Foucault's View example essay topic

As if writing a trailer for a bad slasher movie, Michel Foucault opens his treatise on punishment with a gruesome account of the apparently inhumane execution of the regicide D amiens in 1757. I say "apparently inhumane" because Foucault appears to believe that elimination of death by torture in favor of incarceration is no improvement. Although Mr. Foucault's very complex book discusses "reforms" in punishment systems beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it is evident that he attacks the present-day descendants. Furthermore, he uses his treatment of penal institutions as a means to draw the reader into his criticisms of other (or perhaps all) societal institutions. In doing so, Foucault is not pleased. As someone with a legal background and a past participant in the military criminal justice system, I found most interesting Foucault's demonstration of the reversal of roles of the two sides of the judicial procedure, trial and sentence.

In the ancien regime, trial (and the methods of interrogation and proof) was a private matter for the judges and did not require the presence of the accused. However, the punishment was a public spectacle and meant very much for the education and terrorization of the audience. The power of the King was arrayed against the body of the offender (rehabilitation of the offender's character clearly being not a consideration). Therefore, executors achieved ever greater damage and humiliation on the body. The result was a political as well as a judicial victory. Not only was the victory final, it was immediate and dramatic.

Truth was made real. The King received his pound (s) of flesh. With the coming of the "reformers", the tactic became the attack upon the "soul". Trial became more open, while punishment gradually moved behind walls.

The motive for this transformation was not necessarily humanitarian. The motive was control. Instead, the antecedents of today's social scientists made war on the offenders' minds. Not only were the convicts incarcerated, they were isolated, regimented, continually watched, made docile and "normalized". In this "history", there is no great man. Instead there is a theoretical institution, Bentham's Panopitcon, a perfect surveillance structure.

Many living commentators would agree with Foucault that the prison system does not work, that criminals merely are recycled into greater society. However, they may not be convinced, nor am I, that the prison system is designed to support a criminal justice apparatus, including the police, or that it is the genesis of social and medical specialties. Even less convincing is Foucault's view that this mind control is spread throughout society via factories, asylums, schools, barracks, and hospitals. Orwell's 1984 immediately materializes in which everyone is monitored everywhere by tele screens. He would see proof of his theory in today's homeland security program. From personal experience, I can confirm that the quality of the United States Armed Forces is not a product of mind control.

Instead soldiers are required to make hard decisions in adverse and unexpected circumstances. Perhaps automaton ism is a problem in the army of Foucault's France. Discipline & Punish provides valuable information about the development of prisons. Unfortunately, it is difficult to determine where Foucault's research ends and his opinion begins. His assignment, of new meanings to words (discipline, surveillance, genealogy, power), frequently without explanation, detracts from his message. His pessimistic view that a few hours on the butcher's block in eighteenth Century France is preferable to a slow "mental death" in the prison system has no shelf appeal.

Nor does Foucault see a pleasant future. He sees no progress or evolution in humankind's journey. His glass was empty. He is Sisyphus with his rock. The contrast in punishment modes is useful.

His interpretation is less so..