References for Theme: Discipline and Punish
- Foucault, Michel
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.120) Discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a ‘political’ force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force. The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, “political anatomy”, could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses and institutions.
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.121) in 1597 a prisoner was condemned to twelve years' imprisonment, which could be reduced to eight, if his behaviour proved satisfactory). Work was obligatory; it was performed in common (indeed the individual cell was used only as an additional punishment; prisoners slept two or three to a bed, in cells containing between four and twelve persons); and, for the work done, the prisoners received wages.
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.150) The gradual extension of the wage-earning class brought with it a more detailed partitioning of time 'If workers arrive later than a quarter of an hour after the ringing of the bell . . .' (Amboise, article z); 'if any one of the companions is asked for during work and loses more than five minutes . . .', 'anyone who is not at his work at the correct time . . .' (Oppenheim, article 7-8). But an attempt is also made to assure the quality of the time used: constant supervision, the pressure of supervisors, the elimination of anything that...
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.174) (Quote covering pages 174 -75)But, the disciplinary gaze did, in fact, need relays. The pyramid was able to fulfil, more efficiently than the circle, two requiremens: to be complete enough to form an uninterrupted network - consequently the possibility of multiplying its levels, and of distributing them over the entire surface to be supervised; and yet to be discreet enough not to weigh down with an inert mass on the activity to be disciplined, and not to act as a brake or an obstacle to it; to be integrated into the disciplinary mechanism as a function that increases its possible...
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.200) (Quote covering pages 200 - 01)And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow...
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.202) A real subjection is born mechanicalty from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations.
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.203) With this exception, the Panopticon also does the work of a naturalist. It makes it possible to draw up differences: among patients, to observe the symptoms of each individual, without the proximity of beds, the circulation of miasmas, the effects of contagion confusing the clinical tables; among schoolchildren, it makes it possible to observe performances (without there being any imitation or copying), to map aptitudes, to assess characters, to draw up rigorous classifications and, in relation to normal development, to distinguish 'laziness and stubbornness' from 'incurable imbecility'; among workers, it makes it possible to note the aptitudes of each worker,...
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.205) It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form...
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.215) Discipline' may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology. And it may be taken over either by 'specialized' institutions (the penitentiaries or 'houses of correction' of the nineteenth century), or by institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals), or by pre-existing authorities that find in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mechanisms of...
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.232) This 'self-evident' character of the prison, which we find so difficult to abandon, is based first of all on the simple form of 'deprivation of liberty'. How could prison not be the penalry par excellcnce in a society in which liberty is a good that belongs to all in the same way and to which each individual is attached, as Dupon put it, by a 'universal and constant' feelingl lts loss has therefore the same value for all; unlike tlrc 6ne, it is an 'egalitarian' punishment. The prison is the clearest, simplest, most equitable of penalties. Moreover, it makes it...
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.233) For the prison has a purpose, which is laid down at the outset: 'The law inflicting penalties, some of which are more serious than others, cannot allow the individual condemned to light penalties to be imprisoned in the same place as the criminal condemned to more serious penalties .. . although the penalty fixed by the law has as its principal aim the reparation of the crime, it also desires the amendment of the guilty man' (Real, 244). And this transformation must be one of the internal effects of imprisonment. Prison-punishment, prison-apparatus: 'The order that must reign in the maison...
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.240) Several polemics that took place under the Restoration and the July Monarchy throw light on the function attributed to penal labour. First, there was the debate on the subject of wages. The labour of prisoners was remunerated in France. This posed a problem: if work in prison is remunerated, that work cannot really form part ofthe penalty; and the prisoner may therefore refuse to perform it. Moreover, wages reward the skill of the worker and not the improvement of the convict: 'The worst subjects are almost everywhere the most skilful workers' they are the most highly remunerated, consequently the most...
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.241) There were strikes against the prison workshops: when a Chaumont glove-maker succeeded in organizing a workshop at Clairvaux, the workers protested, declared that their labour was dishonoured, occupied the manufactory and forced the employer to abandon his project (cf. Aguet, 3o-3r). There was also a widespread press campaign in the workers' newspapers: on the theme that the government encouraged penal labour in order to reduce 'free'wagesl on the theme that the inconveniences of these prison workshops were even more evident for women, who were thus deprived of their labour, driven to prostitution and therefore to prison, where these same women,...
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.242) Penal labour cannot be criticized for any unemployment it may give rise to: with its limited extent, and its low output, it cannot have a general effect on the economy. It is intrinsically useful, not as an activity of production, but by virtue of the effect it has on the human mechanism. It is a principle of order and regularity; through the demands that it imposes, it conveys, imperceptibly, the forms of a rigorous power; it bends bodies to regular movements, it excludes agitation and distraction, it imposes a hierarchy and a surveillance that are all the more accepted, and...
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.244) The length of the penalty must not be a measurement of the 'exchange value' of the offencel it must be adjusted to the 'useful' transformation of the inmate during his term of imprisonment. It is not a timemeasure, but a time finalized. The form of the operation, rather than the form of the wages.
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
(p.285) Erecting the barrier to separate delinquents from all the lower strata of the population from which they sprang and with which they remained linked has been a difficult task, especially no doubt in urban milieux. It has been a long and arduous undertaking. It has involved the use of the general principles of the 'moralization' of the poorer classes that elsewhere has had such crucial importance both from an economic and a political point of view (the acquisition of what might be called a 'basic legalism', which was indispensable from the time when custom was replaced by the system of...
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