Why on earth are there prisons? An anachronistic question, one may reply, given that prisons have already been so prevalent and accepted in our society, but Michel Foucault\u2019s lectures at the Coll\u00e8ge de France in 1973, collected in The Punitive Society<\/em>, convincingly demonstrate how warranted, rich and meaningful this question is. In thirteen lectures, Foucault justified the question, explained how prisons became acceptable in Europe, illustrated the transformation from the acceptance of prisons to a punitive, or disciplinary, society (p. 237) and offered an analysis of disciplinary power.<\/p>\n Foucault first justified the question of \u201cWhy prisons?\u201d on practical, historical and theoretical grounds. Practically, prisons were \u201cdysfunctional from the start\u201d (p. 226). The institution\u2019s property of \u201ctaking back into prison those who have left it\u201d was not a hidden attribute of the institution that took long to discover (p. 150). Other criticisms against the institution include \u201cprevent[ing] judicial power from checking and verifying the application of penalties,\u201d \u201cproducing a veritable army of internal enemies,\u201d and \u201cencouraging delinquency\u201d by offering conditions preferrable to that of workers (p. 250).<\/p>\n Historically, the punitive tactic of imprisonment, despite its appearance as an old punishment, is a late invention. Imprisonment \u201cwas never really a punishment within the penal system\u201d until the end of the eighteenth century (p. 7). Indeed, something like prisons had existed in judicial practice before, but such prison \u201cby itself is not at all a penalty,\u201d but \u201ca necessary precaution in order to secure the accused, and to have him at one\u2019s disposal.\u201d (p. 66). Neither can the birth of prisons be traced to monastic enclosure, since monastic enclosure keeps the world outside for an individual\u2019s repentance, whereas prison keeps the individual inside as a punishment. In any event, punitive confinement was not a \u201cgeneral ecclesiastical practice.\u201d (p.\u00a085).<\/p>\n Furthermore, on theoretical grounds, the prison-form was not derivable from penal theories during the same period which saw criminals as social enemies. The idea of individual crimes as harms to the society at large was developed by criminologists such as Cesare Beccaria relying on the Hobbesian conception of the war of all against all, the social contract and civil war, arguing that criminals \u201cbreak[] the social pact binding him to others and goes to war against his own society\u201d and reactivate the war of all against all, one against the society (p. 32). Based on this first principle, four principles of penalties emerge: \u201csociety can modulate the scale of its penalties according to its needs\u201d; \u201cthere needs to be a fine gradation of counter-attack commensurate with the attacks on society\u201d; the individual should be supervised and re-educated through punishment to \u201creintroduce him into the social contract\u201d; and penalty must be public so as to be \u201cexemplary\u201d and \u201cdissuade those who might arise as enemies.\u201d (p. 67-68).\u00a0 The three model penalties these penalty principles produce are \u201cinfamy,\u201d \u201ctalion\u201d and \u201cslavery,\u201d none of which are homogeneous with imprisonment (p.70).\u00a0 A question on the origin of prisons is, therefore, a very well justified and warranted question.<\/p>\n Foucault\u2019s answer to the question started with a description of the moralization of crimes and the organization of prisons in the US, which was based on the Quaker conception of religion, morality, and power. For the Quakers, the sole function of political power is to practice moral divisions and curb evil (p. 87). Given that \u201cthe ways of salvation are open everywhere and at every moment\u201d and to everyone directly, the responsibility of the political powers is to provide individuals with retreat and teaching to help them rectify their minds (p. 88). Relying on these principles the Philadelphia prison was developed, and with regard to such an institution, the phrase \u201cpenitentiary\u201d (penance) was used. \u00a0Contrary to the suggestion of some historians that the penitentiary element (penance<\/em>) was added to the prison later as a type of reform, Foucault argued that prison was born with this element (p. 99).<\/p>\n From the Quaker prisons, Foucault proceeded to explain the emergence of prisons on the other side of the Atlantic. Noting the early exchange between America and Europe regarding prisons, Foucault focused on \u201cwhat [it is] that made the prison-form acceptable in countries like France and England,\u201d which is what he believed made the transfer of prison from America to Europe possible (p. 101).<\/p>\n According to Foucault, in England, capitalist economic development not only displaced people from their lands, but also exposed capital, in the form of goods, machinery and stock, to the new risk of depredation by those who handle such wealth (p. 104). A new order was therefore required to replace, or at least supplement, the unwieldy and strict penal law to control populations and reduce depredation. Moral societies hence emerged to, to a lesser extent, \u201cdetect and punish crime\u201d and, more importantly, \u201cattack moral faults, and \u00a0. . . psychological propensities, habits, manners, and behavior such as idleness, gambling, and debauchery\u201d by \u201cteaching [and] inculcating conduct\u201d(p.\u00a0105). From organizations of petit bourgeois focusing on controlling \u201cmarginal, dubious, restless [and] wandering elements\u201d of themselves or their immediate neighbours at the beginning of the eighteenth century, these moral societies had become organizations of aristocrats focusing on controlling the \u201c’lower class\u2019 as such\u201d by campaigning for judicial intervention by the century\u2019s end (p. 106-107). \u201cEthical-juridical control,\u201d \u201ca State control to the advantage of a class,\u201d and \u201ceveryday constraints\u201d \u201cfocus[ing] on ways of being\u201d and \u201cseek[ing] to bring about a certain correction of individuals\u201d were hence installed into the society (p. 110). These last everyday constraints, called the coercive<\/em> factor, were, according to Foucault<\/em>, the condition of the prison\u2019s acceptability, as \u201cprison is the intensification, in the form of the penitentiary, of the system of coercion.\u201d (p. 111).<\/p>\n As to France, the situation was quite different. At the end of the seventeenth century, neither army nor justice allowed the monarchy to deal with large-scale popular movements effectively (p. 123). Hence, a new tactic of removing dangerous people from the population in advance was developed to replace the tactic of repression (p. 124). Police and intendants of justice, police and finance were correspondingly established. Notable about these non-judicial apparatuses was the fact that they could serve local and particular interests (p. 126). This was achieved by lettres de cachet<\/em>, where local intendants make decisions on private individuals\u2019, organizations\u2019 or corporation\u2019s requests after conducting an inquiry in the circle of people around the solicitor (p.\u00a0127). When punishment was concerned, the matter was usually one of behaviours unacceptable to the individual or locally but beyond the law\u2019s reach, such as \u201cconjugal infidelity, debauchery, squandering a patrimony, a dissolute life, agitation\u201d (p. 128), and the punishment requested was usually confinement (p. 129). Through these letters, \u201ca certain moral consensus located in families, in localities\u201d was expressed (p. 130), and the coercive <\/em>factor was installed (p.\u00a0139).<\/p>\n Now that the coercive factor had been installed and prisons had become acceptable, the question becomes why we ended up with the punitive society<\/em>, where the state took control over the non-legal coercive system, grafted the system into the legal, penal system, and had a penal system that is a penitentiary system by the end of the first twenty years of the nineteenth century (p. 140). Foucault\u2019s answer to this question was the bourgeoisie\u2019s demand on State to control lower-class or popular illegalism \u00a0<\/em>(p. 140). Whereas certain lower-class illegalism had been useful to the development of bourgeois economy until the end of the eighteenth century (p. 140-146), bourgeois economy became intolerant of lower-class illegalism since then, which, in urban areas, took the form of an underground but coherent scheme of depredation of bourgeois wealth by agents responsible for handling the wealth (p. 147). Bourgeois thus started to denounce such illegalism, denounce those who practiced the illegalism as social enemies, and moralize workers<\/em> and separate delinquents from non-delinquents (p. 149). For this last purpose prisons were used to, first of all, \u201clock up delinquents,\u201d and second, \u201cpit[] delinquents and non-delinquents against each other.\u201d (p. 150).<\/p>\n After explaining how this same illegalism of depredation analysis applies to rural illegalism as well (p. 155-160), Foucault described another form of illegalism that the bourgeois disapproved of at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This is the illegalism of dissipation, which stands for workers\u2019 refusal to apply their bodies to work (p. 187). Such illegalism took various forms, including the decision of idleness, worker irregularity, festive revelry, and refusal of family (p. 187). Worker immorality regarding their own bodies, or moral nomadisim, thus became the next target of bourgeois and capitalism repression (p. 193). Whereas such illegalism cannot be directly criminalized due to the bourgeois economy\u2019s demand for the freedom of the labour market (p. 191), penal law was defined to discreetly incorporate moral control and coercion and establish institutions with a moralization function (p. 177). Para-penal, pre-judicial mechanisms of rewards and punishments were also introduced to implement diffuse, everyday disciplines to control such immorality (p. 193), and accumulation of these little warnings and punishments would push the workers into the penal system (p. 194). Through such general surveillance and the accompanying punishment, the perfect continuity of the disciplinary and the penal was established for the first time in Western history (p.\u00a0194). Here we are in a disciplinary society, which had \u201ca means of ethical and political coercion that is necessary for the body, time, life, and men to be integrated, in the form of labor, in the interplay of productive forces.\u201d (p.\u00a0196).<\/p>\n One more question needs to be resolved, however, which is \u201c[b]y what instruments [] the disciplinary system that is established [was] actually able to be assured.\u201d (p. 196). Foucault\u2019s answer was instruments of sequestration (p. 208), whereby workers were attached to productive and non-productive institutions such as factories, schools and hospitals (p. 203) and were subject to the almost controlled power of their employers (p. 206), so that they could be normalized and be prepared for production (p. 208). These instruments serve the capitalist society, first, by subjecting \u201cthe time of people\u2019s existence\u201d to \u201cthe temporal system of the cycle of production\u201d (p. 211); second, by controlling people\u2019s non-productive existence such as sexuality and relationships between individuals under guises such as education or treatment (p. 212); and third, through judgment and general surveillance, by fabricating a social norm (p. 215).<\/p>\n According to Foucault, we have been living in such a disciplinary society since the eighteenth century, \u201ca society equipped with apparatuses whose form is sequestration, whose purpose is the formation of a labor force, and whose instrument is the acquisition of disciplines or habits.\u201d (p. 237). In this society, power no longer takes the \u201csolemn, visible, ritual form of sovereignty,\u201d but is exercised through habit and discipline, through the discourse of normalization (p. 240).<\/p>\n Now we can return to the \u201cwhy prison\u201d question posed at the beginning. Here is Foucault\u2019s answer: \u201cprison has the advantage that it produces delinquency, an instrument for controlling and putting pressure on illegalism, a not insignificant component in the exercise of power on bodies, an element of that physics of power that gave rise to the psychology of the subject.\u201d (p. 263).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By a graduate student in the seminar Why on earth are there prisons? An anachronistic question, one may reply, given that prisons have already been so prevalent and accepted in our society, but Michel Foucault\u2019s lectures at the Coll\u00e8ge de… Continue Reading