Discipline and Punish

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

Discipline and Punish

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The Prison examines the nineteenth century emergence of imprisonment as the main means of punishment. The rise of the middle-class propagated the ideals of liberty and equality, which made the prison seem like a “natural” development as something that targeted those values. The prison controlled every part of an individual through the creation of a body of psychological, social, and biological knowledge – they became “objects” to be known. This marked the appearance of “delinquency,” a type of criminal that can be controlled through disciplinary means. The goal of the prison was not necessarily to reduce crime, but to control it through a police-prison-delinquency system that served the interests of the bourgeoisie. Foucault characterizes this new disciplinary society as a “carceral archipelago,” a network of institutions that wield their power across all areas of the social body. Punishment extended beyond the prison system, as various institutions targeted people that exhibited even the slightest amount of abnormality. Carceral society normalized power-knowledge, to the extent that this extent of societal control was unlikely to change.

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Discipline and Punish