons in the twenty first century use the same style of chain of authority in their correctional institutes. The panopticon brings out a lot of mental effect to the prisoners when they are sent into the cell. Prisoners in today 's society society go through the same mental effects of inmates in the Panopticon. The ideas of panopticism are relevant to the development of the twenty first century through building structure, a chain of authority command, guard surveillance, and mental effects that prisoners go through.

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

The society generally has established customs and moral imperative to guide the conduct of each member of that particular society. These norms designating certain ways in which people ought to live in the society exist in societal laws and moral prescription. The justifications for the ideal practices in the society have been found in the desire to maintain peaceful coexistence in the society. The extent of freedom of an individual is therefore often curtailed for the greater good of the society. These utilitarian considerations have been discussed amidst the concept and rationale of punishment. John Stuart Mill, Michel Foucault and Kantian ethics have been used to justify or refute the notion and rationale of punishment in our society. These ethical perspectives provide useful insight into understanding punishment and its justifications or otherwise. Punishment is necessary as a social control tool and must be exerted with reasonableness and with due regard for the aim for which it is exerted.

According to Foucault, power does not belong to the individual, but to the system, to the institution. In his essay on Discipline and Punish, Foucault presents his idea of the panopticon mechanism, a mechanism in which visibility is a trap. With little importance over the actual individual in the role of the observer or of the observed, the object of the system is total power over the observed. Due to the unique shape of the panopticon, there are no corners and thus no blind spots for the observed to hide in. The private space is replaced by the public one. Furthermore, as final evidence of total control, the observed never knows for sure if they are being watched or not, as they can’t see the observer (Foucault 200-205). Foucault further argues that this system is followed by any government institution, placing the society under permanent observation. Individuals might try to evade the system, but achieving liberation and freedom is not something that anyone could do. Dostoevsky’s famous novel, Crime and

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

Prison: The prison develops from this idea of discipline; it aims both to deprive the individual of his freedom and to reform him. The penitentiary is the next development and it combines the prison with the workshop and the hospital. The penitentiary replaces the prisoner with the delinquent where it is created as a response to changes in popular illegality, in order to marginalize and control popular behavior. In his writing, the eighteenth century saw various calls for reform of punishment; the reformers, according to Foucault, were not motivated by a concern for the welfare of prisoners. But rather they wanted to make power operate more efficiently. “The prison, that darkest region in the apparatus of justice, is the place where the power

The work focuses in how punishment functions from within, targeting actual mechanisms of penal power and their way of operating. The relation between power-body-knowledge is a central point in Foucault’s book. Although, modern punishment is seen as more humane, it is still a tool of domination and subordination. According to Foucault power is: ‘’…in thinking of the mechanisms of power, I am thinking rather of its capillary forms of existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies, and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, caring processes, and everyday lives. ‘’ (Foucault, Power/Knowledge p.39).

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.

There were many scholars throughout history that take various accounts into their theoretical framework to explore, as well as explain the use of societal punishment. Was societal punishment the work of political enterprises? Or was the use of societal punishment widely implemented due to the economic drive associated within the criminal justice and penal system? There are a multitude of approaches that can be explored, however two researchers, Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer set out to understand a different dynamic, the relationship between the labor market and incarceration (Garland, 1991).

Over time, the logics of social control and punishment have transformed dramatically and are designed to be effective based on the overall structure of society. During the ancient regime, society was under a feudal system controlled by the monarchy who used fear, torture, and public executions to keep citizens submissive. Accompanying the transition of the logics of punishment under the ancient regime to those introduced by the reformers is the new form of control through the use of discipline and punishment to produce productive members of society and to rehabilitate those who do not conform to societal expectations. During the seventeenth century, the monarchy relied upon the techniques of penal torture and public execution to reaffirm

Michel Foucault, author of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, examined how power has changed the means of discipline and punishment. He started by tracing various forms of punishment prior to the eighteenth century where public executions were the primary forms of punishment while torture was also a commonly used investigation technique. Communities were heavily involved in executions and they played an important role in the process. Punishment during this time was concentrated at the prisoner’s body. Public executions were intended to reassert the authority and power of the king or ruler of a territory.

Michael Foucault’s book, “Discipline & Punish, The Birth of the Prison” reflected a philosopher’s viewpoint of the evolution of discipline and punishment. The book was separated into four different parts that would provide a historian with an excellent post modernistic background of the society’s change of punishment, and how these changes affected the cultural society. Foucault’s book discussed how the Sovereign power over the people was changed to the discipline of the people through the use of penal systems. Foucault’s deliberated how these changes created the disciplinary switch from body to mind. The author expanded on these disciplinary changes and encompassed other aspects of the society as a whole.

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.

According to Michel Foucault, the change in how criminals were being punished was too hastily viewed as a progressive humanization in the punishment system by the public. Foucault theorized that the transition to discipline from torture was simply a change in strategy to punish better and longer. In this claim, he saw better punishment through the introduction of governmentality, and longer punishment through the increasing disciplinary powers. With governmentality, the state could better exercise their control with the three basic instruments of hierarchal observation, normalizing judgements and examinations. Through the increasing disciplinary powers, people would discipline themselves for longer periods of time because they know that they

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.