Before:
2 March 1757
Damiens the regicide was condemned “to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris, conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds, then to the Place de Greve, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes, and his ashes thrown to the winds.”
(Now I know that sounds gross enough, but the story told by eyewitnesses is far messier. It turns out to be not at all easy to tear flesh off a body with red-hot pincers. The horses which were supposed to pull his body apart by the limbs could not do so, never having had a chance to practice. The executioner’s men had to cut the body to pieces, but Damiens’ limbless body was still alive when it was thrown on the fire. Ooh, I know, gross, yucchh, did I have to tell you all this? The point is that the intensity of your reaction shows how far we have moved away from the culture that thought this appropriate punishment.)
Léon Faucher sets up a schedule for a prison in Paris: “The prisoners’ day will begin at six in the morning in winter and at five in summer. They will work for nine hours a day throughout the year. Two hours a day will be devoted to instruction. Work and the day will end at nine o’clock in winter and at eight in summer.
“Rising. At the first drum-roll, the prisoners must rise and dress in silence, as the supervisor opens the cell doors. At the second drum-roll, they must be dressed and make their beds. At the third, they must line up and proceed to the chapel for morning prayer. There is a five-minute interval between each drum roll.”
And on and on, so that every second is carefully planned.
No, these two punishments do not apply to the same crime or to the same kind of criminal. But each is the epitome of a method of punishment, and one seems very familiar, while the other is extremely foreign. So what caused the change? You could look at it as the birth of modern culture, or you could say that society had simply become more humane in the intervening years.
Or you could, as Foucault does, look at it as a change in the systematic use of power and authority in a society, and note that the second punishment might not indicate a lesser use of power. Careful control of every aspect of a life can represent a more complete exercise of power than the massive display of a death.
When we do execute someone now, we take care that it be quick and painless.
Sure, society might kill people. but it wouldn’t intentionally cause
Before, pain was very much a normal part, perhaps the definition, of punishment.
Torture was a crucial part of the trial, & torture during the trial was also part of the punishment.
What? How could the punishment begin before the trial was over? The guy wasn’t even guilty yet!
Guilt wasn’t viewed then as all or nothing. People weren’t simply innocent or guilty, and they certainly weren’t innocent until proven guilty. A little proof made a man a little guilty, which might justify a little torture to get a little more evidence. One could not be the object of suspicion and be completely innocent.
After the trial was over, the element of public display was added. Any criminal was a threat to the authority of the king, and the full public regalia of the king’s power could be used in a display of vengeance and of order restored.
But during the 18th century, just as philosophers were deciding that the desire to cause pain was not a seemly one for governments, the crowds that came to the spectacles of torture and death became more and more unruly. Something had to be done.
Now we have to switch the scene to outside the penal system, where, meanwhile, a new science of changing—engineering really—the individual develops in the army, schools, hospitals, madhouses, poorhouses, and factories.
A place for everyone, and everyone in his place. Where someone is indicates who and what he is, as in the wards here, or in schools where the best student moves to the head of the class.
8 to 8:20 will be reading. 8:20 to 8:40, handwriting. 8:40 to 9, spelling; and at 9 there will be a test. Recess is from 9:30 to 9:45, and during that time you will all go outside and you will play.
REPETITIVE EXERCISES.
Must be both standardized and individualized according to rate of progress. Sufficient repetition creates automatic reactions to stimuli...
Backs straight, hands held high, fingers curved. C. E. G. C. G. E. C. Again, and again, and again. No, Josie, you are not lifting your fingers high enough. Do the exercise 20 more times.
That is, a continual analysis of whether the disciplined one deviates in any way from normality. Laws are traditionally set out only in negative terms. They put limits on behavior and decide what is unacceptable. But laws rarely talk about what behavior is desired. As a form of power, the law prevents, but does not specify. Disciplinary power is very different: it not only punishes, it rewards. It gives gold stars for good behavior. And the tendency is for that which transgresses its dictates to be defined not only as bad but as abnormal. It is a more subtle use of power that works on the transgressor from the inside, and consolidates the ranks of the “normal” against all others.
Nowhere is the institutionalized use of a concept of normality used as a technique more fully than in a madhouse. Today’s madhouses are a series of gradated wards through which the inmate can move only by good, appropriate, sane behavior, as defined by the authorities of the institution.
While Discipline was being developed in all these different modes, Punishment was changing as well.
The system centered on pain and spectacle was coming under attack from social theorists, but more important, the spectacles were getting out of hand, becoming a site for political unrest and riots (like the Rodney King riots), and, especially after the French Revolution, great pains were taken to avoid political unrest and riots.
An entire system of carefully articulated and gradated punishments became reduced to a single punishment for all crimes: imprisonment. We are so used to this idea today, it is hard to imagine it as new. But prisons had not been used for punishment, they were simply meant for holding those whose trials were pending, and detaining debtors until they paid off their debts. Many people did not understand the new notion.
These criticisms were heard from the beginning, and they have been heard ever since.
If the prison does succeed in remaking the individual through this process, what kind of person will be made?
A docile worker who does as ordered without question. An automaton, the perfect fodder for the Capitalist factory.
And what about the ones the prison doesn’t remake?
They come back again and again. Everyone knows that prisons make recidivists.
But suppose we take as a premise that if prisons have always had a large number of return inmates, perhaps this very fact is of some advantage to society. What advantage could there possibly be?
Well, the people who become devoted to a life of crime might otherwise be causing worse problems. They might, for instance, go into politics. The prisons are full of petty thieves who steal, again and again, from someone most likely as poor as themselves. Without the prison system as an education in this life, some of these people might generalize about their problems, and theorize on the validity of the very notion of private property. Some of them might organize unions, or riots, or political parties. Instead, those who will not accept the prevailing ideology are systematically channeled into a life story that every penologist knows by heart: the hopeless recidivist, the permanent delinquent.
Franee in the 19th century and Nevada today are special cases, or are they? The police always decide which prostitutes to arrest, and which to leave alone. They know who has been in prison, and why. They determine the conditions under which prostitution operates, and in many perhaps most cases, paying the police off is the tax a prostitute pays on her tax-free income.
Prostitution is potentially a rebellion against woman’s economic, social, and sexual roles. As it mostly works out, however, prostitution is a system run very strictly by men, for men. Female prostitutes are subject to brutal male dominance at every turn.
(Whoa. Did Mr. Foucault say all that? Almost. Almost all of it. He says very clearly that the whole business of prostitution is a direct profit to the state. He didn’t quite get around to saying that this potential threat to gender roles is contained by an overemphasis on gender roles. But I’m sure he was just about to. After all, his next book is the one where he really does look at women’s issues.)