Summary of Part 4
The last part of Discipline and Punish, “Prison,” tracks the continued rise of the prison in the 19th century. Once the prison comes on the scene as an institution for reforming people, it takes off quickly, because it seems the “perfect penalty.” Aimed primarily at the “deprivation of liberty” rather than the infliction of pain, it is the best penalty for a society that values freedom above all else. And more importantly, because liberty is a universal value, depriving it impacts everyone equally. Fining a rich person does not impact him as much as fining a poor person. But confining, on the other hand, affects rich and poor alike.
Most importantly, the prison transforms individuals. Just like a barracks creates good soldiers, a prison should create good citizens who can return to play a functioning role in society. In order to make this transformation, the prison operates on three different levels: moral, economic, and medical. Morally, the criminal is isolated from society and put into a hierarchy of moral depravity, based on the seriousness of the crime. Economically, the criminal is put to work through prison labor, which both benefits society and provides training for being productive once returned to society. And medically, the criminal is treated as a delinquent to be “cured,” that is, re-attached to the social norms that will facilitate his proper functioning in society at large.
This idea of a delinquent being cured is a great shift from a prior way of talking about criminals. Foucault makes a distinction between the “offender” and the “delinquent.” An offender is known by his offense, and punishment is given in accordance with his action. A delinquent, in contrast, is known by his personality, of which his offense is just one symptom. He’s not a normal person who has committed a bad offense, but an abnormal person whose entire personality has to be re-programmed. That means the p`enal system starts to be concerned with the entire life of the criminal, not just the bad deed he’s committed. He is “examined from top to bottom.”
Once again, we are no longer in the realm of punishment alone. Prison comes to be conceived less as a legal punishment and more as a “punitive technique,” a way of reforming and reshaping the entire life of a criminal. The individual in turn becomes, as in other institutions, an intersection of power and knowledge. His whole life must be known, and this knowledge is part of his being subjected to the society against which he has trespassed.
Foucault notices another way in which power and knowledge intersect, which is the production of the very concept of the “delinquent” as a category. Foucault notes that the rise of penal colonies coincides with the rise of psychological science. New forms of knowledge, like psychology, produce types of people, like the delinquent. And that type of person is then subjected to the power of medical and legal institutions. The point is that the production of knowledge is tied to the exercise of power. It’s not that delinquents are running around in the world, and then science comes along to cure them. Rather, in providing a cure that is about transforming the entire life of a person, science produces someone who has to be cured: the delinquent whose entire life must be known and studied.
Towards the end of this part, Foucault reflects on the fact that prisons actually rarely achieve what they promise to achieve. The crime rate hasn’t fallen all that much, and criminals frequently do repeat criminal activity when they leave prison, rather than being reformed by the prison. If prison “fails,” why are prisons so popular? First of all, Foucault notices that when people discuss prison failure, they always come back to seven ideal principles about prisons. This allows them to say that the problem is not the idea of prison, but the failure of real prisons to yet achieve the ideal form. So we have to keep working on prisons, rather than abandoning them. The seven principles Foucault lists are isolating criminals from society, individualizing punishment, compelling prisoners to work, educating prisoners, supervising prisoners, transforming prisoners, and erecting “auxiliary institutions” to monitor prisoners after prison, such as through parole. People think if we achieve these ideals, then prison will do what it’s supposed to do. If prison fails, they think, it’s just because we need to make better prisons, rather than give up on the idea of prison altogether.
These excuses may be used to justify prison in the face of it's evident failure to achieve it's goals. But Foucault suggests another reason for the continuation and proliferation of prisons. These "failures" are actually productive, in that they produce new concepts that people find useful. For instance, we have seen how prisons create the type of person called the delinquent—the criminal who has difficulty reforming. His life needs to be studied in order for him to be reformed, which will, in turn, lead to his not committing an offense in the future. This makes any crime the effect of a pathological person, and in turn, it reinforces that society at large is non-pathological. Prisons therefore work to reinforce social norms, and this is the most important effect. Because when we are governed by norms even more than by laws, we will police ourselves into correct behavior in the same way we imagine prisons correct delinquents. Prisons produce a society in which we constantly examine our lives and shape them into norms.
Analysis
In the last chapter, we come full circle to the context in which Foucault began his first chapter: the prison riots in France at the time of his writing. Foucault reminds us of the political stakes of thinking about prisons. We have seen throughout this history how coercive prison can be and how it negatively impacts not just prisoners, but everyone else, too. This is because of the "lateral effects" of prison in shaping the consciousness and disciplinary power of a wider society. Foucault seems to be saying the stakes of prison are not just for prisoners, but for all of society.
He also points out that the defenses people have of prisons, even though they fail to do what they are supposed to do, have been around for a while. If people really want a functioning and fair society, Foucault suggests, we should get rid of prisons in the current form they take. But that’s not what people really want; they want instead a society that is structured in such a way that people can separate the good citizens from the “delinquents.”
A recurring theme throughout other works by Foucault is this interest in categories of people. He is especially interested in how different identifies start to seem like the soul or essence of an entire person. In History of Sexuality, for instance, he talks about how identities like the “homosexual,” which only emerged at the end of the 19th century, came to express some “inner truth” of a person. This is what “delinquent” does as a category, too. It’s not like the kind of identity that expresses one role you might play in a particular place or time, like student or child. You’re a student at school, but it’s not the same kind of identity like sexuality, which people think applies all the time. Similarly, delinquent starts to be an entire essence of someone, related to their soul rather than to their actions or roles they play in parts of their life.
As Foucault says, one of the driving forces of this new sense of a category is psychology. In the 20th century, the practice of classifying types of people would only accelerate with such things as the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from the American Psychological Association. Foucault also discussed the historical precedents of psychology in his earlier book, Madness and Civilization. There, he was interested in how mental illness started to look more like a mental problem rather than a physical disease, and part of this transition was thinking that the whole person, their very soul, had to be cured of illness, rather than, say, treating a sore throat.
It might seem odd that Foucault concludes his book with discussion of prisons, a specific institution, when the point of the previous part was that a “Panopticism” is pervasive throughout Western societies, not isolated to prisons alone. But Foucault’s aim is finally to tell two parallel stories: one about the rise of a general system of power and one about the fate of a particular institution. He concludes with the institution because of the political urgency of dismantling the injustices he sees in prisons. It may be, Foucault suggests in conclusion, that abolishing the prison, rather than simply trying to reform it, could be one step in destroying the system of disciplinary power in which we are all enmeshed.
