The Punitive Society

Abstract

4 forms of punitive tactics are given: exile (Greek), compensation (German), torture (western) and prison (modern). MF examines the rise of prison, a marginal form of punishment until the 18th century that was quickly denounced for producing the very delinquency it sought to correct. MF argues that prison was born outside of penal theory, imposed upon it, and then justified after the fact. Prison function, underneath the apparent dysfunction identified by penal theory, by: 1. intervening in the spatial distribution of individuals. They are moved out of the city yet unable to roam the countryside. They are also forced in a place where they must work. 2. Confinement intervenes at the level of individual conduct, on behalf of order and regularity. 3. It is locally controlled. The shift towards imprisonment is related to the shift to capitalist production: a new form of materiality taken by the production apparatus, a new contact between these apparatus and the bodies making them function, and new reqiurements imposed upon individuals as productive forces. The body must not be marked but rather re-trained.The transformation of penalities is a history of the relations between political power and bodies centered upon the themes of optics, mechanics & physiology.