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   Source:  Whole Earth Review, Winter 1995 n88 p73(2).
                                                                              
    Title:  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison._(book reviews)
   Author:  Andrew Needham
                                                                              
 Subjects:  Books - Reviews
   People:  Foucault, Michel
Rev Grade:  A
                                                                              
  Magazine Collection:  82A5104
Electronic Collection:  A17922438
                   RN:  A17922438
                                                                              

Full Text COPYRIGHT POINT 1995

(The Birth of the Prison) Michel Foucault. Vintage Books, 1979; 333 pp. ISBN
0-679-75255-2 $12 ($16 postpaid).

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison studies how prisons
specifically, but really all institutions of coercion schools, armies, etc.)
developed. Prisons are a relatively recent invention. Earlier measures of
punishment demonstrated the sovereign's ability to inflict pain upon
transgressors of his laws. For example, Foucault cites the account of a
regicide named Damiens who was condemned in 1757: "The flesh will be torn from
his breasts, arms, thighs, and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand ...
burnt with sulfur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away,
poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulfur melted together
and then his body drawn and quartered." What Foucault sees in torture is the
sovereign's power personally engaged with the elimination of a transgressor
who challenged his laws, his basis of control. Power occurs in one direction
in this model;; the king exerted his power to eliminate the transgressor and
provide an example to the spectators. Pain was a vital part of the public
spectacle that reaffirmed the king's power. Just around the time of Damien's
execution, though, an important series of challenges occurred. The crowds
became increasingly unruly, sometimes chasing off the executioner and carrying
the criminal away in triumph. Faced with this type of disobedience, the
sovereign had to respond with ever-increasing displays of power, and the
possibility of full rebellion came to hover over every punishment, Clearly, a
new solution was needed.

The solution was found in the new methods of production revolutionizing the
Western world. The modern prison is an even more complete exercise of power
than the spectacle of the gallows. The transition from torture to control as a
means of punishment represents a massive shift in systematic uses of power and
authority within society. Foucault analyzes the Industrial Revolution in terms
of its production of "docile bodies" conditioned to their role in the rapidly
technologizing society. Foucault calls this production the science of
discipline; its main principles are spatialization, complete control of
activity, repetition, detailed hierarchies, and normalizing judgments. All of
these combine to create self-reinforcing systems of power and control. Each
level looks to the one above it for knowledge or direction. The subject gaze
of the lower also controls those above by reinforcing their role as knowledge
providers. In this sense, powers is not simply the control exerted by elites
upon the masses but a whole network of interlocking conditions and coercions;
power is not directed by elites, flowing top to bottom, but is localized in
institutions.

* Delinquency, with the secret agents that it procures, but also with the
generalized policing that it authorizes, constitutes a means of perpetual
surveillance of the population: an apparatus that makes it possible to
supervise, through the delinquents themselves, the whole social field.
Delinquency functions as a political observatory. In their turn, the
statisticians and the sociologists have made use of it, long after the police.
--Discipline and Punish
                                                                              
                                -- End --