How nice of them!įrom being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights. Their sentences are meant to correct and even cure the criminal. This has several consequences: it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime the exemplary mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms (9). The prison hides punishment behind locked doors. The problem was that public executions were “a hearth in which violence bursts again into flame” (9) as spectators sometimes rioted in support of the condemned. It was a public spectacle, directed at the criminal’s body, meant to graphically demonstrate the king’s awesome power. The usual method for dealing with criminals pre-Enlightenment was public hanging, drawing and quartering, and various forms of torture. The book begins with the contrast between European punishment styles before and after the Enlightenment. The techniques that we use to teach people how to be good and productive members of society are just milder versions of the ones we use to inflict pain in retribution for a crime. Are the two concepts that different for us? Foucault says no. This video gave me some helpful biographical context.įoucault doesn’t specifically mention that the US calls its penal body “The Department of Corrections.” But the point of his book is to explore the rich significance of the term “corrections” as a polite euphemism for punishment.

The book begins with a memorably graphic torture scene that pretty well sets the tone for what follows. This week’s reading is Discipline and Punish, by noted ray of sunshine Michel Foucault. Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg

Michel foucault punishment