Discipline and Punish

Notes

1. The Body of the Condemned

• Foucault started by discussing two different styles of punishment - Damiens the Regicide and Faucher's young prisoners in Paris.
• Two processes: (1) disappearance of punishment as a spectacle (**amende honorable**, prisoners in public work). (2) A slackening of the hold on the body.
• The way to evaluate the effectiveness of punishment changed: inevitability vs. visible intensity.
• Blame is redistributed between conviction vs. execution.
• The role of a doctor in execution is interesting - welfare and alleviator of pain. This describes the double process: the disappearance of the spectacle and the elimination of pain.
• The more monstrous the crime, the criminal must not see or be seen.
• French Revolution endowed the guillotine with a great theatrical ritual. Eventually, the guillotine was placed inside prison walls.
• Discussion on the objective of punishment - if not on the body, it must be on the soul. Punish intention rather than action. Establish the causal relationship between the two.
• Insanity and judgment - creating subsidiary judicial power for experts, doctors, etc. Not responsibility, but usefulness. Something other than crimes.
• A whole new system of truth that is used to judge.
• Analyze the penal leniency as a technique of power. Four rules: (1) view punishment as a complex social function. (2) analyze punitive methods as techniques for power. (3) unify the penal system and the knowledge of man. (4) whether this transformation is the way of how one's body is treated by power relations. - a common history of power relations and object relations.
• The condemned man's body codes the lack of power, just as the king's body codes the power.
• The power exercised on the condemned man is the present correlative of a certain technology of power over the body. It is born out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint.
• Connection of prison revolt - the issue at hand was not whether the prison environment was too harsh, rather, the prison as a vector of power.

Quotes

It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing.

—Foucault, The body of the condemned

Beneath the increasing leniency of punishment, then, one may map a displacement of its point of application; and through this displacement, a whole field of recent objects, a whole new system of truth and a mass of roles hitherto unknown in the exercise of criminal justice. A corpus of knowledge, techniques, ‘scientific’ discourses is formed and becomes entangled with the practice of the power to punish.

—Foucault, The body of the condemned

We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.

—Foucault, The body of the condemned

What was at issue was not whether the prison environment was too harsh or too aseptic, too primitive or too efficient, but its very materiality as an instrument and vector of power; it is this whole technology of power over the body that the technology of the ‘soul’ – that of the educationalists, psychologists and psychiatrists – fails either to conceal or to compensate, for the simple reason that it is one of its tools.

—Foucault, The body of the condemned

Suplement details

1958 Ruling

It refers to the creation in 1958 of the Code of penal procedure, i.e., the set of rules that organize the process of punishing an offense. The text cited by Foucault is not a "ruling", but, as written in the original French text of Surveiller et punir -, a circular: Circular of the Garde des Sceaux, Article C345 of the Instruction générale pour l'application du code de procédure pénale.

I cannot find the exact text of the circular, but when Foucault was writing his book, the investigating judge (juge d'instruction) could order a psychiatric examination that included the following questions (Rivière-Perrier and Simon, 1976):

• Does the examination reveal any mental or psychic abnormalities in the subject? If so, describe them and specify to which conditions they are related.
• Is the offense with which the subject is charged related to such abnormalities or not?
• Is the subject in a dangerous condition?
• Is the subject eligible for criminal sanction?
• Is the subject curable or rehabilitatable?
• Was the subject in a state of insanity within the meaning of Article 64 of the Penal Code at the time of the offence?
• Punishment as a way to support the political-economy of the time.
• A history of the body in the political field and its relationship with power.
• Power and knowledge directly imply one another.

Article 64 requires to specify whether the crime was committed in a state of insanity.

Rivière-Perrier and Simon note that there was no fixed set of questions, which could be vague or extremely precise. However, the circular C345 provided a general model. From what I see the standard questions have not changed much but two have been added (see the Senate report of 2021 on psychiatric evaluation).

Source

   Riviere-Perrier, Danielle, and Marie-Agnès Simon. ‘Réflexions sur une expérience d’expertise en criminologie’. Bulletin de psychologie 29, no. 322 (1976): 485–89. https://www.persee.fr/doc/bupsy_0007-4403_1976_num_29_322_10729

Quoted from reddit

Interesting branches

• amende honorable
• Tristlewood.
• French code of 1791.
• Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structures.