Foucaults Contribution to the Study of Punishment Essay

Foucaults Contribution to the Study of Punishment - Essay Example The briefest thing to be said about Discipline and Punish is that it is about how certain people who were subjects of a sovereign became subjects of a new kind. The people in question were lawbreakers, malefactors, criminals--those who were apprehended and punished for contravening the laws of the sovereign. They became and continue to be individuals who, having contravened the laws of societies having modern legal structures, undergo complex processing in institutionalized judicial and penal systems that center on the incarceration of offenders. Discipline and Punish are ostensibly about the change from lawful punishment as brutal monarchical vengeance to lawful punishment as humanized deterrence and rehabilitation. What the book is really about is the production of subjects through the imposition of disciplines; it is about how the process of constant observation, assessment, and control of inmates in the modern penitentiary manufactures new subjects through the employment of manag ement techniques that intrude into and govern every aspect of life. But what makes Discipline and Punish more than a study of penalty is its portrayal of techniques employed in the manufacture of these new subjects as those more widely used in the production of the contemporary norm-governed social individual. (Richard Marsden, 1999). Foucault's point of departure in rethinking a subject-matter is to impugn the commonplace, to query accepted knowledge. In applying genealogy to a penalty, Foucault impugns the commonplace view that our present penitentiary-centered penal system is the result of the progressive humanization of earlier, more ruthless methods of retributive punishment. Foucault begins by discussing how spectacular public punishments and executions constituted a standard procedure for dealing with lawbreakers in the European monarchical order to roughly the mid-eighteenth century.