Michel Foucault: Discipline And Punishment

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison Wanchen Xie Introduction on the author Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926 in Poitiers, France. He wrote a great many works which influenced the philosophy and sociology deeply, for instance, Madness and Civilization. Not only was Foucault an intellectual and philosopher, but he was a political activist as well. He got involved in various protests and campaigns, say, against the war in Algeria, against social issues, as well as prison reform. He got involved in the prison reform in France and visited prisons in America as well.

Western punishment doesn't just involve separation from society and living in a locked cell. This is a strong piece of evidence because it brings into question what really goes on in prisons, something which most would rather not think about. It shows how a society can condemn another’s form of punishment yet not take a step back and analyze its own. Another piece reason brought up is that prisons do not do what they were initially intended to do: retribution, specific deterrence, general deterrence, prevention, and rehabilitation. Instead prisons only seem to do one thing and that is punish.

However, the severity of punishments and the methods used by the law were beneficial and practical and they helped to reduce the amount of crime in England. The article “Crime and Punishment in the Elizabethan Era” expresses that crime was an issue in Elizabethan England, and a threat to the stability of society. To maintain order the penalties for committing minor crimes were generally punished with some form of public humiliation. For major crimes including thievery, murder, and treason those convicted were put to death. The sheer ruthlessness of the punishments discourage any sort of crime as they will scare the citizens into never breaking the law in fear of the consequences.

Summary Foucault work of “The Gentle Way in Punishment” describes the shift from the excessive force of the sovereign towards a more generalized and controlled forms of punishment. It emphasizing on transforming and improving the individual into a socius through public works and introspection. It discusses the crime and how it is dealt with in a more rehabilitating sense that specific crime need specific moral counterparts. For example, those who are lazy give the counterpart of work.

People in the lower class are sometimes accused of theft, begging, and poaching. Throughout Elizabethan Era, the disciplines were narcotic and just plain inhumane. Crime and punishment is important because we now know how history is different from today's

A man named W.S Gilbert once said, “Let the punishment fit the crime.” In the Elizabethan Era this idea was nowhere near hypothetical. The punishments were only as harsh, heartless, and unusual as one could imagine for every act that was considered a crime. The most inhuman behaviors were demonstrated at every hour, of every day, throughout this time period. Although the upper and lower class committed mostly contrasting crimes, they all had similar punishments involving humiliation from villagers that were classified as common or rare.

Chapman describes how instead of the punishments in western civilization, it has been changed into a “single

First, the punition of slavery state does not depend on the iniquity of conviction and could ply to prisoners refute of piracy as well as massacre. By sweeping so broadly, bondage as beating loses any restraint outcome it might have had if targeted to a particular rank of crimes. Second, deterrence is sap by the pronounced racial dynamics in the modern action of prisons, whereby minority racial groups are way overrepresented in prison populations. Accordingly, members of these family may instead trust that, whether or not they commit thief Acts of the Apostles, the purpose of prison is weakly to digest their enslaved condition. Last, slavery status undermines the goals of rehabilitation forasmuch as prisoners experience feelings of unfairness as they undergo a punishment logical by a prison administrator rather than a sentencing

While we prefer life in jail, they preferred death. To conclude, a significant extent of the nature of crime and punishment changed between social classes and over the years since the Medieval Period. This is seen through the significant groups that were involved in medieval crime and punishment, the effects of a person’s social class on crime and punishment, the sort of crime each punishment was used for and the difference between crime and punishments between the Medieval Period and today. The Medieval Period lasted from 476 CE to 1453 CE, with different punishments for each crime committed by different social

There is a worldwide trend in the use of penal imprisonment for serious offenses as capital punishment has been renounced by an increasing number of countries. Harsh punishments include capital punishment, life imprisonment and long-term incarceration. These forms of punishments are usually used against serious crimes that are seen as unethical, such as murder, assault and robbery. Many people believe that harsher punishments are more effective as they deter would-be criminals and ensure justice is served. Opposition towards harsh punishments have argued that harsher punishments does not necessarily increase effectiveness because they do not have a deterrent effect, do not decrease recidivism rates and do not provide rehabilitation. In addition,

To much of the common citizen’s disbelief, the spike in the mass incarceration of citizens in America is not necessarily a result of the national increase in violence, but rather an operation fueled by the corruption within our own legal system. Although many individuals in the United States would stand to believe that there is no particular way that anyone could stand to profit from the mass incarceration of Americans–they are wrong. The standing profiteers for mass incarceration is the private prison industry. The name to their game is simple, the more that the public good suffers from mass incarceration, the more government money the companies can obtain. As a result of these efforts, the private prison industry cuts corners at the expense of public safety and prison security in order to maximize profits by obtaining government money, resulting in the mass denial of American citizen’s liberty.

These variations of discrimination are the building blocks as to who considered criminal and how they are treated when it comes to the law. Government officials pass numerous laws pertaining to crime and imprisonment but never disclose the details regarding the economic factors. Several businesses, directly or indirectly connected to the prison industrial complex, continue to profit from the increase in inmate population. The prison corporation itself is able to make an even greater profit by exploiting inmates to slave-like labor for little to no compensation. This phenomenon is justified through the idea that the “criminal” is getting what they deserve as a way to recompense for their harm against

The industry has much power in states that learn further right-wing in the political sphere; mostly due to the views of many regarding the restriction of the government power and preference for the privation of most all services. When prisons are privatized, profits then become the main purpose and as a result, those incarcerated in privatized institutions often suffer as a result; mostly in the poor food, labor conditions, and overcrowding. This issue of terrible conditions of these prisons doesn’t just influence the incarcerated, they instead affect society as they often fail at rehabilitation, even at a higher rate than public, creating more crime when those incarcerated are reintroduced into

Eugene Jarecki States that ,“The prison industrial complex, to put it in it’s crassest term, is a system of industrial mass incarceration. So there’s what you call bureaucratic thrust behind it. It’s hard to shut off because politicians rely upon the steady flow of jobs to their district that the prison system and its related industries promise” (Jareckil 1). Mass incarceration is high rates of imprisonment. Even though when you commit the crime you should do the time.

The United States of America is known across the world as one of the biggest superpowers, both in its military and economy. It is a democratic nation that runs on a successful capitalist system, which especially benefits those in positions of power. In the 1960’s, 200,000 people were incarcerated across the country, however this number has increased rapidly in the last fifty years and now more than 2 million people are incarcerated in prisons and detention centres all across the United States, leading to what is described as an age of mass incarceration. There is evidence to suggest that mass incarceration does benefit the American capitalist system and that the institution of criminal justice is beneficial to capital gain. America is a nation that prides itself on truth and justice for all its citizens, however it could be argued that America values its capitalist advancement more than the individual rights of the people who live there and consequently marginalises and discriminates against its African American and Latino communities in order to further its capitalist system.