Discipline and Punish

Summarize the section titled, Discipline, from Foucault's, Discipline and Punish.

Discipline and Punish

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Discipline, explores the creation of docile people alongside a new focus on discipline starting from the eighteenth century. Developments in science converged with disciplinary methods to create useful and obedient prisoners; methods such as controlling their time and space served as a form of training that would cause people to function as instruments of power. Following a military-camp layout, prisons, hospitals, and schools began to function as surveillance institutions that observed individuals at all times. Power used to target the body, but now it targeted “the soul” through vision, i.e constant observation. The ultimate symbol of the modern disciplinary institution was Bentham’s Panopticon, which was structured in a way that ensured that inmates never knew whether they were being watched. The Panopticon, though never fully adopted, envisioned the creation of individuals that were useful and obedient at a low cost. This disciplinary method spread throughout many institutions and into the social body.

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Discipline and Punish