Discipline And Punish Foucault

In his 1975 book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, French philosopher Michel Foucault proposed that the prison system -- along with other social institutions like the hospital, school, and army barracks – acts as a form of social control. Rather than being punished or rehabilitated, inmates are reeducated into an obedient docility, thus maintaining the social hierarchy. Though Foucault’s claims may appear rather reductive and dystopian, he is careful to note that the sole reason the prison (and other social institutions) are able propagate this induced docility is because their true purpose is kept largely clandestine: the prison’s ideal function is to punish and rehabilitate; however, its actual function is the establishment

While this progression is supposedly egalitarian in nature (certainly the torture that Damiens endured seems a far crueler punishment than imprisonment), Foucault argues that this change was far from benevolent, as it saw the prison system becoming increasingly efficient in its disciplining of the human body; though the prison system may have become less malicious in its materiality, the power with which it governed the condemned became all the more effective. The insidious growth of the prison’s efficacy can, in turn, be compared to various social programs and policies intended to alleviate the ills of slums. In his essay, “Housing policy and the myth of the benevolent state,” Peter Marcuse addresses the common misconception that American housing programs in the twentieth-century were created as a panacea for poverty. Drawing from a number of early housing programs, Marcuse demonstrates that these programs were not implemented out of benevolence, but rather to fulfill measures beneficial to the government, like quelling “social unrest amongst unemployed city workers.” Much like the modernization of the prison system, the proliferation of housing programs was a supposedly altruistic act that, in reality, further propagated the ills it meant to solve. As Marcuse