Book Review - Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault
★★
Many years ago (very early 2000s), when I was at Uni, I decided I had to take a shot at the books of Michel Foucault. The first I read was the Spanish translation of Surveiller et Punir. Even though almost a quarter of a century has passed since them, I retain a very vivid remembrance of the contents of this book, as as I was pondering about it this New Year’s Day, I decided to write a review of it.
Discipline and Punish is a study on incarceration in the western world, part of a series of books in which Foucault explores different institutions of social control, knowledge creation, surveillance and confinement, like asylums, schools, hospitals, armies and prisons. The book opens with a very visual and detailed description of the execution of Jacques Damiens, the would-be French regicide, which as a brutal and ritualized example of public torture and execution. This sets the tone for contrasting pre-modern penal systems with modern ones, with the follow-up being some passages from the regimented schedule of a 19th-century prison, which symbolizes the shift from punishment as a spectacle to punishment as a tool for discipline. This contrast introduces the central thesis: how mechanisms of power evolve and become internalized within institutions and individuals.
The main gist of the whole book is a thesis somewhat like this: different periods have different paradigms of how to deal with crime. In pre-modern societies, this takes the form of ritualized and sadistic, visual and public displays of sovereign power (like branding, mutilation, etc...). At the same time, you could view them as very inefficient (punishments are severe, but most of the time, it is relatively easy to evade them). A new paradigm arrises in what Foucault calls the 'classical period' (17th century France) but becomes firmly established in the 19th, with Bentham's Panopticon being its most symbolic representation and metaphor. The idea is confinement in prison will become the norm, as well as a program of rehabilitation and 'scientific' gazing and studying of the prisoner. The panopticon represents this very well - the managers of the prison have their eyes theoretically at all times on each and every prisoner, and they become objects of surveillance, scientific study and scrutiny. The Panopticon doesn’t rely on actual surveillance but on the potential of being observed. This possibility creates a psychological effect where individuals monitor and regulate their own behavior, and in such a way that we get a tool that in some aspects in much more intrusive and aggressive than the old style public torture, as it seeks to actually transform the individual by achieving an interiorization of social norms through the exercise of its disciplinary power.
A topic dear to Foucault and which is represented well here is the merging of power and knowledge as two, inextricable heads of the same hydra. The drive to control is wrapped (interchanged? mixed? welded?) with the drive to know. Disciplinary power doesn’t just repress but also creates knowledge, categories, and norms. Power and knowledge are intertwined; and this very aptly applies to the purposes of the Foucaultian book itself. Foucault is making an implicit political point against modern imprisonment: under a façade of greater humaneness, ‘reason’ and scientific trappings there hides raw power that is allowed to be exerted in a new, more efficient form, against criminals. While modern imprisonment claims to be humane and rehabilitative, it is fundamentally about exercising power more effectively.
With this extensive summary over, I can focus now on my disagreements with the author’s thesis, as well as limitations I perceive in his arguments:
To a certain extent, Foucault feels hypocritical. The main gist of his argument is that current methods of dealing with criminals (mostly, imprisonment) are not substantially better, more 'humane' or 'rational' than past ones, just more controlling and effective, as well as discrete. At the same time, from the first anecdote, it is clear Foucault is expecting us to recoil with disgust towards the types of punishment that is typical of sovereign power societies.
Foucault’s thesis assumes the existence of a series of paradigms that change over time, but he never makes an attempt at explaining either why this paradigms appear in the first place and/or under which circumstances they change. One doesn’t get any explanation of why these models change. He is committed to an argument that precludes notions of progress or evolution, so the changes seem to come for unknown, contingent reasons and unevenly.
My last issue with the book is that is so very evidently the typical jeu d’esprit of a leftist, French sixties intellectual. The sixties were a wild time in which the subversion of all types of structures and even of rational knowledge itself seemed like fair game. Foucault got rather enthusiastically onboard on the assault against ‘Western Reason’ and its institutions though what feels like some sort of leftist Nietzscheanism, and this drive towards aligning with all sorts of marginalized groups against evil state power and its institutions leads him towards supporting prison and asylum abolitionism (the latter in his doctoral dissertation about Madness which comes before this book on prisons). One obvious critique is that Foucault is indifferent and cavalier to the consequences his proposals would have for society. There’s lots of evidence that imprisonment is a pretty effective tool at protecting society from criminals (especially highly recidivist ones that commit a disproportionately high number of crimes and are resistant to any reasonable attempts at reinsertion). His contemporary successors, which have been rather more successful with asylums than with prisons, would insist on the need to abolish the latter without actually providing solutions to the problems that would arise, and one could reasonably imagine the result would be what happens in places like New York and San Francisco, with the insane and drug-addicted effectively expelling normal citizens from public spaces and normalizing situations of danger and petty crime that deteriorate to enormous degrees city life and the social contract.
These objections are responsible for the low rating that I give this book. It is well written and rhetorically persuasive; it is also deeply wrong, and in many ways, an intellectual poison that leads to hare-brained false ideas and beliefs and to noxious practices that create worse outcomes for everybody.