Discipline & Punish summary

The changing approach to punishment at the end of the eighteenth century did not spontaneously materialize. There was a rationale behind it. The philosophers of the Enlightenment had begun to attack the use of torture as a hangover from a “Gothic” age when cruelty and savagery were the norm.

Of course, torture had not been seen as unduly sadistic at the time. It was, in fact, heavily regimented as a form of science, right down to the length of ropes that were used, or even the frequency with which a given torture instrument should be applied.

By the end of the eighteenth century, calls for more “humane” forms of punishment could no longer be dismissed. Public executions and torture were seen as beyond the pale: the general feeling was that the breaking of a criminal’s body as a demonstration of sovereign power was no longer acceptable.

A new system of punishment would have to be instigated. The watchword was “humanity,” and it was to be the “measure” of a given punishment.

For the author, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries encompass what he terms the classical age.

During this time, discipline itself changed. Individual punishment was no longer portrayed as exemplary for the wider public. Instead, criminal individuals were transformed into docile bodies, to be “subjected, used, transformed, improved.” They were to service the burgeoning industries of the age.

As disciplinary machinery developed over the course of the seventeenth century, it became evident that its power primarily lay in three areas.

The first element was hierarchical observation. This means that systems of coercion were enforced through invasive monitoring. Paragons for this sort of behavior and exercise of power had long been in place. The military camp is a case in point.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the plague was ravaging Europe. Any town that suspected the pestilence had come knocking went into lockdown. For reasons of safety, maintaining discipline was essential.

To begin with, every family was ordered, on pain of death, to stay home. An official, known as a syndic, was appointed to surveil each street, locking every door as he went.

In the modern era, there is nothing unusual about the idea of prisons. They seem quite natural to us, an obvious solution to dealing with crime.

But things were different at the start of the nineteenth century. Detention as a punishment was novel. It took time for its position as the primary form of punishment to become established. But it triumphed in the end, and there were good reasons for this.