Crime and Punishment

By George Russell

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: THE BIRTH OF THE PRISON by Michel Foucault; translated by Alan Sheridan Pantheon; 333 pages; $10.95

Michel Foucault is one of those rare intellectual cult figures whose impact is easier to acknowledge than to assess. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, he is highly regarded in the narrowest of academic circles. This, the sixth translated volume of Foucault's work, reaffirms his meditative brilliance--and Delphic obscurity. As always, Foucault, 51, ransacks history for prefigurations of contemporary power and knowledge. Discipline and Punish analyzes the institution of incarceration as it burgeoned in 19th century Europe and America. Why this sudden, universal appearance? Foucault's answer: to meet the needs of a new, relentlessly scrutinizing "disciplinary" society.

Until the mid-18th century, criminals were disemboweled and beaten in a ghastly revenge drama. In his own dissection Foucault shows how torture originated in feudal society: "Its ruthlessness, its spectacle ... its entire apparatus were inscribed in the political functioning of the penal system." Then, within 40 years (1769-1810), Western reformers over threw the penal catechism. An "art of un bearable sensations" gave way to "an economy of suspended rights." But Foucault argues that the real aim of the change was "not to punish less, but to punish better ... to insert the power to pun ish more deeply into the social body."

According to the author, this modern view of punishment arose from the Enlightenment. Its basis lay in the principles of individual regulation and social organization. New technologies were absorbed into the modern prison of cellular, open tiers and central observation towers. Such prisons became "a privileged place for experiments on men . . ." With in the jails, a new theoretical being was conceived: the correctable "delinquent," unceasingly probed by "civil servants of moral orthopaedics."

Criticisms of the 18th and 19th cen tury prisons arose simultaneously with the system, and on the same terms as today: incarceration does not cure, it reinforces delinquency, it "professionalizes" crime.

Observes the author: "After a century and a half of 'failures,' the prison still exists, producing the same results, and there is the greatest reluctance to dispense with it ... Is not the supposed failure part of the functioning of the prison?" After such original investigations, Foucault's question should be rhetorical. Any possible answer is as haunting as the book and as problematic as crime and punishment themselves.

--George Russell

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