Knowledge is Power

A Summary of Foucault's Discipline and Punish

Preface

I recently uncovered this piece I wrote while slacking off in high school English, perhaps around 2020. It is not a piece that reflects myself as a writer today; I like to think that my writing style has improved over the past five years. Still though, this piece is one of my writings that I can be proud of, especially considering when I wrote it. Hopefully it may still be helpful.

Ryan Baylon, 2025

Introduction

Foucault’s main purpose in writing his (what I believe to be his best) book is to simply analyze the power ‘network’ of society through time, specifically looking at the power mechanisms and machines used in punishment in the medieval era and the discipline of the modern era. A “history of the present'' (31). In this book, he doesn't aim to put forth any alternative positive arguments, but simply to analyze. If Foucault had imputed any political suggestions, he would be entirely hypocritical and would contradict one of the central theses in the book by rejecting Nietzsche’s critique of morality, something he builds upon in this book. When reading Foucault, do not take any normative claims away from it, as it centrally misses the point.

Foucault’s central thesis, or rather the root of the rest of the thinking in the book, essentially, is the claim that punishment for a crime has moved from physical bodily punishment in the medieval era (specifically in torture and flogging) towards a new mechanism of punishment of the soul, via discipline. Foucault opens his work with a gruesome description of a man sentenced for regicide, with his body fastened on the wheel (a medieval torture mechanism), being drawn and quartered, burned with sulfur, and then stabbed by the executioner as a public crowd gathered at the scaffold to witness the spectacle. Later, he juxtaposes that with a rigid timetable, a day divided into 28 rigid commands, narrowed down to hours, minutes, and seconds. The prisoner governed by the timetable is not physically punished (in a significant way), but rather neutralized.

With this new development came a new regime of power, a new method of classification. “The question (of punishment) is no longer simply: ‘What law punishes this offense?’ But: ‘What would be the most appropriate measures to take?’” (19). Now instead of a clear crime -> punishment signifying chain, the question of punishment became about understanding the individual. What exactly were the circumstances that brought them here? What is their mental state? How much do they make? Who are they?

Spectacle of the Scaffold

After this introduction, Foucault starts his genealogy all the way back to the time of public torture. Foucault makes the argument, simply, that torture was a spectacle above all to display the power of the king. As the criminal became an aggressor specifically to the king’s rule, public torture was seen as justice enacted by the king above all else. The main reason for this was to scare the general public into not committing such a crime. Before them, they see the body of the criminal maimed and flayed and understand the might of the ruler in its full glory. The goal was to “make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, the unrestrained presence of the sovereign. The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power… Nothing was to be hidden of this triumph of the law” (49). The “spectacle of the scaffold” was also entirely theatrical; people would attend any and all tortures as a truly public event. People would chant, dress up, and even sometimes take part in the torture as well, making the public executions and tortures truly public.

Somewhat tangentially, the scaffold served as a spectacle of Truth-seeking. During the torture, a criminal would accept his cross (or other relevant torture method) and a sign that detailed their exact crime. The end result of the spectacle was thus the confession. Right before the release of death, most executioners would ask the tortured to confess to their crime and repent for it to show the truth and righteousness of the system, and to guarantee the prisoner a spot in heaven. Thus the criminal is a hero for accepting the truth, and the torture is self-justified. “A successful public execution justified justice” (44). As society moved forward though (not as in 'Progress') but rather in time (Foucault didn't believe in progress), this spectacle began to decline for a few reasons (Foucault really likes lists like these, so we’re also going to see a lot of lists in this paper):

Firstly, and most importantly, a lot of times (as convictions became more arbitrary), the public spectacle became too public for the powers that be. A lot of times, crowds would bum-rush the scaffold of people who they deemed as innocent. Foucault goes into specific detail of an executioner who was rushed before a killing, taken into the crowds, and beaten senseless, as his apprentice was killed. This was also a large class issue as well, as people related more towards the people being killed than the king. Thus, many times, the spectacle couldn't continue due to public unrest. The breaking point of class solidarity was now the aim of the ruling class; well above proving the king’s sovereign rule.
Secondly, reformers sought to end the arbitrarily of the king, moving towards a clear signifying chain of crime -> punishment. As this cultural shift happened, more judges were appointed, and there were more rules on which specific crime warranted a specific punishment.
Thirdly, and less importantly, the ‘heroization’ of the criminal in the procession of torture led to (at least in the mind of reformers of the time) a heroization of the crime itself, as more crime fiction was released as a result. Thus, according to those in power, a change had to be made to the penal system.

Generalized Punishment

Correlative with the reform movement was a shift in crime from violent (murder, battery, rape, etc) to more material crime (stealing, looting, etc). As there became larger wealth gaps, a much stronger emphasis was placed on thoroughness. “Following a circular process, the threshold of the passage to violent crimes rises, intolerance to economic offenses increases, controls become much more thorough, penal interventions at once more premature and more numerous” (78). As crime increased and as culture began to demand new penal reforms (although there were multiplicitous reasons for its spark), many reformists, such as Beccaria, pushed forwards more structured plans of punishment. In essence, the reform movement wanted to systematize the penal system above all else.

“The true objective of the reform of movement, even in its most general formulations, was not so much to establish a new right to punish based on more equitable principles, as to set up a new ‘economy’ of the power to punish, to assure its better distribution so that it should neither be too concentrated at certain privileged points, nor too divided between opposing authorities; so that should be distributed in homogeneous circuits capable of operating everywhere, in a continuous way, down to the finest grain of the social body” (Foucault is infamous for massive run-on sentences like this) (80). Reformists had clear goals as such: make the punishment of illegalities regular, to punish better (not less), to punish with more university, and to probe into the deepest organs of the social body. The importance of this is clear, as the power shifted from the hands of the sovereign king to the hands of the public, creating a net of power over a pyramid. Rather than a highly individualized and clear dictator of punishment, the punishers became the ambiguous ‘public.’ The further implications of this will become clearer.

The Gentle Way in Punishment

The new way of punishment worked had “several conditions.” First to make punishments as unarbitrary as possible so that “he who dreams of the crime the idea of the offense will be enough to arouse the sign of the punishment” (105). Thus the symbolic chain is complete with the crime as the signified and punishment as the sign. Secondly, to bake a counter-force into the system itself: if begging was the crime, labor was the punishment; if a crime of pride occurred, shame was the solution. Thirdly, time had to be the independent variable of punishment. An issue with the death penalty, to the reformers, was that there was no real place to become a ‘better’ person. “Punishment can only function if it comes to an end” (107). Fourthly, the crime wasn't only intended for the guilty, but for the potentially guilty. People were in prison not only to atone for their sins, but to serve as an example and reify the symbolic chain as aforementioned. “Thus the convict pays twice; by the labor he provides and by the signs he produces” (109). Lastly, there needed to exist a culture of shame. As people entered the prison, it wasn't a spectacle like before, but instead, it was a mourning of the loss of an innocent person. Constant reifications of the code (crime -> punishment) were ubiquitous as prisoners were given placards, posters, and symbols making clear their crimes so all knew what not to be. Again, since the prisoners served as sign-producers, they became the villainous archetype as this cultural shift occurred.

Surprisingly enough, prisons were not ubiquitously loved upon their arrival. Before their cultural appearance, they were seen as ineffective because they didn't (seem to) teach anything or reform anyone. Eventually, though they were hated, a few key examples of prisons seemed to work (towards the end that prisons work for) and made the prison system more ubiquitous. The main reason (among many) was because “idleness was the general cause of most crime” (121). The prison not only provides a timetable (a detailed description of where the prisoner goes at what hour, minute, second, etc. of the day), but a labor supply. Thus, there was a way to give people opportunities after their prison term (in the form of apprenticeship) by reforming them into normal members of society. The goal of the prison thus became how to make someone ‘normal.’ “Work on the prisoner's soul must be carried out as often as possible. The prison, though an administrative apparatus, will at the same time be a machine for altering minds… But no doubt the most important thing about this control and transformation of behavior were accompanied… by the development of a knowledge of the individuals” (125).

This is where the conception of knowledge comes into play in terms of prison. As people began to enter the prison as convicts, extensive files, records, and documentation surrounded them. Again, rather than the previous documentation of “What was the convict's crime?” beforehand, it evolved into not only “What was the crime?” but also “What were the circumstances? What are their behaviors like before and after sentencing? What is their psychological state? How much did they make? Who are they?” Before, the question sought to answer what the appropriate punishment was, at this point, it sought out the best method to ‘fix’ the criminal. “So one punishes not to efface the crime, but to transform a criminal (actual or potential)” (127). The prisons became observatories designed as an ‘apparatus of knowledge’ above all else. Already we can see a clear shift in intention within the prison, moving from a punishment to a control.

“The training of behavior by a full time-table, the acquisition of habits, the constraints of the body imply a very special relation between the individual who is punished and the individual who punishes him. It is a relation that not only renders the dimension of the spectacle useless: it excludes it. The agent of punishment must exercise a total power, which no third party can disturb; the individual to be corrected must be entirely enveloped in the power that is being exercised over him. Secrecy is imperative, and so too is autonomy, at least in relation to this technique of punishment: it must have its own functioning, its own rules, its own techniques, its own knowledge; it must fix its own norms, decide its own results… In short, the divergence is the following: punitive city or coercive institution?” (129)

Docile Bodies

Here we are beginning to talk about discipline in terms of punishment. Whereas punishment to Foucault relies generally on the signifier for a crime, discipline specifically talks about the control of the body, the making-docile. Discipline necessitates docility. “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved.” “In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the disciplines became general formulas of domination. They were different from slavery because they were not based on a relation of appropriation of bodies; indeed, the elegance of the discipline lay in the fact that it could dispense with this costly and violent relation by obtaining effects of utility at least as great” (137). This creation of docility in the body led to much higher forms of control; it shaped people and their behaviors into uniformity. This was the main purpose of the prison at this point. It wasn't primarily to punish people for wrongs they committed but to turn the prisoners into docile bodies, to make them bend into a neat mold. Docility was created, not only in prisons, but as a cultural trend in a few ways:

Requirement of enclosure. This enclosure led to the entire production process (whether it's in the military, school, prison, police force, workplace, etc.) being seen as and acting as a whole unit, an entire machine. There were other docile bodies setting a standard and a code for others to play off of and to integrate. The body (both of the individual and the whole) became a machine.
More importantly, though, was the principle of partitioning. Although the previous wasn't indispensable to disciplinization, the partitioning of people into their own areas of work was. For example, I picture an office cubicle in a labyrinth of other cubicles. I picture cells in the body of the prison. I picture individual desks in a school. This not only made it easier for those who observe to root out problems, but it effectively removed a community aspect from every person and prevented unionization and collectivism.
Architecture of places like schools, prisons, clinics, asylums, military camps, workplaces also changed. There was now a much higher focus on observation. Most places now came built-in with these individualized spaces, “forming a permanent grid” (145). There was always a central aisle for the ‘leader’ to walk down to observe, there were more divisions in schools, and more compartmentalizing of prisons. A new way in architecture came with an increased focus on individualization and fragmentation.
MOST IMPORTANTLY though, the biggest development of discipline in this time was the creation of rankings. Rather than being objectively judged by the amount of product one creates, one was now judged by the amount of product (NOT only in the sense of a workplace) one creates in relation to others. These rankings not only made everyone more hyperproductive since they had no objective goal anymore, but it also created alienation between peers. “The striving of the whole community towards salvation became the collective, permanent competition of individuals being classified in relation to one another… it served to economize the 1of life, to accumulate it in a useful form and to exercise power over men through the meditation of time arranged this way” (162).

“Discipline is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine” (164). The whole of the social body in these factories (not in the literal sense; with this term I mean prisons, barracks, schools, asylums, etc.) becomes a whole individual system in itself, with its own self-regulating system of power through an ingrained system of producing and reproducing docility.

The Means of Correct Training

One of the biggest things to come from this cultural shift was a new science. This science was that of surveillance, a science of categorization, a science of rank and comparison. With the new system of ranking at the forefront of cultural hegemony, it created a system of graduated and blurred power, and also shifted power relations to a much less obvious form since peers hold power over one another. Foucault brings up the example of kids in school (although other examples span nearly all aspects of society). Back in the day, kids would become classroom monitors if they performed better than their peers in school. Those that were the best out of those people would then get the opportunity to observe and judge the classroom monitors. This process repeats near ad infinitum and creates a self fulfilling system of power. There is no longer an obvious herald of power (such as a king), but a vague system of power classified through rank. It forms a net of power rather than a point, in which all people contribute towards the power structure, all the while achieving the same goal as the king would. “Discipline makes possible the operation of a relational power that sustains itself by its own mechanism and which, for the spectacle of public events, substitutes the uninterrupted play of calculated gazes” (177). The entire organism of power now no longer has a controlling head, but an organ-ization of organs, cells, and microbes that all check on one another, observe one another, judge one another. The whole of power becomes a headless blunder.

A helpful discourse appears in the 1998 film Cube by Vincenzo Natali, in which a group of people is stuck in a cube actively trying to kill them. At one point it is revealed that one of the people stuck in the group was one of the designers of the cube. As the other members pester Worth (the designer) for answers to “Who hired him? Who is behind it? What purpose does it serve?” Continually, he replies that he “didn't ask who was hiring” and that he “never even left his office. [He] talked to some people, some other guys like [him], specialists working on small details. Nobody knew what it was. Nobody cared.” Worth then continues that “There is no conspiracy. There is nobody in charge [This cube] is a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan… Big Brother isn't watching [anyone]. The only conclusion [he] can come to is that there's nobody up there” “I mean this place is an accident, a forgotten, perpetual public works project.” Just like the officer in the movie “walks a beat,” he had been an infinitesimally small part of an arbitrary system of power. The cube was produced just as the school, prison, military, asylum, workshop, factory, etc. was produced. Not by any “Big Brother,” but by an infinite bureaucracy. A truly ‘public’ works project.

Discipline is defined in a few important ways, according to Foucault:

The smallest deviations must be accounted for.
Punishment must be brought about for non-conformity, for example, holding soldiers or school children back for not reaching a certain level. Either people will be forced to learn or face some other punishment.
Discipline is inherently corrective.
Punishment is only one element of a system of gratification-punishment. Both are necessarily informed by the conventions of the morality of a society. This idea draws from Nietzsche, one of Foucault’s main influences. The creation of a morality specifically around the idea of discipline was created. With this came the ‘bad’ subject, as opposed to the ‘defiant’ subject “The definition of behavior and performance on the basis of the two opposed values of good and evil; instead of the simple division of the prohibition, as practiced in penal justice, we have a distribution between a positive pole and a negative pole; all behavior falls in the field between good and bad marks, good and bad points” (180).
Grades and marks are used to turn this morality into a form of a rank system, in which judges and observes can rank individuals. It hierarchies qualities. This also exemplifies not only the new comparative model but also the necessity for objective observation.

Discipline brings 5 distinct operatives into a power system: it compares, it differentiates, it measures, it moralizes conformity, it digs for roots of ‘issues.’ “In short, it normalizes” (183). The Normal then established a principle of coercion and standardization, which prioritized education and correction above all else.

Logically following came a principle of examination. Sort of building off of (2) In the previous list, the examination is a “normalizing gaze, a surveillance” (184). It not only served to turn the science of observation into power, but it was also the best way to translate individuality into power. It opened up the opportunities to turn the individual into an analyzable, descriptive object and made it so that people also knew their positions among the ranks of other people in the system. Examination also led to the beginning of the prescription of individuals. Under the terms of the examination, everyone became a “case.” There was always something wrong with an individual and the examination became an easy route to diagnose the ways in which a person was not normal.

As one of the main parts of this book, this shift towards discipline led to a shifting of the political axis. Although Foucault didn't include this graphic in his book, I found it useful to make and visualize.

As the power structure, as depicted by the pyramid, gets darker grey, there will be more individualization. As it gets more white, it becomes more ambiguous and amorphous.

More concretely, in the old regime, the king was the most individual person there was. Everything was known about the king, and it was clear that he was the most important figure in the power structure. As the levels of power dwindled, and as things became more public, the lowest caste seemed like an amorphous blob solely of wants and needs.

In the new regime, as the levels of power went down, those in the lower castes were more individualized. Those in the lower castes became documented, examined, judged, and, above all else, disciplined. As power goes up in the new regime, the individuals at the ‘top’ become more amorphous. They become security cameras, watch towers, and the notorious ‘they’ in the phrase “they are watching you.” Thus, as there was more power in the new regime, there was less individualization and observation, as opposed to the old royal regime. Everything is known about those with little power, which is why there was a corollary rise of documentation and observation of subjects. “What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, its 'useful' object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual” (227).

Finally, it's important to note that this era of discipline was also heavily correlated with the beginnings of the human sciences. As Foucault points out, the beginning of any science with the prefix “psych” (psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry) began roughly around the time of this cultural shift.

“All the sciences, analyses or practices employing the root 'psycho-' have their origin in this historical reversal of the procedures of individualization. The moment that saw the transition from historico-ritual mechanisms for the formation of individuality to the scientifico-disciplinary mechanisms, when the normal took over from the ancestral, and measurement from status, thus substituting for the individuality of the memorable man that of the calculable man, that moment when the sciences of man became possible is the moment when a new technology of power and a new political anatomy of the body were implemented” (193).

These practices of observation and classification and ‘making-case’ led, in part, to the sciences of observation, classification, and ‘making-case;’ those sciences of humans developed with the new demand for classification. This was the first time in history that individual objectification occurred, so new objective sciences had to correlate with this trend.

Panopticism

This is the most important, and most famous chapter of the book. For context, Jeremy Bentham in the very early 19th century proposed a plan for a new prison. This prison featured individualized cells, a circular room, and most importantly a central pillar for guards to watch. The catch is though that Bentham specifically designed the prison watchtower so that no prisoner could see into it, but guards could see out. Thus, the prisoners at all times of day never knew if there was any guard in the tower observing them. The mere presence of the tower, whether populated by guards or not, was the enforcer. It didn't matter if there were guards in the tower, the mere idea that someone could be watching the prisoners led to a sort of self-discipline in this jail. “The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities” (201). Each person was responsible for their own governance, and their own behavior. A system of power governed entirely by subjects.

“But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use” (205).

Of course, Foucault didn't bring up Bentham’s idea to simply just talk about one specific type of prison, but to universalize its principles; to detail its applications beyond the prison. These uses can be found literally anywhere: security cameras in a store, productivity bracelets in Amazon warehouses, email phishing, internet tracking, social media, policing, etc.

With the symbolic invention of the Panopticon by Bentham (showing a new notch of 'Progress' in the reformation movement), discipline shifted from a negative purpose (to punish) to a positive purpose (to produce reformed people). Correlated with this switch came a few important points

First of all, it made people useful above all else. Its main goal wasn't to punish but to turn invalids into a machine. Something that “treats actions in terms of results, and forces an economy” (210). It was the Normalizing gaze that turned abnormal people into machines. With an omnipresent gaze, people could be expected to be always productive, always self reforming.
Second, the importance of information. “The Christian school must not simply train docile children; it must also make it possible to supervise the parents, to gain information as to their way of life, their resources, their piety, their morals” (211). The main tool of discipline is information, figuring out exactly what led to a person misbehaving as they have. This is also correlated with the rise in psychology, and the ‘making-case’ mentioned before. Only with this information, could a person be ‘solved,’ cured, fixed, etc. The knowledge of the individual is power. Knowledge is power.
Third, and less importantly, state enforcement of the mechanisms of discipline. The police, in all honesty, haven’t changed much in forms since the old regime, but have more so changed in intensity. The police’s main function had now gone from the enforcement of laws, as well as providing constant surveillance to those around. With higher police presence and higher organization, there came a stronger presence of panopticism.

“Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labor, its authorities of surveillance and Discipline registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penalty Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (228).

Complete and Austere Institutions

This chapter wraps back around to prisons specifically, talking about the rule of discipline in prions, whereas the previous two were more so a cultural genealogy of discipline as a whole. With whole new “reformatory” power, an included set of principles became more apparent. It also must be noted that the reformation of prisons is sort of a misnomer. Reformations shouldn’t be seen as revolutionary changes we use to evolve our method of punishment; the essence of a prison, with its function and form, is consistent between all periods of prison history. I’ll touch more on this later in the paper. But back to the principles of prison.

Isolation. Isolation was necessary, mostly to stop cooperation between prisoners (as aforementioned), but it was also useful under the neo-panoptic regime as a productive tool. Reformers at the time believed that solitude was wholly productive, it not only weakened the ‘soul’ of the prisoner, but also let them reflect upon their actions. Reflection was, above all else, a positive instrument of reform. “Isolation provides an intimate exchange between the convict and the power that is exercised over him” (237). “A change of morality over a change of attitude” (239).
Work. Forced work is necessary for prisoners, not to accrue more capital for capital owners, not as an activity of production, but by the way it engraves the human soul. It doesn't matter if the prisoner is paid or not for their labor, the idea is that the labor acts as a normalizing, objective principle of regularity and of discipline. “The wages of penal labor do not reward production; they function as a motive and measure of individual transformation… What, then, is the use of penal labor Not profit; nor even the formation of a useful skill; but the constitution of a power relation, an empty economic form, a schema of individual submission and of adjustment to a production apparatus” (243).
Time. The length of the penalty isn't about the crime you commit anymore, but rather about how well reformed you are. This is why processes such as probation have come into play in the prison system. Prison time is based on usefulness, rather than exchange value (crime -> exact punishment). Punishment isn’t based on the crime, but on the individual who did the crime. This, I believe, is also a large reason why many rich people serve substantially less prison time than many poor people for the same crime. They are already naturalized to discipline in a large way and thus serve no purpose in prison. I’ll touch more on this later in the paper.

It is important here to distinguish between the difference of a criminal offender and a ‘delinquent.’ “The delinquent is to be distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him” (251). Both need discipline. The thing about the delinquent is that they are deemed as criminal far before any criminal act. Through this development of the categorization of a delinquent, a science surrounding the study of delinquency came to be, namely, criminology. In a sense, according to Foucault, the prison created the delinquent, as the delinquent created the prison.

“… In fabricating delinquency, it gave to criminal justice a unitary field of objects, authenticated by the 'sciences', and thus enabled it to function on a general horizon of 'truth', The prison, that darkest region in the apparatus of justice, is the place where the power to punish, which no longer dares to manifest itself openly, silently organizes a field of objectivity in which punishment will be able to function openly as treatment and the sentence be inscribed among the discourses of knowledge. It is understandable that justice should have adopted so easily a prison that was not the offspring of its own thoughts. Justice certainly owed the prison this recognition” (256).

Illegalities and Delinquency

Firstly, Foucault jumps into, what I believe to be the most important list in the book: what are the essential maxims of prison? Foucault points out seven.

Principle of correction. Prisoners’ behavior must be corrected and reformed.
Principle of classification. Prisoners must be classified (age, crime, behavior, mental state, etc.) in order to best organize and effectively change them.
Principle of modulation of penalties. Prisoners must be able to reduce their sentence via ‘good’ behavior.
Principle of work as obligation and right. Prisoners must work, not only to reform them for a working society, but also to occupy them, and to enforce disciplinary power.
Principle of penitentiary education. Prisoners must hold education as their main purpose for remaining in prison.
Principle of the technical supervision and detention. The staff must be moral actors (not in the traditional sense of the word, but the Nietzschean) and must be technically skilled in discipline. Doctors, psychologists, guards, wardens, etc., must know the prisoners as a case.
Principle of auxiliary institutions. Prisoners leaving prisons, or general delinquents, must have surveillance outside of prison, whether by probation, conditional release, policing, or other methods.

Early in the chapter, Foucault mostly takes note of the criticisms of the prisons though mid-19th century and today, to specifically take notice that they take on one of two characteristics: either that prison was not corrective enough or that prison was not sufficiently punishing individuals. Every complaint about prisons you hear in common discussion falls into one of these two categories. The solution was always a reintroduction of penal techniques, not a change in the prison itself. It has become impossible to imagine anything but the prison itself. All of the changes proposed culturally all amount to a reification of the system already in place. We shouldn’t think of the prison dialectically (thesis - prison, antithesis - it's ‘failure’, synthesis - reform), but rather “of a simultaneous system that historically has been superimposed on the juridical deprivation of liberty; a fourfold system comprising: the additional, disciplinary element of the prison - the element of 'super-power' the production of an objectivity, a technique, a penitentiary 'rationality'” (271). “One should be surprised that for the past 150 years the proclamation of the failure of the prison has always been accompanied by its maintenance” (272).

By now it should be clear that the prison system was never meant to punish, at least primarily. Its goal was to distinguish, classify, and use offenses into the product of a docile body. It differentiated ‘illegalities’ above all else.

The term ‘illegalities’ (plural) is a really interesting term to me. Foucault’s main point in using it is to directly show the different targets of the laws. Peasant illegalities, black illegalities, neurodivergent illegalities, rich illegalities, etc.. These different modes of illegalities are all targeting specific actions of a specific ‘classification’ of people to put them under the Normalizing gaze, the gaze of the prison, of the panopticon. A peasant stealing 100 dollars from someone and a business executive laundering 100,000 dollars both exist within different illegalities of the system, thus the rich person gets a shorter sentence than the robber (although both are robbers). There is, was, and always will be a distinction between popular and dispopular illegalities. Within the pluralities of illegalities, it seems clear that the goal of not only the carceral system was a strict discipline, but also the laws which dictate who goes into them.

In a later interview, Foucault brought up the War on Drugs as a perfect example of these different illegalities. Reagan’s advisor has said before that the War on Drugs was specifically designed to hurt black people and hippies (political ‘delinquents’ at that time). Although rich people can openly talk about their experiences with heroin, meth, cocaine, marijuana, etc., poor, black, and ‘delinquent’ people will get a lifetime in prison for even holding a drug such as that. The War on Drugs is entirely succeeding in its goal, and the prison system is entirely doing its job in creating these delinquencies and illegalities. The War on Drugs’ purpose was never to end drug use. If it was, we would have stopped it by now. Its definitive purpose is to discipline and correct delinquents, acting merely as a red herring; it is succeeding. ‘Delinquency’ is a classification to organize social class above all else and to punish based on it.

“Crime is not a potentiality that interests or passions have inscribed in the hearts of all men, but that it is almost exclusively committed by a certain social class that criminals, who were once to be met with in every social class, now emerged 'almost all from the bottom rank of the social order' (Comte, 49) that 'nine tenths of murderers, thieves and idlers come from what we have called the social base' (Lauvergne, 337); that it is not crime that alienates an individual from society, but that crime is itself due rather to the fact that one is in society as an alien, that one belongs to that 'bastardized race', as Target called it, to that 'class degraded by misery whose vices stand like an invincible obstacle to the generous intentions that wish to combat it' (Buri, 391); that, this being the case, it would be hypocritical or naive to believe that the law was made for all in the name of all; that it would be more prudent to recognize that it was made for the few and that it was brought to bear upon others; that in principle it applies to all citizens, but that it is addressed principally to the most numerous and least enlightened classes that, unlike political and civil laws, their application does not concern everybody equally... (Rossi, I, 32)” (275). Justice is inherently classist, abilist, racist, and any “ist” that is not in the interest of the lawmakers.

Thus with this frame in mind, the prison never ever failed. Prison “reform” as a political objective necessarily is a misnomer because it is already succeeding with flying colors. The only reform that could and would exist (as mentioned earlier) is a reform that only increases discipline or punishment, neither of which fundamentally "fix" the prison itself.

The prison's goal was, neither, to eliminate crime. Crime and the prison system are twin sisters, one necessitating the existence of the other.

“For the observation that prison fails to eliminate crime, one should perhaps substitute the hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency, a specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous - and, on occasion, usable - form of illegality; in producing delinquents, in an apparently marginal, but in fact centrally supervised milieu; in producing the delinquent as a pathologized subject… So successful has the prison been that, after a century and a half of failures', the prison still exists, producing the same results, and there is the greatest reluctance to dispense with it.” (277). “Delinquency, controlled illegality, is an agent for the illegality of the dominant groups” (279).

Not only is the idea of ‘delinquency’ necessary to control certain sects of the population, but it also enforces constant surveillance, turning nearly every facet of our lives into a micro-panopticon. It supports a constant ever-present eye on each individual in a half secret, half official hierarchy of power. It universalized the panopticon, truly, to measure, classify, identify, and control delinquents, and to prevent any future delinquents.

In the heart of this system of justice, comes a Nietzschean critique of morality and justice. That which is moral, that which is just, that which is “good” is merely a thing done to serve the dominant class. These forms of “justice” are presented as objective services done for society’s sake, without underlining who exactly defined the term “justice” or “society’s sake.” Looking at the etymology of the terms “good” and “evil” to their fundamental roots, they were literally translated to that which serves power, and that which does not. The justice system plays into this as well, according to Foucault.

“There is not, therefore, a criminal nature, but a play of forces which, according to the class to which individuals belongs will lead them to power or to prison: if born poor, today's magistrates would no doubt be in the convict-ships; and the convicts, if they had been well born, 'would be presiding in the courts and dispensing justice” (289). Everyone is just a part of the same machine, the same headless blunder.

The benefits of discipline were also clear politically and economically. With the new hierarchy of discipline, the question “what is your station?” became a popular question for people to ask. Who do you serve? Those delinquents were then sent to the fringes of society, metaphorically. Because they did not serve anyone, they were then seen as needing fixing, needing a diagnosis, being a case. Thus it became common that one should have a master. One should be within the hierarchy. This also draws from Nietzsche, in which the interests of the dominant class (and often the lower class) determine morals within society. Liberty is disorder, it needs to be disciplined and corrected. Here, Foucault makes the argument for anarchists to never heroize delinquents, but rather to try and disentangle them from colonial and bourgeois illegalities.

The Carceral

Foucault dates the beginning of this carceral system in January of 1840, the opening of the Mettray prison. Foucault chose this specific prison merely because it was the most obvious form of the dynamics of power and discipline that we’ve talked about, and served as an example for other prisons across the continents. It created 5 models for classification, that of family (your inmates are your brothers) that of army (military exercises were practiced, there was always a head of command), that of the workshop (the dynamic by which prison laborers were operated), the school (corrective and educational programs), and the judicial body (isolation and definitive punishment for incorrect behavior). Written on the walls of this prison were the words “God sees you,” also making it the first ever panopticon. God was the blind watchtower.

Foucault then outlines the effects of the carceral institution on the entire social body

With the new carceral system, there also became a new era of classification and judgment. It created a stigma in abnormality and moralized discipline in a keyway, which lead to other institutions following the lead.
The carceral also allows for the constant surveillance/ rooting out of delinquents. New careers began to sprout organized over the finding of delinquency and correction, such as many psychologists, psychiatrists, recruiters, hospitals, almshouses, and criminologists. These careers developed outside of the criminal justice system to create discipline in all facets of life.
It naturalizes and normalizes power to punish by more dominant classes. Carceral systems reinforce docility not just within the carceral system, but too in the whole of the social body. It, in a sense, legalizes discipline.
It also normalized omnipresent judgment. As more people became qualified to judge, not only via the new sciences but by their peers as well, it created a stricter discipline and a much tighter net of power.
Building off of (4), it also led to the omnipresence of observation. As more surveillance over the population was added, more stringent and coercive methods of power came into fruition

Foucault connects this deeper, saying that “If there is an overall political issue around the prison, it is not therefore whether it is to be corrective or not; whether the judges, the psychiatrists or the sociologists are to exercise more power in it than the administrators or supervisors; it is not even whether we should have prison or something other than prison. At present, the problem lies rather in the steep rise in the use of these mechanisms of normalization and the wide-ranging powers which, through the proliferation of new disciplines, they bring with them” (306).

Thus the prison is not the cause of any large-scale socio-cultural change, but rather merely a symptom of a progression of this new regime of power in Europe and North America. These modes of normalization and judgment are at the heart of everything the prison is, not the idea of the prison itself. It's also important to note that there isn’t just one reason that normalization and judgment became much more potent now than before. In fact, that is the complete opposite of Foucault’s message throughout the book. With every single issue, every single shift, and every single movement, there are rhizomatic and multitudinous reasons for its arousal and death. To Foucault, it is impossibly reductive to point towards one thing and call it the cause.

With this, I will end this paper with what I believe to be the most important quote from the book:
“A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas” (102).