Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

by Michel Foucault

The great carceral machinery was bound up with the’ very functioning of the prison. The sign of this autonomy is very apparent in the ‘useless’ acts of violence perpetrated by warders or in the despotism of an administration that has all the privileges of an enclosed community. Its roots lie elsewhere: precisely in the fact that the prison is required to be ‘useful’, that the deprivation of liberty – that juridical levying on an ideal property – must, from the outset, have exercised a positive technical role, operating transformations on individuals. And, for this operation, the carceral apparatus has recourse to three great schemata: the politico-moral schema of individual isolation and hierarchy; the economic model of force applied to compulsory work; the technico-medical model of cure and normalization. The cell, the workshop, the hospital. The margin by which the prison exceeds detention is filled in fact by techniques of a disciplinary type. And this disciplinary addition to the juridical is what, in short, is called the ‘penitentiary’.