Change of look

In "Monitored and punish", Foucault describes the transition of punishment company in a surveillance society (Genealogy of Morals). Foucault shows that in our disciplinary society, the body is not a natural given, it is invested, required, crossed by procedures that make the docile, obedient so it can be useful (disciplines). The bodies are prepared either by an institution or by a device but under diffuse knowledge powers, ubiquitous, anonymous, extensive, detailed, picky, without a holder machinery (micro power), comprising instruments, techniques, processes, levels of application, targets (physical microphone). In the dépersonnifiant, bodies are individualized, assigned to a space to be standardized, archived and constantly monitored. That's life itself becomes an object of power. Foucault reveals in "Discipline and Punish" the relationship between a set of techniques of power, which targets the bodies, lives, and the generalization of the prison. For Foucault, it is the disciplinary society that produces, from the outside, certainly as a result the most radical and the most successful, jail.

Foucault meticulously describes the passage of torture cells, revenge punishment, a fear society, show where a multitude contemplates a few to a surveillance society where a multitude is monitored by a small number. The idea of ​​revenge attacked the sovereign in His sovereignty has been abandoned in favor of a technology recovery by the entire society when reached its foundations. Foucault shows how, under the joint impetus of moral orthopedics and an architecture that provides the ability, the prison era arose. A device for the amendment of the guilty, the punishment of the soul is in our modern societies systematically implemented. Prisoners are individually encellulés and put under constant surveillance. The introspection, the fault must allow internalization of reifying the souls without bodies bruise; widespread mistrust must force obedience. The company does not punished less but differently says Foucault. It punishes with severity attenuated but with more generality. What the sentence has lost density, she generously gains in extent. The disciplinary civilization produced the prison but has not had to deal with an ungrateful daughter. Good student, the prison carcéralisé back the entire company extending its arbitrary procedures outside of herself. A prison has become autonomous power control of justice and of public opinion, he co-managed the trouble inventing new and generalizable methods (the prison proved also as a place of production of knowledge: behaviorism, classification techniques, specific management of time and space ...).

Foucault in "Discipline and Punish" says: prison does not fail, it succeeds! We must, he says, to be convinced, out of the internal explanation of the management of detainees and worrying about what upstream feeds: production of illegalities. Illegalities are positive elements of social functioning. Any legislative household space profitable and protected spaces where the law can be violated, others where it can be ignored, and others where the offenses are punishable. The bourgeoisie succeeded in power no longer supported the old popular illegalities. The centrality of equipment and private property, taking into account the body of the worker labor force (performance, absenteeism, migration ...) involved a reconfiguration of other illegalities. The prison was the redevelopment of the field instrument of these new illegalities, the belt distribution of its economy. The prison located a plebs declared dangerous, it has marginalized, cut these social roots to form some form of professional illegality: delinquency. In other words, crime was this historical intentional cutting certain illegalities in the thickness of illegalities that prison was tasked to identify, to exalt, to stigmatize. Analyzed in the light of this economy illegality, prison has proved an efficient instrument of integration rather than exclusively repression. There were indeed many interests in this professionalization. Delinquency has maintained an ideologically profitable conflict with the rest of the population, it has promoted the acceptance of repression and police control over the whole of society and it served as labor to the bourgeoisie to monitor , infiltrate and manipulate the proletariat. She weighed on popular illegality and left in the shade illegality of the ruling classes.

Foucault finally updates with the prison, the character that would now dominate the judicial scene: the dangerous individual. Extrapolated from undeniable facts but also isolated and (or) resolved that turn into native tendencies, permanent provisions, the dangerous individual is both ill considered and criminal without being one or the other. It has dual membership in the judicial field and the medical field. A shift has been so significantly carried: it is not the act is reprehensible but now its author. Psychiatry in contemporary society has become the dominant vector of the judicial stage with the central issue of dangerousness and his two correlates: accessibility to the penalty and the curability of detainees. The concept of risk is now highlighted and the punishment is the way not to punish but to prevent. Foucault thought that if the danger often means an imaginary danger, a virtuality, measures to circumscribe however were truly productive of insecurity, fears and obsessions safe.

Michel Foucault said: "Write interests me only in so far as this is incorporated into the reality of a fight, as an instrument of tactical lighting." "Discipline and Punish" Is the desired instrument by the author? Does this subtle mechanics can still trim some bars open some doors, broaden few breaches, excluding certain walls? She unquestionably did. Once read, it must be wisely put away the book on a shelf, make some praise, or approximate scholars and return to the routine of sinful supervisors, spies porticos, roundabouts Orwellian and uncertain corridors? An eddy spectrum yet still seems to haunt the prison space.
With Foucault "Discipline and Punish" has permanently changed our look, it made inévidentes our most daily evidence. He showed by what necessity has befallen the prison and at the same time how she could disappear. The use of incarceration as a privileged penal system is in fact not from everlasting. He showed more generally how the knowledge produced of disciplinary power in the whole society.