Quotes from book
Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault Original title Surveiller et punir , Naissance de la prison (French, 1975)

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is a 1975 book by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. It is an analysis of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the changes that occurred in Western penal systems during the modern age based on historical documents from France. Foucault argues that prison did not become the principal form of punishment just because of the humanitarian concerns of reformists. He traces the cultural shifts that led to the predominance of prison via the body and power. Prison used by the "disciplines" – new technological powers that can also be found, according to Foucault, in places such as schools, hospitals, and military barracks.In a later work, Security, Territory, Population, Foucault admitted that he was somewhat overzealous in his argument that disciplinary power conditions society; he amended and developed his earlier ideas.

Michel Foucault photo

“A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Part Four, Complete and austere institutions
Discipline and Punish (1977)

Michel Foucault photo

“There can be no doubt that the existence of public tortures and executions were connected with something quite other than this internal organization. Rusche and Kirchheimer are right to see it as the effect of a system of production in which labour power, and therefore the human body, has neither the utility nor the commercial value that are conferred on them in an economy of an industrial type. Moreover, this ‘contempt’ for the body is certainly related to a general attitude to death; and, in such an attitude, one can detect not only the values proper to Christianity, but a demographical, in a sense biological, situation: the ravages of disease and hunger, the periodic massacres of the epidemics, the formidable child mortality rate, the precariousness of the bio-economic balances – all this made death familiar and gave rise to rituals intended to integrate it, to make it acceptable and to give a meaning to its permanent aggression. But in analysing why the public executions survived for so long, one must also refer to the historical conjuncture; it must not be forgotten that the ordinance of 1670 that regulated criminal justice almost up to the Revolution had even increased in certain respects the rigour of the old edicts; Pussort, who, among the commissioners entrusted with the task of drawing up the documents, represented the intentions of the king, was responsible for this, despite the views of such magistrates as Lamoignon; the number of uprisings at the very height of the classical age, the rumbling close at hand of civil war, the king’s desire to assert his power at the expense of the parlements go a long way to explain the survival of so severe a penal system.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), pp. 51

Michel Foucault photo

“Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One, pp.58

Michel Foucault photo

“The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter Two, pp.. 79

Michel Foucault photo

“Exercise is the technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated. By bending behavior towards a terminal state, exercise makes possible a perpetual characterization of the individual…It thus assures, in the form of continuity and constraint, a growth, an observation, a qualification.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish (1977)

Michel Foucault photo

“It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing. Hence the double system of protection that justice has set up between itself and the punishment it imposes.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), pp. 10

Michel Foucault photo

“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish (1977)

Michel Foucault photo

“We are aware of all the inconveniences of prison, and that it is dangerous when it is not useless. And yet one cannot 'see' how to replace it. It is the detestable solution, which one seems unable to do without.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Part Four, Complete and austere institutions
Discipline and Punish (1977)

Michel Foucault photo

“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish (1977) as translated by Alan Sheridan, p. 228
Discipline and Punish (1977)

Michel Foucault photo

“In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One, pp. 56

Michel Foucault photo

“Discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power…it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish (1977)

Michel Foucault photo

“A utopia of judicial reticence: take away life, but prevent the patient from feeling it; deprive the prisoner of all rights, but do not inflict pain; impose penalties free of all pain. Recourse to psycho-pharmacology and to various physiological ‘disconnectors’, even if it is temporary, is a logical consequence of this ‘non-corporal’ penalty.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One, The Spectacle of the Scaffold

Michel Foucault photo

“The condemned man found himself transformed into a hero by the sheer extend of his widely advertised crimes, and sometimes the affirmation of his belated repentance. Against the law, against the rich, the powerful, the magistrates, the constabulary or the watch, against taxes and their collectors, he appeared to have waged a struggle with which one all too easily identified. The proclamation of these crimes blew up to epic proportions the tiny struggle that passed unperceived in everyday life. If the condemned man was shown to be repentant, accepting the verdict, asking both God and man for forgiveness for his crimes, it was as if he had come through some process of purification: he died, in his own way, like a saint.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One: The Spectacle of the scaffold, pp. 67

Michel Foucault photo

“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the contraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Part Three, Panopticism
Discipline and Punish (1977)

Michel Foucault photo

“This dysfunction of power was related to a central excess: what might be called the monarchical 'super-power', which identified the right to punish with the personal power of the sovereign.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter Two, pp.80

Michel Foucault photo

“In the old system, the body of the condemned man became the king's property, on which the sovereign left his mark and brought down the effects of his power. Now he will be rather the property of society, the object of a collective and useful appropriation.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment

Michel Foucault photo

“If torture was so strongly embedded in legal practice, it was because it revealed truth and showed the operation of power. It assured the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public, the procedure of investigation on the operation of the confession; it made it possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One, pp.55

Michel Foucault photo

“The different pieces of evidence did not constitute so many neutral elements, until such time as they could be gathered together into a single body of evidence that would bring the final certainty of guilt. Each piece of evidence aroused a particular degree of abomination. Guilt did not begin when all the evidence was gathered together; piece by piece, it was constituted by each of the elements that made it possible to recognize a guilty person. Thus a semi-proof did not leave the suspect innocent until such time as it was completed; it made him semi-guilty; slight evidence of a serious crime marked someone as slightly criminal. In short, penal demonstration did not obey a dualistic system: true or false; but a principle of continuous gradation; a degree reached in the demonstration already formed a degree of guilt and consequently involved a degree of punishment.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One, The body of the condemned, pp.23

Michel Foucault photo

“Above the punitive city hangs this iron spider; and the criminal who is to be thus crucified by the new law is parricide.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment

Michel Foucault photo

“In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish (1977)