Discipline and Punish is first of all a history of changing attitudes toward and practices of punishing crime in the late 1700s through mid 1800s. Foucault focuses on Western societies, especially France and England. But by looking at a history of punishment, Foucault also theorizes how power operates in society, especially how people are trained in “correct” behavior.
The major transition Foucault describes, laid out in Parts One and Two of Discipline and Punish, is from punishment as a public spectacle to a private detention. Up until the late 1700s, punishment for crimes was usually doled out by the sovereign of a country, such as a king, and came in the form of public torture or execution. Beginning in the 1800s, these public spectacles came to be replaced by more “delicate” means of punishment, ultimately culminating in imprisonment. In prison, the criminal is taken away from social view rather than publicly displayed. Moreover, in prison, the aim is not to inflict pain on the criminal’s body in retribution for his acts, but to reform his entire personality in order to prevent crime in the future.
The transition from torture to prisons then entails a number of other transitions. First, there is a transition from a focus on the body to a focus on the soul: reforming the soul instead of punishing the body. Second, there is a transition from thinking of crime as an injury to the sovereign to thinking of crime as a violation of social norms. The criminal has violated a social code, and he needs to be reformed in order for the code to be repaired.
Part Three of Discipline and Punish looks at how a number of institutions, including but not only the prison, were re-designed in the early 1800s with the aim of training people into correct behavior, just like the prison aims for reform more than retribution. These institutions confine their members, give them a proper place or role, and constantly examine them or subject them to observation so that they start to act properly. A barracks trains soldiers by giving everyone a function within a hierarchy, just as schools train students by giving everyone a grade and a place in the classroom. People learn to act in these institutions because they might be observed or examined at any moment.
One of the main symbols of this process, and of the new regime of punishment, is something called the "panopticon." The Panopticon was a design for a prison that had a tall central tower and cells arranged in a circle around it. Anyone in a cell would expect that a guard in the tower might be watching them at any time, and so they never disobeyed, for fear of being caught. Foucault takes the panopticon as a symbol of social organization on a much vaster scale. For Foucault, this is how people in Western society live in general, not just prisoners in a cell. We always observe ourselves through the lens of social norms, and we adjust our behavior in order to fit into the right norm. This kind of power, which is about disciplining people at all times, is everywhere, because social norms don’t belong to any one person (like power belonged to the king in a previous period).
In Part Four, Foucault returns to the institution of the prison in particular and notes that prisons haven’t really achieved what they were intended to achieve. Crime still happens; criminals still get released without being completely “reformed.” But the prison continues to exist, despite these failures, because of the symbolic power it holds in organizing society. For instance, it gives us classes of people, “delinquents” separated from the rest of more civil society, in turn giving us a sense of “good” and “bad” people.
