Michel Foucault's Examination Of The Penal System

Running head: UNIT 5/QUESTION 2 1

QUESTION 2 6

Unit 5 Assignment/Question 2
French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose primary field of inquiry was that of power systems working to control and monitor individuals, was massively interested in the process of punishment and how it evolved over time on the basis of power play in the society. This essay seeks to explore Foucault?s examination of the history of punishment, the changes that the penal system went through, the advantages and disadvantages that came with these changes and how Foucault?s vision of punishment varied from Bentham?s view.
Foucault?s Discipline and Punish asserts that it is ?more efficient and profitable to place people under surveillance than to subject them
Since the power belonged to the king, and then to the state, and so on and so forth, punishment kept being tampered with to control the population with greater effectiveness. As more and more experts began to study the human behavior and psychology over the years, it became apparent that any punitive structure would need to not only focus its attention on the prisoner's mind and soul rather than inflicting physical damage, the idea of disciplining as a form of control also began to take over. "Punishment of a less immediately physical kind, a certain discretion in the art of inflicting pain, a combination of more subtle, more subdued sufferings, deprived of their visible display..." (Foucault, 1995, p. 8). Punishment without torture, but with discipline, began to take over as a certain kind of awareness took hold and reformers rallied for punishment to be separated from the ideas of revenge and torture. With this reform and disappearance of torture as a public spectacle came the need to view the prisoner as a human in a process of ?humanization? (Foucault, 1995, p. 23). In this way, recognizing the wrongdoer as an equal being led to a need to not torture him but to refine him, and the idea of penance took hold, resulting in the creation of a penitentiary where the inmate wasn't robbed of his freedom but was allowed to work and create while
This would create an opportunity for effective surveillance. While occupants of the cells would always be visible to those keeping an eye on them from the tower, they would be invisible to each other due to the walls of their cells and the power in the tower would be invisible to them. This would turn discipline into a passive action, with the anonymous observer in the tower holding the power (Bentham). While Foucault builds on this concept, his idea of punishment also stands in stark contrast to Bentham's approval of the scrutiny of the public eye. Foucault maintained that imprisonment and punishment should never be a public spectacle, Bentham envisioned a public gallery where an audience would be able to observe the inmates and even communicate with them. Bentham wanted to maximize public visibility of the imprisoned and involve the press (33), which both were notions Foucault was not in favor of when it came to punishment. Foucault was in favor of the Panopticon to replace spectacle with surveillance (Sarup, 1989, p. 80), while Bentham wanted to create a show for an audience within the aforementioned surveillance. ?In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them ? And the examination is the technique by