Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

The more surveillance, the more minutiae we deal with in the digital age, the more this book is relevant. We are disciplined by everything around us more than ever. We don't need to be imprisoned to know this - we can live in prisons while shopping online. As google and eBay and any other algorithm driven platform sends us suggestions we might like, we become caught in our own reflection and permanently stay there, as though incarcerated in a version of ourselves we cannot even argue against or change.

We are trapped too in the endless improvements of the self, the endless idea that we must achieve the next level, not much different to the reaching of levels of behaviour to satisfy a disciplinary regime in a prison.

We adapt constantly show more to new regimes to avoid punishment, or loss of privilege - passwords, software changes, updated protocols and procedures, new forms to fill in, new ways to pay for things.

We fear being cast out if we don't. Of missing out or being labelled some delinquent class of citizen by not conforming. show less

Exceptionally written, the economy of language throughout this book is nearly as remarkable as what it expresses.

The initial chapters are utterly horrific, and will linger and haunt throughout the rest of the book. The refrain of one of the first wretches described, 'pardon, lord' as he is subject to a battery of the most incomprehensibly torturous and revolting punishment, still comes back to me.

And yet, even after being confronted with the abject horror of old world justice, Foucault slowly and with purpose, shows that the present system of universal discipline, surveillance, and penitentiary, is for many even more cruel and inhumane than the barbarism which it slowly came to replace.

If you though 1984 was an eerily prescient show more damnation of the modern world, this will only give you more to despair over. But, you know, in a good way. show less

This book had been sitting on my shelf for a few years, and the longer I waited to read it the more intimidated I became. My low amount of confidence was shared by others: On at least two occasions I told someone I was reading this book and they replied with some variation of “Oh, you are. Hmm, that's a pretty hard book.” Yet, I did it anyway and didn't find it as hard as people made it out to be, thought it was still a doozy.
Foucault gives a history of prisons, and explains how we got from public torture to where we are today (or at least where we were when he wrote this book). It's thorough and he references a lot of other work, but the thing I had the most trouble with was the way he jumped around in time. I would find a linear show more history much easier to read, but he's a philosopher and has to intentionally make things as hard as possible.
Back in the day the powers that be preferred public torture and embarrassment. The spectacle was the point, and the inflicted as much damage onto the “offenders” body as possible. More often than not, they killed the person. Everyone who came to watch (and pretty much everyone came to watch) saw the unquestionable, unstoppable power of the sovereign. Slowly, over the course of a couple centuries, the methods of punishment became more hidden and bureaucratic. There was also more focus on the human being, as opposed to just the act they committed. Perhaps prison reformers and other pre-hippies had a hand in this, but it seems more likely that it was done to be more efficient and to have more control over the lives of their subjects.
Plus, the old ways of punishing were becoming less effective. The crowds of people who went to see the public spectacles ended up relating more with the tortured than they did with the king or ordered the torturing or the soldier who committed the acts. As time went on, many of the people being punished became folk heroes: a lot of them even had little zines made about them. Perhaps most importantly, the people began to notice that the vast, vast majority of those being punished were poor, while the powerful people who stole money and land from them were let off Scot-free. This anger turned into riots; mostly when the crowd thought the accused was innocent, but also when they thought the punishment had gone too far. The state began to lose control of the narrative and things had to change.
So, punishment changed and prisons became a thing. Almost right away, they became almost indistinguishable from schools, factories, barracks, and other places where the people in power wanted to control the masses. All of these places featured heavy amounts of discipline to go along with routines, surveillance, and judging and categorizing people. Children where scheduled down to the minute; workers began to get penalized for “wasting time,” and people all over the place were being turned into efficient machines.
There's a lot more to say about this book, but I don't feel like it. show less

It’s easy to understand why Foucault was such an influential theorist; his explanation of the use of information collection and standardization to work on the body, in places from prisons to hospitals to armies to schools, offers a powerful theoretical apparatus with lots of applications across countries, times, and situations. That said, if you’ve read summaries elsewhere, it’s not clear to me that you need to read this book (cf. Bowling Alone). One very striking thing to me, since I also just finished Matt Taibbi’s The Divide, was how much these two books described the exact same thing: the extension of categorization, surveillance, and manipulation to poor people, who gain “identity” by being classified and recorded. By show more contrast, rich people gain identity (and even acclaim) by being above the law—that’s not Foucault’s focus, but he mentions it. Thus the modern army and modern capitalism go hand in hand. show less

When I finished reading this book, I broke out a tub of Ben and Jerry's Half Baked—chocolate and vanilla frozen yoghurt with brownie and cookie dough chunks seemed the only suitable reward after 300+ pages of Foucault's prose. Whether or not its his writing style or an effect of the translation, Discipline and Punish is a dense and at times frustratingly opaque book. That, coupled with Foucault's fondness for using minuscule, ahistorical details to justify large-scale abstractions, made this a very frustrating book to read. I admired his refusal to accept conventional truths, but his arguments were never wholly convincing to me, his tendency to reify 'power' as a independent entity with agency of its own irritating, and his lack of show more intersectionality jarring (does society really treat the bodies of men and women in the same way? Of cis- and transgendered, ablebodied and those with disabilities?). To sum up: an important philosophical work, but his historical method sucks. show less

I must say that "Discipline and Punish" is a difficult book to review. It is excellent, and it is deep. The book starts with the description of a prisoner being tortured and killed. The final stages of the torture, and the execution used to take place in the public sphere.

We may be squeamish today, but we cannot state that torture has disappeared from the world. It has just disappeared from the public eye.

From there, he moves on to the concept of punishment, and the various theories that prevailed. And, of course, the practices. For me, the most interesting chapters were those that pertained to discipline, the panopticon, and delinquency.

I don't think that 'the birth of the prison' is a good subtitle. This book is much deeper than show more that.

It revolves around the concept of power (initially with the king), punishment, society's attitudes towards this, discipline and society; and finally, the Panopticon. This concept was centuries ahead of its time.

In many ways, society is living in a Panopticon today. show less

This book will make you want to live out in the woods.

Its language is very cold and measured - except, of course, for the graphic description of a man's quartering in the beginning - but it systematically begins to make you feel enclosed upon from the outside in. Foucault succeeds in sounding objective, letting only detailed facts and descriptions persuade you of his point. But, to be honest, although this subject is right up my alley, I can see a lot of people not being convinced by the text's problem at the very end. And, to be even more honest, the problem is probably not something we can solve in our lifetime anyway. S0, why read this book? Because you like learning about scary depressing things that you can't change. Enjoy!