Foucault on Prisons& Schools

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison  is a 1975 book by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault argues against the idea that the prison became the consistent form of punishment due mainly to the humanitarian concerns of reformists. He traces the cultural shifts that led to the prison's dominance, focusing on the body and questions of power.

The main ideas of Discipline and Punish can be grouped according to its four parts: torture, punishment, discipline, and prison.

Torture

Foucault begins by contrasting two forms of penalty: 

• the violent and chaotic public torture of Robert-François Damiens, who was convicted of attempted regicide in the mid-18th century, and 
• the highly regimented daily schedule for inmates from an early 19th-century prison (Mettray). These examples provide a picture of just how profound the changes in western penal systems were after less than a century.

Foucault wants the reader to consider what led to these changes. How did western culture shift so radically?

He believes that the question of the nature of these changes is best asked by assuming that they weren't used to create a more humanitarian penal system, nor to more exactly punish or rehabilitate, but as part of a continuing trajectory of subjection. Foucault wants to tie scientific knowledge and technological development to the development of the prison to prove this point. 

• He defines a "micro-physics" of power, which is constituted by a power that is strategic and tactical rather than acquired, preserved or possessed. 
• power and knowledge imply one another, as opposed to the common belief that knowledge exists independently of power relations (knowledge is always contextualized in a framework which makes it intelligible, so the humanizing discourse of psychiatry is an expression of the tactics of oppression).
• That is, the ground of the game of power isn't won by 'liberation', because liberation already exists as a facet of subjection. "The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself."
• The problem for Foucault is in some sense a theoretical modelling which posits a soul, an identity (the use of soul being fortunate since 'identity' or 'name' would not properly express the method of subjection—e.g., if mere materiality were used as a way of tracking individuals then the method of punishment would not have switched from torture to psychiatry) which allows a whole materiality of prison to develop.  
• He begins by examining public torture and execution. He argues that the public spectacle of torture and execution was a theatrical forum the original intentions of which eventually produced several unintended consequences. Foucault describes public torture as ceremony.

The intended purposes were:

• To make the secret public (according to Foucault the investigation was kept entirely secret even from the accused). The secret of the investigation and the conclusion of the magistrates was justified by the publicity of the torture.
• To show the effect of investigation on confession. (According to Foucault torture could occur during the investigation, because partial proofs meant partial guilt. If the torture failed to elicit a confession then the investigation was stopped and innocence assumed. A confession legitimized the investigation and any torture that occurred.)
• Reflecting the violence of the original crime onto the convict's body for all to see, in order for it to be manifested then annulled by reciprocating the violence of the crime on the criminal.
• Enacting the revenge upon the convict's body, which the sovereign seeks for having been injured by the crime. Foucault argues that the law was considered an extension of the sovereign's body, and so the revenge must take the form of harming the convict's body.

Some unintended consequences were:

• Providing a forum for the convict's body to become a focus of sympathy and admiration.
• Redistributing blame: the executioner rather than the convict becomes the locus of shame.
• Creating a site of conflict between the masses and the sovereign at the convict's body. Foucault notes that public executions often led to riots in support of the prisoner. Frustration for the inefficiency of this economy of power could be directed towards and coalesce around the site of torture and execution.

Public torture and execution was a method the sovereign deployed to express his or her power, and it did so through the ritual of investigation and the ceremony of execution—the reality and horror of which was supposed to express the omnipotence of the sovereign but actually revealed that the sovereign's power depended on the participation of the people. Torture was made public in order to create fear in the people, and to force them to participate in the method of control by agreeing with its verdicts. 

• But problems arose in cases in which the people through their actions disagreed with the sovereign, by heroizing the victim (admiring the courage in facing death) or in moving to physically free the criminal or to redistribute the effects of the strategically deployed power. 

Punishment

Prison was preceded by a different form of public spectacle. The theater of public torture gave way to public chain gangs. Punishment became "gentle", though not for humanitarian reasons,

• Reformists were unhappy with the unpredictable, unevenly distributed nature of the violence the sovereign would inflict on the convict. The sovereign's right to punish was so disproportionate that it was ineffective and uncontrolled. 
• Reformists felt the power to punish and judge should become more evenly distributed, the state's power must be a form of public power. This, according to Foucault, was of more concern to reformists than humanitarian arguments. 
• Prisoners would have been forced to do work that reflected their crime, thus repaying society for their infractions. This would have allowed the public to see the convicts' bodies enacting their punishment, and thus to reflect on the crime. 

This theory of "gentle" punishment represented the first step away from the excessive force of the sovereign, and towards more generalized and controlled means of punishment. 

• The shift towards prison that followed was the result of a new "technology" and ontology for the body being developed in the 18th century, the "technology" of discipline, and the ontology of "man as machine."

Discipline

He looks at the development of highly refined forms of discipline, of discipline concerned with the smallest and most precise aspects of a person's body. Discipline, he suggests, developed a new economy and politics for bodies. 

• Modern institutions required that bodies must be individuated according to their tasks, as well as for training, observation, and control. Therefore, he argues, discipline created a whole new form of individuality for bodies, which enabled them to perform their duty within the new forms of economic, political, and military organizations emerging in the modern age and continuing to today.

The individuality that discipline constructs (for the bodies it controls) has four characteristics, namely it makes individuality which is:

Cellular—determining the spatial distribution of the bodies

Organic—ensuring that the activities required of the bodies are "natural" for them

Genetic—controlling the evolution over time of the activities of the bodies

Combinatory—allowing for the combination of the force of many bodies into a single massive force

Foucault's argument is that discipline creates "docile bodies", ideal for the new economics, politics and warfare of the modern industrial age - bodies that function in factories, ordered military regiments, and school classrooms. But, to construct docile bodies the disciplinary institutions must be able to 

• constantly observe and record the bodies they control 
• ensure the internalization of the disciplinary individuality within the bodies being controlled. 
• That is, discipline must come about without excessive force through careful observation, and molding of the bodies into the correct form through this observation.  

The Panopticon was the ultimate realization of a modern disciplinary institution. 

• It allowed for constant observation characterized by an "unequal gaze"; the constant possibility of observation. 
• it was specifically designed so that the prisoner could never be sure whether they were being observed at any moment.  This means one is less likely to break rules or laws if they believe they are being watched, even if they are not. 
• Thus, prisons, and specifically those that follow the model of the Panopticon, provide the ideal form of modern punishment. 

Prison

prison became part of a larger "carceral system" that has become an all-encompassing sovereign institution in modern society. 

• Prison is one part of a vast network, including schools, military institutions, hospitals, and factories, which build a panoptic society for its members. 
• This system creates "disciplinary careers" for those locked within its corridors.
• It is operated under the scientific authority of medicine, psychology, and criminology. 
• It operates according to principles that ensure that it "cannot fail to produce delinquents."  

Foucault on Schools

Schooling as 'moral orthopedics
The centuries-long shift from negative to positive features of discipline was of primary im- portance in the establishment of schooling as a society-wide disciplinary technology. It went hand in hand with the development of new educational procedures and relays through which individual and collective subjects could be managed, their contexts regulated, their capacities augmented, and their effects channelled, including,

• the development of new teaching methodologies;
  
• the application of new forms of micro-discipline;
  
• the apportionment of time;
  
• the management of sexuality;
  
• the manipulation of bodies;
  
• the spread of lateral controls;
  
• the production and extraction of knowledge and the reappraisal of curricula and learning. 
• creation of a specialized time of schooling and the reconceptualization of childhood; to a proliferation of new, especially sexual, anxieties about children, and the reorganization of adult–child relationships; and to the rise of the idea of education as a science.
• Schooling in itself had been a disciplinary response to the need to manage growing populations; within the progressively discriminating space of the schoolroom the productive regulation of large numbers of pupils also required new methodologies. 
• First the monitorial method, already tried and tested at medieval universities, gradually supplanted the traditional one-on-one teacher–pupil relationship; this approach, in which a small number of older or more advanced pupils were individually tutored by teachers and then tutored the other pupils, signalled a shift in pedagogical relations of power by supplementing confinement with the moral and disciplinary 'relays' of increasing numbers of trained teachers, support staff and pupil assistants. 
• Later, the monitorial method was superseded by the 'simultaneous method' of direct group instruction by a single teacher.

Accompanying these new instructional methods was a 'micro-disciplinarization' of schooling. 

• simple transfer of knowledge from one person to another cannot be disentangled from those authoritative processes which seek to instill discipline into the moral fibers of its inmates and thus differentiate between them, their nature, potentialities, levels, and values. 
• Punishment in schools began to shift away from the public, the spectacular and the physically violent, to the personal, the mundane and the psychologically compelling, from 'threats or blows' to 'a cold and neglectful countenance'
• The body, once made to be tortured, became something to be trained and corrected, from the gymnastics of handwriting to regimens of personal cleanliness: a new moral orthopedics that was intended to fashion the future more than punish the past.

Like other disciplinary institutions, the early modern school attempted to exercise control over and responsibility for nearly all of its inmates' time, 

• interventions in pre-, post- and home-schooling, vocational training, 
• Sunday schools, 
• extra-mural activities and managed recreation, 
• lifelong learning.

The new conception of childhood was first framed negatively

• protecting the innocent child from the various dangers that might beset it, such as disease, ignorance, immorality, or adult sexuality. Increasingly, however, it was also felt necessary to positively strengthen children by developing their physiques, character, and reason 
• In the midst of these new anxieties about children, Foucault saw develop what he called a 'pedagogization of children's sex': 
• at home, parents, siblings, tutors, and servants, and at school, teachers and fellow pupils, constituted in relation to the child potential sources of danger, contagion, per- version and bad influence. 
• Childhood sexuality was thus the premise around which great battles were fought in the schools, and also the pretext for the reciprocal surveillance of, and the reorganization of the relations between, parents, priests, police, pedagogues, and physicians 
• It consequently became more pressing, and more justifiable, to separate children from adults, younger children from older children and middle class from lower class children, and for certain categories of children to be 'rescued' from 'inappropriate' institutions like workhouses, poorhouses, prisons, and guilds.
• Schools began to develop, first, functionally differentiated spaces, and later, separate classrooms; and pupils were distributed spatially and serially, not only according to progress, age, or level of achievement but also character, cleanliness, even morality.
• Schools' putative control of all aspects of existence extended well beyond the formal school gates, fostering a whole margin of lateral controls which permitted the indirect supervision of parents and families and, ultimately, society as a whole 
• Schooling taught not only punctuation, but also punctuality, and not only reading, but also hygiene; 
• it taught that learning should not only entail gratification but also require chastisement.