Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Bennie's pick. A French philosopher asks why has prison become the universal way to punish people. It's all about power dynamics: compartmentalize and control. He then examines how this has creeped into everyday life. If you like history, you'll like this.

The Garden of Eden was the first judicial court. Power produces knowledge and power and knowledge are inextricably interwoven. There is no power without knowledge, and no knowledge that presupposes power. Knowledge and power are in direct and reciprocal relationship. The original crime was stealing food and eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil with pain in labor for both men and women as the original punishment. “Justice pursues the body beyond all possible pain.” Jesus endured the ultimate liturgy of punishment–the scarring of skin and the torment of torture–pain, ritual and spectacle. The tortured body is testament of the truth of the crime. In a parade of punishment, Jesus’ nail pierced palms and spear in his side branded Him with our shame as his body and blood gave way for humanity’s sake. The condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king. Christ was coronated at his death, and the “King of the Jews” died as and among condemned criminals. This is the historical reality of the soul, born in sin and subject to punishment, set free by Christ the quintessential criminal, condemned for our sin. Sin offends the dignity of His character and attacks Him personally and physically unto death. “The law represents the will of the sovereign…the force of the law is the force of the prince, and the Prince of Peace paid the penalty for humanity’s lawlessness.” Through His public execution, Christ re-establish justice and reactivated power. He endured this theatre of terror: “Its ruthlessness, its spectacle, its physical violence, its unbalanced play of forces, its meticulous ceremonial, its entire apparatus…inscribed in the political functioning of the penal system” in a “liturgy of torture and execution…The sovereign was present at the execution not only as the power exacting the vengeance of the law, but as the power that could suspend both law and vengeance,” and as the power upon whom both the law and vengeance was enacted for our sake! “He alone could wash away the offences committed on his person,” and He alone did wash clean the people who had committed their offences to His person! Through the atrocity of His atonement, Jesus showed solidarity with “a whole section of the population with those we would call petty offenders - vagrants, false beggars, the indigent poor, pick-pockets, receivers and dealers in stolen goods…The people never felt closer to those who paid the penalty than in those rituals intended to show the horror of the crime and the invincibility of power.” Truth “occurs exactly at the juncture between the judgement of men and the judgement of God…It is one’s soul that one must save. The external game has already begun: the torture of the execution anticipates the punishments of the beyond; it shows what they are; it is the theatre of hell…in it is glimpsed the promise of forgiveness…The ‘last words of a condemned man’ genre is in itself significant.” Understanding that knowledge and power are inextricably intertwined, Jesus’ final breath was, “Father, forgive them for they KNOW not [and have no power over] what they do!” He assumed both knowledge and power in the politics of punishment! Christ’s suffering was at once a sign that “God abandoned the guilty man to the mercy of his fellow creatures” and “proof that God wishes to protect him and to prevent him from falling into despair…there one could decipher, crime and innocence, the past and the future, the here below and the eternal.” Jesus’ resurrection was marked by the arrival of the messenger (the Holy Spirit) at the last moment bearing the letter with the green wax seal of grace! The criminal who confesses comes to play the role of living truth, and that is what we do as Christians. Our testimony transforms us from confessing criminals into living truths! The Bible is “an everyday epic of illegalities…But if these true stories of everyday history were received so avidly, if they formed part of the basic reading of the lower classes, it was because people found in them not only memories, but also precedents…two-sided discourses, in the facts that they relate, in the effects they give to these facts and in the glory they confer on those 'illustrious' criminals [Christ and the sinners He’s saved], and no doubt in the very words they use,” the everyday grammar of grace in the vernacular of the vile. “For the LORD disciplines those he loves, and he punishes each one he accepts as his child” (Hebrews 12:6) with the intent of enabling “him to go into himself and rediscover in the depths of his conscience the voice of good,” that space between the two worlds of good and evil as a “place for the individual transformation that would restore the states of the subject it had lost” in an “exercise in spiritual conversion.” Discipline is the silent architecture from which the conscience is constructed. It was in this “reformatory of reformation” in which he waited in uncertainty for the moment when he would be delivered, spending long anxious hours with nothing but the reflections that are present to the minds of all guilty persons, and all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23), but some have sinned and fallen farther on the hierarchy to hell. Herein lies my hope, my prayer: “Little things; it will be said, alas, my God, what can we do that is great for you, weak and mortal creatures that we are. Little things; if great things presented themselves would we perform them? Would we not think them beyond our strength? Little things; and if God accepts them and wishes to receive them as great things? Little things; has one ever felt this? Does one judge according to experience? Little things; one is certainly guilty, therefore, if seeing them as such, one refuses them? Little things; yet it is they that in the end have made great saints! Yes, little things; but great motives, great feelings, great fervour, great ardour, and consequently great merits, great treasures, great rewards' (La Salle, Traité ..., 238-9).

Good theory, good supporting evidence--can be applied to a wide variety of scenarios outside of the specifics of what Foucault is discussing. I took off points because of who Foucault is as a person and his pretentious, defeatist attitude. The points awarded are solely for the arguments/thesis.