Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison

And ‘reform’, in the strict sense, as it was formulated in the theories of law or as it was outlined in the various projects, was the political or philosophical resumption of this strategy, with its primary objectives: to make of the punishment and repression of illegalities a regular function, coextensive with society; not to punish less, but to punish better; to punish with an attenuated severity perhaps, but in order to punish with more universality and necessity; to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body.

It was not so much, or not only, the privileges of justice, its arbitrariness, its archaic arrogance, its uncontrolled rights that were criticized; but rather the mixture of its weaknesses and excesses, its exaggerations and its loopholes, and above all the very principle of this mixture, the ‘super-power’ of the monarch. The true objective of the reform movement, even in its most general formulations, was not so much to establish a new right to punish based on more equitable principles, as to set up a new ‘economy’ of the power to punish,

From the end of the seventeenth century, in fact, one observes a considerable diminution in murders and, generally speaking, in physical acts of aggression; offences against property seem to take over from crimes of violence; theft and swindling, from murder and assault; the diffuse, occasional, but frequent delinquency of the poorest classes was superseded by a limited, but ‘skilled’ delinquency; the criminals of the seventeenth century were ‘harassed men, ill-fed, quick to act, quick to anger, seasonal criminals’; those of the eighteenth, ‘crafty, cunning, sly, calculating’ criminals on the fringes of society

‘Let penalties be regulated and proportioned to the offences, let the death sentence be passed only on those convicted of murder, and let the tortures that revolt humanity be abolished.’

In fact, the shift from a criminality of blood to a criminality of fraud forms part of a whole complex mechanism, embracing the development of production, the increase of wealth, a higher juridical and moral value placed on property relations, stricter methods of surveillance, a tighter partitioning of the population, more efficient techniques of locating and obtaining information: the shift in illegal practices is correlative with an extension and a refinement of punitive practices.

n the eighteenth century, the law became slower, heavier, harder on theft, whose relative frequency had increased, and towards which it now assumed the bourgeois appearances of a class justice’

general movement shifted criminality from the attack of bodies to the more or less direct seizure of goods; and from a ‘mass criminality’ to a ‘marginal criminality’, partly the preserve of professionals. It was as if there had been a gradual lowering of level – ‘a defusion of the tensions that dominate human relations,… a better control of violent impulses’1 – and as if the illegal practices had themselves slackened their hold on the body and turned to other targets.

watch, against taxes and their collectors, he appeared to have waged a struggle with which one all too easily identified.

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. But indomitability was an alternative claim to greatness: by not giving in under torture, he gave proof of a strength that no power had succeeded in bending: ‘On the day of the execution – this will seem scarcely credible – I showed no trace of emotion, as I performed my amende honorable, and when I finally lay down on the cross I showed no fear’ (the Complainte of J.-D. Langlade, executed at Avignon 12 April 1768). Black hero or reconciled criminal, defender of the true right or an indomitable force, the criminal of the broadsheets, pamphlets, almanacs and adventure stories brought with him, beneath the apparent morality of the example not to be followed, a whole memory of struggles and confrontations. A convicted criminal could become after his death a sort of saint, his memory honoured and his grave respected.

And they disappeared as a whole new literature of crime developed: a literature in which crime is glorified, because it is one of the fine arts, because it can be the work only of exceptional natures, because it reveals the monstrousness of the strong and powerful, because villainy is yet another mode of privilege