Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

by Michel Foucault

The organization of an isolated illegality, enclosed in delinquency, would not have been possible without the development of police supervision.

Delinquency, with the secret agents that it procures, but also with the generalized policing that it authorizes, constitutes a means of perpetual surveillance of the population: an apparatus that makes it possible to supervise, through the delinquents themselves, the whole social field. Delinquency functions as a political observatory. In their turn, the statisticians and the sociologists have made use of it, long after the police.

But this surveillance has been able to function only in conjunction with the prison.

Prison and police form a twin mechanism; together they assure in the whole field of illegalities the differentiation, isolation and use of delinquency.

So that one should speak of an ensemble whose three terms (police-prison-delinquency) support one another and form a circuit that is never interrupted. Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison.

There is no penal justice intended to prosecute all illegal practices which, to do so, would use the police as an auxiliary and prison as a punitive instrument, and not leave in its wake the unassimilable residue of ‘delinquency’.

Judges are the scarcely resisting employees of this apparatus.18 They assist as far as they can in the constitution of delinquency, that is to say, in the differentiation of illegalities, in the supervision, colonization and use of certain of these illegalities by the illegality of the dominant class.

Vidocq marks the moment when deliquency, detached from other illegalities, was invested by power and turned inside out.

Lacenaire is the typical ‘delinquent’.

At the moment of his death, Lacenaire manifested the triumph of delinquency over illegality, or rather the figure of an illegality, on the one hand, dragged down into delinquency, and, on the other, displaced towards an aesthetics of crime, that is to say, towards an art of the privileged classes. There is a symmetry between Lacenaire and Vidocq, who in the same period, made it possible to turn delinquency in upon itself by constituting it as an enclosed, observable milieu and by displacing towards police techniques a whole delinquent practice that was becoming the licit illegality of power.

More specific methods were used to maintain the hostility of the poorer classes to delinquents (the use of ex-convicts as informers, police spies, strike-breakers or thugs). There has been a systematic confusion between offences against common law and those offences against the severe legislation concerning the livret (work record), strikes, coalitions, associations,22 for which the workers demanded political status. Workers’ action was regularly accused of being animated, if not manipulated, by mere criminals (cf., for example, Monfalcon, 142). Verdicts were often more severe against workers than against thieves (cf. L’Atelier, October 1840, or La Fraternité, July–August 1847).

But this delinquency of wealth is tolerated by the laws, and, when it does find its way into the courts, it can depend upon the indulgence of the judges and the discretion of the press.26

It may be, therefore, that crime constitutes a political instrument that could prove as precious for the liberation of our society as it has been for the emancipation of the Negroes; indeed, will such an emancipation take place without it?

After Vidocq and Lacenaire, a third character must be introduced. He made only a short appearance; his notoriety lasted hardly more than a day. He was merely the passing figure of minor illegalities: a child of thirteen, without home or family, charged with vagabondage and whom a two-year sentence had no doubt long placed in the circuits of delinquency. He would certainly have passed without trace, had he not opposed to the discourse of the law that made him delinquent (in the name of the disciplines, even more than in the terms of the code) the discourse of an illegality that remained resistant to these coercions and which revealed indiscipline in a systematically ambiguous manner as the disordered order of society and as the affirmation of inalienable rights.

He prefers liberty; what does he care if others see it as disorder? It is liberty, that is to say, the most spontaneous development of his individuality, a wild development and, consequently, brutal and limited, but a natural, instinctive development.’

The lessons of La Phalange were not quite wasted. They found an echo when, in the second half of the nineteenth century, taking the penal apparatus as their point of attack, the anarchists posed the political problem of delinquency; when they thought to recognize in it the most militant rejection of the law; when they tried not so much to heroize the revolt of the delinquents as to disentangle delinquency from the bourgeois legality and illegality that had colonized it; when they wished to re-establish or constitute the political unity of popular illegalities.