Punishment: Foucault

Question 1

Overview

Answer 1

Foucault who sees punishment as a system of power & regulation that is dispersed throughout the population. He charts the historical decline in public forms of physical punishment & evolution of greater regulation to control the soul of the offender.

For Foucault the birth of the prison enabled troublesome people to be removed from the popu lation & subjected to individual surveillance which would lead to a change their behaviour. Power & domination are everywhere & often hidden according to Foucault.

Question 2

2 forms of punishment

Answer 2

1. Sovereign power was typical of the period before the 19th century, when the monarch had power over people & their bodies. Inflicting punishment on the body was the means of asserting control. Punishment was a spectacle, such as public torture & execution.
2. Disciplinary power becomes dominant from the 19th century. In this form of control, a new system of discipline seeks to govern not just the body, but the mind or ‘soul’. It does so through surveillance.

Question 3

Example

Answer 3

Foucault illustrates disciplinary power with the panopticon.
This was a design for a prison in which all the prisoners’ cells are
visible to the guards from a central watchtower, but the guards
are not visible to the prisoners.

Therefore, the prisoners don’t
know if they are being watched & have to behave at all times as
if they were, so the surveillance turns into self-surveillance &
discipline becomes self-discipline. Control takes place ‘inside’
the prisoner.

This conformity through self-surveillance has become increasingly used in institutions such as mental asylums, barracks, factories & schools. Foucault suggests that disciplinary power has now infiltrated every part of society

Question 4

A03

Answer 4

The shift from corporal punishment (physical punishment that involves the deliberate infliction of pain such as public beatings, cutting off of hands, etc.) to imprisonment is less clear than he suggests & still occurs in many societies today.

Unlike Durkheim, he neglects the expressive (emotional) aspects of punishment that are still present in modern society. People still want to see criminals punished because they have done something wrong.