Part Two. Punishment

The Gentle Way in Punishment

The art of punishing, then, must rest on a whole technology of representation. [104]

Radical shift [115-6]:

1.      Ancién Regime – Punishment as Terror

2.      Revolutionary imaginings 1789 – Punishment as education

3.      Penal Code of 1810 – Imprisonment in massive, central prison

Three distinct modalities of punishment [130-131

Three distinct technologies of power

Reformers

Correlate punishment to crime, so it stands as a corrective that can be read by the populace. Generalized, not emanating from a central authority. Basic principles of punishment:

1. signs - They must be as unarbitrary as possible [104]
2. interests - the “complex of signs must engage with the mechanics of forces” [106]

        a. reduce the desire that makes the crime attractive

        b. increase the interest that makes the penalty feared

        c. reverse the relation of intensities so that disadvantages of penalty are greater than the crime and its pleasures.

        d. Mechanisms for doing this

            i. Fight the “basic cause” [laziness lies behind vagabondage]

           ii. Set the punishment against the crime – pride à disgusting punishment

           iii. Reanimate virtuous interests

3. duration - Use temporal modulations as reform is accomplished – diminish intensity of punishment [108]
4. target both the criminal and the potentially guilty – everyone must see punishment not only as natural, but as in his own interest” [108-09] – signage highly public
5. Learned economy of publicity. 109-110. Public ceremonials to re-code the spectacles of the Ancién Regime. “Garden of the Laws” [111-112]
6. Inversion of the traditional discourse of crime [112] – each punishment a fable.

Opposed penal imprisonment [114]

But, with the Criminal Code presented in the Constituent Assembly by Le Peletier (1789), imprisonment was the primary form of punishment [117]

Prison in Ancien Regime [118]19]

      Holding ransom, as security, arbitrary, punishment before conviction

Reforming prisons – history of their formation

I. 1596 – Rasphuis of Amsterdam – for beggars or young malefactors [120-121]

      1. duration determined by the administration according to the prisoner’s conduct

      2. work obligatory,

            a. performed in common

            b. prisoners received wages

      3. strict time-table, rules, admonitions

          Formed the link between the 16^th century theory of a pedagogical and spiritual transformation of individuals brought about by continuous exercise and the penitentiary techniques conceived in the second half of the 18^th century. [121]

II. Maison de force at Ghent ( Flanders , Belgium ) [121]

      Organized penal labor around economic imperatives. Aimed primarily at “idlers given to begging”

     1. Reduce costs to state of vagabondage

          a. Reduced number of criminal prosections

          b. Unnecessary to remit taxes of damaged owners of woods ruined by vagabonds

     2. create a mass of new workers

     3.help bring down the cost of labor

     4. enable the true poor to benefit from necessary charity.

      Useful pedagogy for the lazy individual [122]

III.   English prisons - New element: isolation [Glouster] [intensified c. 1799-end to deportation a/c American Revolution]

      1.reduce bad examples, possibilities of escape, and of blackmail

     2. Distinguish from a factory

     3. Enable prisoner to go into himself – find conscience (spiritual conversion)

          a. monastic cell as analogue

IV. Philadelphia model – Walnut Street Prison, 1790. Quakers [124]

     1. prison as moral reform

     2. Strict time-table

     3. Constant supervision

     4. Worked

     5. Earned money

     6. Length of imprisonment based on behavior

     7. New principles [125]

          a. not publicizing the penalty

          b. reform based on process between prisoner and supervisors

               i.  transform individual as a whole

     c. development of knowledge of the individual

     d. distributed in prison according to diagnosed dispositions [126]

               i. 4 classes, from most vicious to least so

“A whole corpus of individualizing knowledge was being organized that took as its field of reference not so much the crime committed (at least inisolation), but the potentialityof danger that lies hidden in an individual and which is manifested in his observed everytday conduct. The prison functions in this as an apparatus of knowledge.” [126]