Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison | Michel Foucault

Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison | Michel Foucault | An absolute classic

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Discipline & Punis...

	Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison Michel Foucault Vintage, 1995 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 39 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Grisly...

Michel Foucault is a rather difficult individual to pigeonhole as belonging to one or another scholarly discipline. Is he a philosopher? Well, yes, but there is much more to his work than philosophical inquiry. Is he a psychologist? I suppose that could be argued. Is he a historian? Sort of, but then again his works contain so much philosophy....and round & round we go. So, probably the best thing to do is not attempt to confine Foucault to any one genre of scholarship.

The present book showcases all of Foucault's interwoven, cross-disciplinary talents. F takes us on a tour of the history of punishment in France & Britain over the course of the past 250 years. Surprisingly enough, our modern day image of huge prisons simply did not exist before that period.

The book grapples with the struggle of society to remain humane in a facet of life that is inherently inhumane: the treatment of our criminals. In doing so, F adopts the methodology utilized by Nietzsche in his "On The Geneology Of Morals."

We begin with the most grotesque executions of a few hundred years ago & witness how the paradigm shift went from vengeance to reform re: our handling of criminals. F notes how the primary goal of the prison became one of making the prisoner paranoid that he was being watched, which would (hopefully) instill within him the understanding that he could not get away with violating rules (both inside the prison & also once he was released back into society).

This is an extraordinary book that I would recommend to anyone who is interested in the judicial system, the history of the prison, or anyone who just has a curiousity about the social & political forces which decide the manner in which we mete out punishment to our malefactors. A great read.

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An absolute classic

Foucault's masterpiece once again reveals the inadequacy inherent in Hegelian homogeneous progressive histories. Foucault invites us to the annals of overlooked spaces of knowledge; schools, prisons, mental hospitals,.. It is a work that entices us to question the philosphy of punishment and how laws are part of the network of power that creates knowledge which in turn bestows the power to regulate, discipine and reproduce reality. And although Foucault does not explicity voice it, capitalism once again is the impetus behind the invention of new forms of rationality and knowledge. The book is an example of a genological rendering of history, which situates discourse on stage of human change which is not always to the best.

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The coercive foundations of modern disciplinary society

"Discipline and Punish", a key text in the Foucaldian canon, is an ambitious, though at times imprecise, attempt to trace the ideological bases of the modern punitive apparati consolidated by the Enlightenment. His most important formulation is the recognition that curative or educative punishment is not dissimilar to judicial punishment, which treats crime as a sin against the social order. Curative discipline, Foucault contends, takes crime as a sin against the wrongdoer and is thus the obverse of penal coercion. He compares prisons, factories, schools, barracks and hospitals in their fundamental coercive underpinnings, a feature which is best illustrated by the Panopticon, Bentham's version of the model prison, which was designed to enforce total surveillance of the punished. As opposed to the view that the Enlightenment saw to the triumph of science, reason, progress and order, Foucault considers it as contributing to increased suffering and repression through social control. The corollary of Foucault's argument is that the West has achieved no progress in the past two centuries, a conclusion which is plain false. Reason, as understood by Foucault, is a technology of power with science as its tool; its area of domination human bodies and their actions, as demonstrated by disciplinary surveillance. The will to power, as knowledge, is expressed to consolidate the position of the bourgeois society, and the concentration of coercion, the prevalent quality inherent in modern culture. This is by far an eloquent and absorbing treatise.

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Foucault's discipline and punish

A truly remarkable postmodern historical insight into the power structure of the prison system as only Foucault can.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, page 6, 7, 8

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