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The disciplinary pyramid constituted the small cell of power within which the separation, coordination and supervision of tasks was imposed and made efficient; and analytical partitioning of time, gestures and bodily forces constituted an operational schema that could easily be transferred from the groups to be subjected to the mechanisms of production; the massive projection of military methods onto industrial organization was an example of this modelling of the division of labour following the model laid down by the schemata of power.
The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, ‘political anatomy’, could be operated in the most diverse political régimes, apparatuses or institutions.
2. The panoptic modality of power – at the elementary, technical, merely physical level at which it is situated – is not under the immediate dependence or a direct extension of the great juridico-political structures of a society; it is nonetheless not absolutely independent.
The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
3. Taken one by one, most of these techniques have a long history behind them. But what was new, in the eighteenth century, was that, by being combined and generalized, they attained a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process.
The eighteenth century invented the techniques of discipline and the examination, rather as the Middle Ages invented the judicial investigation. But it did so by quite different means.
The extreme point of penal justice under the Ancien Régime was the infinite segmentation of the body of the regicide: a manifestation of the strongest power over the body of the greatest criminal, whose total destruction made the crime explode into its truth. The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty
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It must be the most powerful machinery for imposing a new form on the perverted individual; its mode of action is the constraint of a total education: ‘In prison the government may dispose of the liberty of the person and of the time of the prisoner; from then on, one can imagine the power of the education which, not only in a day, but in the succession of days and even years, may regulate for man the time of waking and sleeping, of activity and rest, the number and duration of meals, the quality and ration of food, the nature and product of labour, the time of prayer, the use of speech and
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1. The first principle was isolation. The isolation of the convict from the external world, from everything that motivated the offence, from the complicities that facilitated it. The isolation of the prisoners from one another. Not only must the penalty be individual, but it must also be individualizing
The Auburn model prescribed the individual cell during the night, work and meals in common, but under the rule of absolute silence, the convicts being allowed to speak only to the warders, with their permission and in a low voice. It was a clear reference to the monastic model; a reference, too, to the discipline of the workshop.
In absolute isolation – as at Philadelphia – the rehabilitation of the criminal is expected not of the application of a common law, but of the relation of the individual to his own conscience and to what may enlighten him from within.7 ‘Alone in his cell, the convict is handed over to himself; in the silence of his passions and of the world that surrounds him, he descends into his conscience, he questions it and feels awakening within him the moral feeling that never entirely perishes in the heart of man’ (Journal des économistes, II, 1842).
A whole series of different conflicts stemmed from the opposition between these two models: religious (must conversion be the principal element of correction?), medical (does total isolation drive convicts insane?), economic (which method costs less?), architectural and administrative (which form guarantees the best surveillance?). This, no doubt, was why the argument lasted so long. But, at the heart of the debate, and making it possible, was this primary objective of carceral action: coercive individualization, by the termination of any relation that is not supervised by authority or
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2. ‘Work alternating with meals accompanies the convict to evening prayer; then a new sleep gives him an agreeable rest that is not disturbed by the phantoms of an unregulated imagination. Thus the six weekdays pass by. They are followed by a day devoted exclusively to prayer, instruction and salutary meditations. Thus the weeks, the months, the years follow one another;
This posed a problem: if work in prison is remunerated, that work cannot really form part of the penalty; and the prisoner may therefore refuse to perform it. Moreover, wages reward the skill of the worker and not the improvement of the convict: ‘The worst subjects are almost everywhere the most skilful workers; they are the most highly remunerated, consequently the most intemperate and least ready to repent’
‘Work is the providence of the modern peoples; it replaces morality, fills the gap left by beliefs and is regarded as the principle of all good. Work must be the religion of the prisons. For a machine-society, purely mechanical means of reform are required’
What, then, is the use of penal labour? Not profit; nor even the formation of a useful skill; but the constitution of a power relation, an empty economic form, a schema of individual submission and of adjustment to a production apparatus.
3. But prison goes beyond the mere privation of liberty in a more important way. It becomes increasingly an instrument for the modulation of the penalty; an apparatus which, through the execution of the sentence with which it is entrusted, seems to have the right, in part at least, to assume its principle.
The length of the penalty must not be a measurement of the ‘exchange value’ of the offence; it must be adjusted to the ‘useful’ transformation of the inmate during his term of imprisonment. It is not a time-measure, but a time finalized. The form of the operation, rather than the form of the wages.
If anything can awaken in the minds of convicts the notions of good and evil, bring them to moral reflections and raise them to some extent in their own eyes, it is the possibility of obtaining some reward’
All this ‘arbitrariness’ which, in the old penal system, enabled the judges to modulate the penalty and the princes to ignore it if they so wished, all this arbitrariness, which the modern codes have withdrawn from the judicial power, has been gradually reconstituted on the side of the power that administers and supervises punishment.
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’.
This involves two essential mechanisms. It must be possible to hold the prisoner under permanent observation; every report that can be made about him must be recorded and computed.
‘in the glass house of the Greek philosopher’
Delinquency is the vengeance of the prison on justice. It is a revenge formidable enough to leave the judge speechless. It is at this point that the criminologists raise their voices.
– The prison cannot fail to produce delinquents.
It does so by the very type of existence that it imposes on its inmates: whether they are isolated in cells or whether they are given useless work, for which they will find no employment, it is, in any case, not ‘to think of man in society; it is to create an unnatural, useless and dangerous existence’; the prison should educate its inmates, but can a system of education addressed to man reasonably have as its object to act against the wishes of nature?
The prison also produces delinquents by imposing violent constraints on its inmates; it is supposed to apply the law, and to teach respect for it; but all its function...
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– The prison makes possible, even encourages, the organization of a milieu of delinquents, loyal to one another, hierarchized, ready to aid and abet any future criminal act:
– The conditions to which the free inmates are subjected necessarily condemn them to recidivism: they are under the surveillance of the police; they are assigned to a particular residence, or forbidden others; ‘they leave prison with a passport that they must show everywhere they go and which mentions the sentence that they have served’
– Lastly, the prison indirectly produces delinquents by throwing the inmate’s family into destitution: ‘The same order that sends the head of the family to prison reduces each day the mother to destitution, the children to abandonment, the whole family to vagabondage and begging. It is in this way that crime can take root’
This is shown conclusively in the fact that the prisoners’ revolts of recent weeks* have been attributed to the fact that the reforms proposed in 1945 never really took effect; that one must therefore return to the fundamental principles of the prison. But these principles, of which such wonderful results are still expected today, are well enough known: for the past 150 years they have constituted the seven universal maxims of the good ‘penitential condition’.
1. Penal detention must have as its essential function the transformation of the individual’s behaviour:
2. Convicts must be isolated or at least distributed according to the penal gravity of their act, but above all according to age, mental attitude, the technique of correction to be used, the stages of their transformation.
3. It must be possible to alter the penalties according to the individuality of the convicts, the results that have been obtained, progress or relapses.
4. Work must be one of the essential elements in the transformation and progressive socialization of convicts.
5. The education of the prisoner is for the authorities both an indispensable precaution in the interests of society and an obligation to the prisoner.
6. The prison régime must, at least in part, be supervised and administered by a specialized staff possessing the moral qualities and technical abilities required of educators.
7. Imprisonment must be followed by measures of supervision and assistance until the rehabilitation of the former prisoner is complete.
One must not, therefore, regard the prison, its ‘failure’ and its more or less successful reform as three successive stages. One should think rather of a simultaneous system that historically has been superimposed on the juridical deprivation of liberty; a fourfold system comprising: the additional, disciplinary element of the prison – the element of ‘super-power’; the production of an objectivity, a technique, a penitentiary ‘rationality’ – the element of auxiliary knowledge; the de facto reintroduction, if not actual increase, of a criminality that the prison ought to destroy – the element
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Perhaps one should look for what is hidden beneath the apparent cynicism of the penal institution, which, after purging the convicts by means of their sentence, continues to follow them by a whole series of ‘brandings’ (a surveillance that was once de jure and which is today de facto; the police record that has taken the place of the convict’s passport) and which thus pursues as a ‘delinquent’ someone who has acquitted himself of his punishment as an offender?
Law and justice do not hesitate to proclaim their necessary class dissymmetry.
No doubt delinquency is a form of illegality; certainly it has its roots in illegality; but it is an illegality that the ‘carceral system’, with all its ramifications, has invested, segmented, isolated, penetrated, organized, enclosed in a definite milieu, and to which it has given an instrumental role in relation to the other illegalities. In short, although the juridical opposition is between legality and illegal practice, the strategic opposition is between illegalities and delinquency.
For the observation that prison fails to eliminate crime, one should perhaps substitute the hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency, a specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous – and, on occasion, usable – form of illegality; in producing delinquents, in an apparently marginal, but in fact centrally supervised milieu; in producing the delinquent as a pathologized subject. The success of the prison, in the struggles around the law and illegalities, has been to specify a ‘delinquency’.
The establishment of a delinquency that constitutes something like an enclosed illegality has in fact a number of advantages. To begin with, it is possible to supervise it (by locating individuals, infiltrating the group, organizing mutual informing):
Moreover, it is possible to divert this self-absorbed delinquency to forms of illegality that are less dangerous:
It may be useful in relation to other illegalities:
But delinquency has other direct uses. The example of colonization comes to mind.
Delinquency, controlled illegality, is an agent for the illegality of the dominant groups.
It is also an instrument for the illegality with which the very exercise of power surrounds itself.
Delinquency, solidified by a penal system centred upon the prison, thus represents a diversion of illegality for the illicit circuits of profit and power of the dominant class.
