Summary
The second part of Discipline and Punish, titled “Punishment,” goes into more historical detail about the larger transformation Foucault discussed in the previous part, ranging from roughly 1750-1850. He begins by noting a surge in petitions, in the late 1700s, against torture, executions, and other public spectacles of pain. This made such spectacles a “dangerous confrontation between the violence of the sovereign and the violence of the people.” An execution is supposed to be sovereign violence, or an exercise of the monarch’s control over life and death. But it increasingly faces the anger of the people, or general public, when they feel the monarch is acting unjustly.
Moreover, the public began to conceive of crimes as being injuries to themselves, not just the monarch. A large part of this was the rise of crimes against property. More so than murder, a “crime of blood,” people worried about things like theft, or “crimes of fraud.” One of the things that made this possible was the rise of a sense of private property. In a capitalist society, land is owned by private citizens rather than, as in a feudal society, by the monarch. Now, these private citizens want to protect their property, and they are especially concerned with crimes that infringe upon the value they place on the things they own.
Thus, there is a “double movement” in crime and punishment at the turn of the century. There is less violent crime, with a focus on “fraud” rather than “blood.” Second, there is less violent punishment, with a call for less painful punishment. Moreover, there is in both cases an emphasis on what the people want, rather than what the king wants. All these factors together set the stage for reforming the criminal system entirely. Now, the aim is to maintain a well-behaved society, rather than gloriously punishing affronts to the king.
This is a deceptively radical shift, because it entails that the problem is not evil individuals, but the tendency for anyone in society to be tempted to break the rules for their benefit. Anyone might steal, given the chance, or similarly commit any such crime of “fraud.” But in doing so, that person has violated not just the person he steals from, but also society as a whole. The thief has transgressed a social contract we’ve all implicitly signed that says we won’t steal from each other. He is a “traitor” to social norms. Society must now create a system in which these norms are enforced, in which the norms are so powerful that people don’t even think of committing the crimes that would be so easy for them to commit.
Enter what Foucault calls the “gentle way of punishment,” which has six main rules or principles. First, the “rule of minimum quantity,” which means that punishments should give disadvantages that outweigh advantages of the crime. You’re deterred from stealing if you’ll be fined much more than you steal. Second, the “rule of sufficient ideality,” which means punishment can be something in your head, an “ideal,” in addition to something inflicted on your body. People can represent to themselves how terrible it would be to go to prison, for instance. Third, the “rule of lateral effects,” which means the punishment should affect people besides the criminal. When someone goes to jail for a crime, everyone else is also deterred from the crime, again because they can represent to themselves how bad it would be to go to jail. Fourth, the rule of “perfect certainty,” which means that the laws should be precise and published, so there is no doubt that crimes will be punished. Fifth, the “rule of common truth,” which means trials should be proof of crime and investigation, again so justice seems like a precise science rather than the arbitrary whim of the monarch. And sixth, the “rule of optimal specification,” which means that the penal code is written in detail, with every variation of crime imagined and prohibited.
The prison emerges as a great institution for meeting these principles. You can precisely lay out different sentences for different offenses, for instance, thus developing a science of punishment in proportion to crime. You couldn’t really do that with torture. And in a society where the thing that people value the most is their property and freedom, prison is actually the ultimate punishment, because it’s a stripping or property and liberty. So it is an especially “ideal” punishment, or one that exists in ideas more than the body. This is why the prison emerges when it does. As Foucault allows, it takes some time for the prison to come to be thought of as punishment for all crime. But eventually it does.
Notice that the primary aim of this reform in punishment, from torture to prison, is economic rather than humanitarian. It’s not that people are, on deeply held moral grounds, objecting to torture. Rather, it’s that people want to protect their property and assert their autonomy from the king, and torture doesn’t seem to be the way to do this. If you’re trying to shape an entire society, you need norms that people will follow: I won’t steal from you and you won’t steal from me. Prison emerges as something that prevents people from breaking those norms and that reforms people when they do.
Analysis
Underlying the transformation Foucault describes from torture to imprisonment are larger transformations in Western societies. The first is the rise of democracy. People start to think of themselves as the source of power in a country, rather than a king or queen. This move from monarchy to democracy requires new kinds of punishment, if punishment is the exercise of a people’s power. Thus, once again, studying something specific like the rise of the prison is also studying something grand, like the rise of democracy.
Related to the rise of democracy is the rise of a concept of personal freedom. In democracies, you have are supposed to have civil liberties and rights as an individual, rather than being subservient to a king or ruler. The inverse of this is that one of the things that starts to seem like the worst thing that could happen to you is to lose that freedom. This is because freedom is your most precious possession, something that gives rise to other possessions. You can lose a house, but if you have freedom, you can work to get your house back. But if you don’t have freedom, you’re out of options. Prison emerges in part because it is a punishment aimed at this most precious thing: personal liberty.
The other major transformation Foucault is describing in the background of his analysis is from feudalism to capitalism. In medieval Europe, the nation belongs to the king, who delegated land to nobles, who in turn employed peasants to work the land. The economy was thus structured hierarchically, through a chain of service. In capitalism, there is a less hierarchical economy as citizens trade with each other instead of working for their lord and by extension the nation as a whole. The relations that matter are between peers rather than between servants and masters. That creates another situation in which people imagine power to be exercised in relation to other citizens rather than in relation to a sovereign.
The point, for Foucault, is that none of these transformations are conscious or planned. It’s not that people sit down and decide, “Okay, let’s try out capitalism now.” Rather, the changes develop over time, and history has a momentum apart from individual intention or consciousness. Once again, it is in discourse and language that we see these changes happening, as new ideas and concepts emerge that are symptoms of an underlying shift in the nature of power.
This can lead to a surprising view of history. We sometimes think of history in terms of great people and their actions, like what kings proclaim or what generals order in war. Foucault is more interested in an impersonal kind of history, which has to do with the changing nature of power or social structures that develop over time without individual planning. It is precisely because these structures are impersonal that they are so powerful, as Foucault will describe later. You can’t simply turn off a structure if there’s no one person who turned it on.
