The birth of the prison: Discipline or punish?

Abstract

The English title of Foucault's famous examination of the prison is Discipline and Punish, but Foucault for the most part says nothing on punishment and devotes his entire effort to establishing that the prison was conceived to perform the latent social control function of discipline. Since discipline is not a conscious function, there is no conscious effort to justify it. Not surprisingly, the modern prison emerges from Foucault's analysis as a morally questionable public institution. Had Foucault examined the other term of his title and even had he done so in terms provided by his bete noire, Jeremy Bentham, he would have discovered that a good deal of effort was expended to justify the punishment concepts that were incorporated in the prison. The prison, which in any case was not “born” when and how Foucault says it was, emerges as a more complex social and political institution than Foucault makes it out to be. It is also less morally questionable than he claims. This article is an extensive critique of one of the more important arguments about the modern prison produced in this century.