Discipline and punish : the birth of the prison /

i. Complete and austere institutions

Michel Foucault; New York: Vintage Books,
1977. (231-256 p.)

It would not be true to say that the prison was born with the new
codes. The prison form antedates its systematic use in the penal
system. It had already been constituted outside the legal apparatus
when, throughout the social body, procedures were being elaborated
for distributing individuals, fixing them in space, classifying them,
extracting from them die maximum in time and forces, training their
bodies, coding their continuous behaviour, maintaining them in
perfect visibility, forming around them an apparatus of observation,
registration and recording, constituting on them a body of know-
ledge that is accumulated and centralized. The general form of an
apparatus intended to render individuals docile and useful, by means
of precise work upon their bodies, indicated the prison institution,
before the law ever defined it as die penalty par excellence. At the
turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was, it is true^
a penality of detention; and it was a new thing. But it was really the
opening up of penality to mechanisms of coercion already elaborated
elsewhere. The 'models' of penal detention - Ghent, Gloucester,
Walnut Street - marked the first visible points of diis transition,
rather than innovations or points of departure. The prison, an
essential element in the punitive panopoly, certainly marks an import-
ant moment in the history of penal justice: its access to 'humanity'.
But it is also an important moment in die history of those disci-
plinary mechanisms that the new class power was developing: that
in which they colonized the legal institution. At die turn of the
century, a new legislation defined die power to punish as a general
function of society that was exercised in the same manner over all its
members, and in which each individual was equally represented: but
in making detention the penalty par excellence, it introduced proce-
dures of domination characteristic of a particular type of power. A
 Prison Complete and austere institutions

justice that is supposed to be 'equal', a legal machinery that is punishments, though contrary to the strict theory of penal law,
supposed to be 'autonomous', but which contains all the asymmetries that one is in prison in order to 'pay one's debt*. The prison is
of disciplinary subjection, this conjunction marked the birth of the 'natural', just as the use of time to measure exchanges is 'natural1
prison, 'the penalty of civilized societies' (Rossi, 169). in our society.1
One can understand the self-evident character that prison punish- But the self-evidence of the prison is also based on its role,
ment very soon assumed. In the first years of the nineteenth century, supposed or demanded, as an apparatus for transforming individuals.
people were still aware of its novelty; and yet it appeared so bound How could the prison not be immediately accepted when, by locking
up and at such a deep level with the very functioning of soci- up, retraining and rendering docile, it merely reproduces, with a
ety that it banished into oblivion all the other punishments that little more emphasis, all the mechanisms that are to be found in the
the eighteenth-century reformers had imagined. It seemed to have social body? The prison is like a rather disciplined barracks, a strict
no alternative, as if carried along by the very movement of history: school, a dark workshop, but not qualitatively different. This double
'It is not chance, it is not the whim of the legislator that have made foundation - juridico-economic on the one hand, technico-disciplin-
imprisonment the base and almost the entire edifice of our present ary on the other - made the prison seem the most immediate and
pertal scale: it is the progress of ideas and the improvement in civilized form of all penalties. And it is this double functioning that
morals' (Van Meenan, 529-30). And, although, in a little over a immediately gave it its solidity. One thing is clear: the prison was
century, mis self-evident character has become transformed, it has not at first a deprivation of liberty to which a technical function of
not disappeared. We are aware of all the inconveniences of prison, correction was later added; it was from the outset a form of 'legal
and that it is dangerous when it is not useless. And yet one cannot detention' entrusted with an additional corrective task, or an enter-
'see' how to replace it. It is the detestable solution, which one seems prise for reforming individuals that the deprivation of liberty
unable to do without. allowed to function in the legal system. In short, penal imprison-
This 'self-evident' character of the prison, which we find so diffi- ment, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, covered both
cult to abandon, is based first of all on the simple form of 'depriva- the deprivation of liberty and the technical transformation of
tion of liberty'. How could prison not be the penalty par excellence individuals.
in a society in which liberty is a good that belongs to all in the same Let us remember a number of facts. In the codes of 1808 and 7810,
way and to which each individual is attached, as Duport put it, by and the measures that immediately preceded or followed them,
a 'universal and constant' feeling? Its loss has therefore the same imprisonment was never confused widi mere deprivation of liberty.
value for all; unlike the fine, it is an 'egalitarian' punishment. The It was, or in any case had to be, a differentiated and finalized mechan-
prison is the clearest, simplest, most equitable of penalties. More- ism. Differentiated because it had to have the same form, whether
over, it makes it possible to quantify the penalty exactly according the prisoner had been sentenced or was merely accused, whether he
to the variable of lime. There is a wages-form of imprisonment that was a minor offender or a criminal: the various types of prison -
constitutes, in industrial societies, its economic 'self-evidence' - and maison d'arret, maison dt correction^ maison centrale — ought in
enables it to appear as a reparation. By levying on the time of the principle to correspond more or less to these differences and provide
prisoner, the prison seems to express in concrete terms the idea that a punishment that would be not only graduated in intensity, but
the offence has injured, beyond the victim, society as a whole. There diversified in its ends. For the prison has a purpose, which is laid
is an economico-moral self-evidence of a penality that metes out down at the outset: 'The law inflicting penalties, some of which are
punishments in days, months and years and draws up quantitative more serious than others, cannot allow the individual condemned
equivalences between offences and durations. Hence the express- to light penalties to he imprisoned in the same place as the criminal
ion, so frequently heard, so consistent with the functioning of condemned to more serious penalties . . . although the penalty fixed

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•s.

by the law has as its principal aim the reparation of the crime, it also instructions or laws: from the reform that the first Restoration had
desires the amendment of the guilty man' (Real, 244). And this envisaged in September 1814, and which was never implemented, to
transformation must be one of the internal effects of imprisonment. the law of 1844, drawn up by Tocqueville, which ended for a time
Prison-punishment, prison-apparatus: 'The order that must reign in the long debate on the means of making imprisonment effective.
the maison de force may contribute powerfully to the regeneration There were programmes drawn up to improve the functioning of
of the convicts; the vices of upbringing, the contagion of bad the machine-prison:8 programmes for the treatment of the prisoners,
example, idleness . . . have given birth to crime. Well, let us try to models for material improvement, some of these, like those of
close up all these sources of corruption; let the rules of a healthy Danjou and Harou-Romain, remaining no more than projects,
morality be practised in the maisons deforce; that, compelled to work, others becoming embodied in instructions (like the circular of 9
convicts may come in the end to like it; when they have reaped the August 1841 on the building of maisons d'arret), others becoming
reward, they will acquire the habit, the taste, the need for occupa- actual buildings, such as the Petite Roquette in which cellular
tion; let them give each other the example of a laborious life; it will imprisonment was organized for the first time in France.
soon become a pure life; soon they will begin to know regret for the To these should be added the publications that sprang more or
past, the first harbinger of a love of duty.' 2 The techniques of cor- less directly from the prison and were drawn up either by philan-
rection immediately form part of the institutional framework of thropists like Appert, or a little later by 'specialists' (such as the
penal detention. Annales de la Charit£)K or, again, by former prisoners; Pauvre
One should also recall that the movement for reforming the pri- Jacques at the end of the Restoration, or the Gazette de Sainte-
sons, for controlling their functioning is not a recent phenomenon. Pilagie at the beginning of the July monarchy.5
It does not even seem to have originated in a recognition of failure. The prison should not be seen as an inert institution, shaken at
Prison 'reform' is virtually contemporary with the prison itself: it intervals by reform movements. The 'theory of the prison' was its
constitutes, as it were, its programme. From the outset, the prison constant set of operational instructions rather than its incidental
was caught up in a series of accompanying mechanisms, whose criticism — one of its conditions of functioning. The prison has
purpose was apparently to correct it, but which seem to form part always formed part of an active field in which projects, improve-
of its very functioning, so closely have they been bound up with its ments, experiments, theoretical statements, personal evidence and
existence throughout its long history. There was, at once, a prolix investigations have proliferated. The prison institution has always
technology of the prison. There were inquiries: that of Chaptal in been a focus of concern and debate. Is the prison still, then, a dark,
1801 (whose task it was to discover what could be used to introduce abandoned region? Is the fact that one has ceased to say so for
the modern prison system into France), that of Decazes in 1819, almost 200 years sufficient proof that it is not? In becoming a legal
Villerme's work published in 1820, the report on the maisons cen- punishment, it weighted the old juridico-political question of the
trales drawn up by Martignac in 1829, the inquiries carried out in right to punish with all the problems, all the agitations that have
the United States by Beaumont and Tocqueville in 1831, by Demetz surrounded the corrective technologies of the individual.
and Blouet in 1835, the questionnaires addressed by Montalivet to
the directors of the maisons centrales and to the general councils of Baltard called them 'complete and austere institutions' (Baltard,
the dipartements during the debate on solitary confinement. There 1829). In several respects, the prison must be an exhaustive disciplin-
were societies for supervising the functioning of the prisons and for ary apparatus: it must assume responsibility for all aspects of the
suggesting improvements: in 1818, the very official Societi pour individual, his physical training, his aptitude to work, his everyday
I'amelioration des prisons, a little later the Sociite des prisons and
conduct, his moral attitude, his state of mind; the prison, much more
various philanthropic groups. Innumerable measures — orders,
than the school, the workshop or the army, which always involved a

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certain specialization, is 'omni-disciplinary'. Moreover, the prison should form from the malefactors that it gathers together a homo-
has neither exterior nor gap; it cannot be interrupted, except when geneous and interdependent population: 'There exists at this moment
its task is totally completed; its action on the individual must be among us an organized society of criminals — They form a small
uninterrupted: an unceasing discipline. Lastly, it gives almost total nation within the greater. Almost all these men met or meet again
power over the prisoners; it has its internal mechanisms of repression in prison. We must now disperse the members of this society'
and punishment: a despotic discipline. It carries to their greatest (Tocqueville, Rapport a la Chambre des Diputis, quoted in Beau-
intensity all the procedures to be found in the other disciplinary mont and Tocqueville, 392-3). Moreover, through the reflection
mechanisms. It must be the most powerful machinery for imposing that it gives rise to and the remorse that cannot fail to follow,
a new form on the perverted individual; its mode of action is the solitude must be a positive instrument of reform: 'Thrown into
constraint of a total education: 'In prison the government may solitude, the convict reflects. Placed alone in the presence of his
dispose of the liberty of the person and of the time of the prisoner; crime, he learns to hate it, and, if his soul is not yet blunted by evil,
from then on, one can imagine the power of the education which, it is in isolation that remorse will come to assail him' (Beaumont and
not only in a day, but in the succession of days and even years, may Tocqueville, 109). Through the fact, too, that solitude assures a
regulate for man the time of waking and sleeping, of activity and rest, sort of self-regulation of the penalty and makes possible a spontane-
the number and duration of meals, the quality and ration of food, ous individualization of the punishment: the more the convict is
the nature and product of labour, the time of prayer, the use of capable of reflecting, the more capable he was of committing his
speech and even, so to speak, that of thought, that education which, crime; but, also, the more lively his remorse, the more painful his
in the short, simple journeys from refectory to workshop, from solitude; on the other hand, when he has profoundly repented and
workshop to the cell, regulates the movements of the body, and even made amends without the least dissimulation, solitude will no longer
in moments of rest, determines the use of time, the time-table, this weigh upon him: 'Thus, according to this admirable discipline, each
education, which, in short, takes possession of man as a whole, of intelligence and each morality bears within itself the principle and
all the physical and moral faculties that are in him and of the time measure of a punishment whose error and human fallibility cannot
in which he is himself (Lucas, II, 123-4). This complete 'reforma- alter the certainty and invariable equity . . . Is it not in truth like
tory' lays down a recoding of existence very different from the mere the seal of a divine and providential justice?' (Aylies, 132-3). Lastly,
juridical deprivation of liberty and very different, too, from the and perhaps above all, the isolation of the convicts guarantees that
simple mechanism of exempla imagined by the reformers at the time it is possible to exercise over them, with maximum intensity, a
of the idiologues. power that will not be overthrown by any other influence; solitude
1. The first principle was isolation. The isolation of the convict is the primary condition of total submission: 'Just imagine,' said
from the external world, from everything that motivated the offence, Charles Lucas, referring to the role of the governor, the instructor,
from the complicities that facilitated it. The isolation of the prisoners the chaplain and other 'charitable persons' as regards the isolated
from one another. Not only must the penalty be individual, but it convict, 'just imagine the power of human speech intervening in
must also be individualizing - in two ways. First, the prison must be the midst of the terrible discipline of silence to speak to the heart,
designed in such a way as to efface of itself the harmful consequences to the soul, to the human person' (Lucas, 1,167). Isolation provides
to which it gives rise in gathering together very different convicts an intimate exchange between the convict and the power that is
in the same place: to stifle plots and revolts, to prevent the formation exercised over him.
of future complicities that may give rise to blackmail (when the It is at this point that the debate on the two American systems of
convicts are once again at liberty), to form an obstacle to the im- imprisonment, that of Auburn and that of Philadelphia, was situated.
morality of so many 'mysterious associations'. In short, the prison In fact, this debate, which was so wide-ranging and long drawn out,*

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concerned only the way in which isolation should be used, it being ficial training; a change of 'morality', rather than of attitude. In the
accepted by all. Pennsylvanian prison, the only operations of correction were the
The Auburn model prescribed the individual cell during the conscience and the silent architecture that confronted it. At Cherry
night, work and meals in common, but under the rule of absolute Hill, 'the walls are the punishment of the crime; the cell confronts
silence, the convicts being allowed to speak only to the warders, the convict with himself; he is forced to listen to his conscience*.
with their permission and in a low voice. It was a clear reference to Hence work there is more in the nature of a consolation than an
the monastic model; a reference, too, to the discipline of the work- obligation; supervisors do not have to exert force - this is assured
shop. The prison must be the microcosm of a perfect society in by the materiality of things - and consequently, their authority may
which individuals are isolated in their moral existence, but in which be accepted: 'At each visit, a few benevolent words flow from this
they come together in a strict hierarchical framework, with no honest mouth and bring to the heart of the inmate gratitude, hope
lateral relation, communication being possible only in a vertical and consolation; he loves his warder; and he loves him because he
direction. The advantage of the Auburnian system, according to its is gentle and sympathetic. Walls are terrible, but man is good'
advocates, was that it formed a duplication of society itself. Con- (Blouet). In this closed cell, this temporary sepulchre, the myths of
straint was assured by material means, but above all by a rule that resurrection arise easily enough. After night and silence, the regener-
one had to learn to respect and which was guaranteed by surveillance ated life. Auburn was society itself reduced to its bare essentials.
and punishment. Rather than keep the convicts 'under lock and key Cherry Hill was life annihilated and begun again. Catholicism soon
like wild beasts in their cages', they must be brought together, absorbed this Quaker technique into its discourses. 'I see your cell
'made to join together in useful exercises, forced together to adopt as no more than a frightful sepulchre where, instead of worms,
good habits, preventing moral contagion by active surveillance, remorse and despair come to gnaw at you and to turn your existence
maintaining reflection by the rule of silence'; this rule accustoms the into a hell in anticipation. B u t . . . what is for an irreligious prisoner
convict 'to regard the law as a sacred precept whose violation brings merely a tomb, a repulsive ossuary, becomes, for the sincerely
just and legitimate harm' (Mittermaier, in Revuefranqaise et itrangere Christian convict, the very cradle of blessed immortality.'8
tUligislation, 1836). Thus this operation of isolation, assembly A whole series of different conflicts stemmed from the opposition
without communication and law guaranteed by Uninterrupted between these two models: religious (must conversion be the princi-
supervision, must rehabilitate the criminal as a social individual: it pal element of correction?), medical (does total isolation drive
trains him to a 'useful and resigned activity' (Gasparin); it restores convicts insane?), economic (which method costs less?), architec-
for him 'habits of sociability' (Beaumont and Tocqueville, 112). tural and administrative (which form guarantees the best surveil-
In absolute isolation - as at Philadelphia - the rehabilitation of lance?). This, no doubt, was why the argument lasted so long. But,
the criminal is expected not of the application of a common law, at the heart of the debate, and making it possible, was this primary
but of the relation of the individual to his own conscience and to objective of carceral action: coercive individualization, by the
what may enlighten him from within.7 'Alone in his cell, the convict termination of any relation that is not supervised by authority or
is handed over to himself; in the silence of his passions and of the arranged according to hierarchy.
world that surrounds him, he descends into his conscience, he 2. 'Work alternating with meals accompanies the convict to
questions it and feels awakening within him the moral feeling that evening prayer; then a new sleep gives him an agreeable rest that is
never entirely perishes in the heart of man' {Journal des iconomistes, not disturbed by the phantoms of an unregulated imagination. Thus
II, 1842). It is not, therefore, an external respect for the law or fear the six weekdays pass by. They are followed by a day devoted
of punishment alone that will act upon the convict but the workings exclusively to prayer, instruction and salutary meditations. Thus
of the conscience itself. A profound submission, rather than a super- the weeks, the months, the years follow one another; thus the

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prisoner who, on entering the establishment, was an inconstant 285). There were strikes against the prison workshops: when a
man, or one who was single-minded only in his irregularity, seeking Chaumont glove-maker succeeded in organizing a workshop at
to destroy his existence by the variety of his vices, gradually becomes Clairvaux, the workers protested, declared that their labour was
by dint of a habit that is at first purely external, but is soon trans- dishonoured, occupied the manufactory and forced the employer to
formed into a second nature, so familiar with work and the pleasures abandon his project (cf. Aguet, 30-31). There was also a widespread
that derive from it, that, provided wise instruction has opened up press campaign in the workers' newspapers: on the theme that the
his soul to repentance, he may be exposed with more confidence to government encouraged penal labour in order to reduce 'free' wages;
temptations, when he finally recovers his liberty' (Julius, 417-18). on the theme that the inconveniences of these prison workshops
Work is defined, with isolation, as an agent of carceral transforma- were even more evident for women, who were thus deprived of their
tion. This is to be found as early as the code of 1808: 'Although the labour, driven to prostitution and therefore to prison, where these
penalty inflicted by the law has as its aim the reparation of a crime, same women, who could no longer work when they were free, then
it is also intended to reform the convict, and this double aim will competed with those who were still at work {L Atelier, 3rd year,
be fulfilled if the malefactor is snatched from that fatal idleness no. 4, December 1842); on the theme that prisoners were given the
which, having brought him to prison, meets him again within its safest jobs - 'in warm and sheltered conditions thieves execute the
walls and, seizing hold of him, brings him to the ultimate degree of work of hat-making and cabinet-making', while the unemployed
depravity.'9 Work is neither an addition nor a corrective to the hatter is forced to go 'to the human slaughter-house to make white-
regime of detention: whether it is a question of forced labour, lead at two francs a day' (L'Atelier, 6th year, no. 2, November 1845);
reclusion or imprisonment, it is conceived, by the legislator himself, on the theme that philanthropy is more concerned about the work-
as necessarily accompanying it. But the necessity involved is pre- ing conditions of prisoners than those of free workers: 'We are sure
cisely not the necessity of which the eighteenth-century reformers that if prisoners worked with mercury, for example, science would
spoke, when they wished to make imprisonment either an example be a great deal more ready than it is to find ways of protecting the
for the public or a useful reparation for society. In the carceral workers from the dangers of its fumes: "Those poor convicts?"
regime, the link between work and punishment is of another type. someone would exclaim, who scarcely has a word for the gilders.
Several polemics that took place under the Restoration and the But what can you expect? One has to have killed or robbed to
July Monarchy throw light on the function attributed to penal arouse compassion or interest.' On the theme above all that, if the
labour. First, there was the debate on the subject of wages. The prison was tending to become a workshop, it would not be long
labour of prisoners was remunerated in France. This posed a prob- before beggars and the unemployed were sent there, thus reconsti-
lem: if work in prison is remunerated, that work cannot really form tuting the old hdpitaux giniraux of France or the workhouses of
part of the penalty; and the prisoner may therefore refuse to perform England. In addition, there were petitions and letters, especially
it. Moreover, wages reward the skill of the worker and not the after the law of 1844 - one petition, rejected by the Chambre de
improvement of the convict: 'The worst subjects are almost every- Paris, 'found inhuman that one should propose to apply murderers
where the most skilful workers; they are the most highly remuner- and thieves to work that is today the lot of a few thousand workers';
ated, consequently the most intemperate and least ready to repent' 'the Chambre preferred Barrabas to us' (L'Atelier, 4th year, no. 9,
(Marquet-Wasselot, quoted in Lucas, 324). The debate, which had June 1844 and 5th year, no. 7, April 1845; cf. also, of the same
never quite died down, was resumed with great liveliness in the period, La Ddmocratie pacifique); typographical workers sent a
early 1840s: it was a period of economic crisis, a period of workers' letter to the minister when they learnt that a printing-works was to
agitation and a period, too, in which the opposition between the Be* set up in the* prison at Melun: 'You have decided between
worker and the delinquent was beginning to crystallize (cf. below, reprobates justly punished by the law and citizens who sacrifice

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their days, in abstinence and probity, to the lives of their families and only a 'pair of arms for any good work', one can live only 'from
to the wealth of their nation' {L'Atelier, 5 th year, no. 6, March 1845). the product of one's labour, through the practice of a profession or
The answers given by the government and the administration to from the product of the labour of others, by thieving'; but, although
this whole campaign changed very little. Penal labour cannot be the prison did not force offenders to work, it seems to have reintro-
criticized for any unemployment it may give rise to: with its limited duced into its very institution and, obliquely, by means of taxation,
extent, and its low output, it cannot have a general effect on the this levying by some on the labour of others: 'The question of
economy. It is intrinsically useful, not as an activity of production, idleness is the same as in society; it is from the labour of others that
but by virtue of the effect it has on the human mechanism. It is a the convicts live, if they do not exist from their own labour' (Lucasj
principle of order and regularity; through the demands that it II, 313-14). The labour by which the convict contributes to his
imposes, it conveys, imperceptibly, the forms of a rigorous power; own needs turns the thief into a docile worker. This is the utility
it bends bodies to regular movements, it excludes agitation and of remuneration for penal labour; it imposes on the convict the
distraction, it imposes a hierarchy and a surveillance that are all the 'moral' form of wages as the condition of his existence. Wages
more accepted, and which will be inscribed all the more deeply in inculcate the 'love and habit' of work (Lucas, II, 243); they give
the behaviour of the convicts, in that they form part of its logic: those malefactors who do not know the difference between mine
with work 'the rule is introduced into a prison, it reigns there with- and thine a sense of property - of 'what one has earned by the sweat
out effort, without the use of any repressive and violent means. of one's brow' (Danjou, 210-11; cf. also L'Atelier, 6th year, no. 2,
By occupying the convict, one gives him habits of order and obedi- November 1845); they also teach those who have lived in dissipa-
ence; one makes the idler that he was diligent and active . . . with tion the virtues of thrift and foresight (Lucas; a third of the prisoner's
time, he finds in the regular movement of the prison, in the manual daily wages was set aside for the day when he left the prison); lastly,
labours to which he is subjected . . . a certain remedy against the by proposing a quantity of work to be carried out, they make it
wanderings of his imagination' (Berenger). Penal labour must be possible to express quantitatively the convict's zeal and the progress
seen as the very machinery that transforms the violent, agitated, of his improvement (Ducp&iaux, 30-31). The wages of penal labour
unreflective convict into a part that plays its role with perfect do not reward production; they function as a motive and measure
regularity. The prison is not a workshop; it is, it must be of itself, of individual transformation: it is a legal fiction, since it does not
a machine whose convict-workers are both the cogs and the pro- represent the 'free' granting of labour power, but an artifice that
ducts; it 'occupies them continually, with the sole aim of filling their is presumed to be effective in the techniques of correction.
moments. When the body is agitated, when the mind applies itself What, then, is the use of penal labour? Not profit; nor even the
to a particular object, importunate ideas depart, calm is born once formation of a useful skill; but the constitution of a power relation,
again in the soul' (Danjou, 180). If, in the final analysis, the work of an empty economic form, a schema of individual submission and of
the prison has an economic effect, it is by producing individuals adjustment to a production apparatus.
mechanized according to the general norms of an industrial society: The perfect image of prison labour was the women's workshop
'Work is the providence of the modern peoples; it replaces morality, at Clairvaux; the silent precision of the human machinery is reminis-
fills the gap left by beliefs and is regarded as the principle of all good. cent of the regulated rigour of the convent: 'On a throne, above
Work must be the religion of the prisons. For a machine-society, which is a crucifix, a sister is sitting; before her, arranged in two
purely mechanical means of reform are required' (Faucher, 64; in rows, the prisoners are carrying out the task imposed on them, and,
England the 'treadmill' and the pump provided a disciplinary as needlework accounts for almost all the work, the strictest silence
mechanization of the inmates, with no end product). The making is constantly maintained. . . It seems that, in these halls, the very
of machine-men, but also of proletarians; in effect, when one has air breathes penitence and expiation. One is carried back, as by a

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spontaneous movement, to the time of the venerable habits of this its circumstances, but also according to the penalty itself as it takes
ancient place, one remembers those voluntary penitents who shut place in actual fact. This amounts to saying that, although the
themselves up here in order to say farewell to the world'. Compare penalty must be individualized, it is so not on the basis of the
this with the following; 'Go into a cotton-mill; listen to the con- individual-offender, the juridical subject of his act, the responsible
versations of the workers and the whistling of the machines. Is there author of the offence, but on the basis of the individual punished,
any contrast in the world more afflicting than the regularity and the object of a supervised transformation, the individual in detention
predictability of these mechanical movements, compared with the inserted in the prison apparatus, modified by it or reacting to it. 'It
disorder of ideas and morals, produced by the contact of so many is a question only of reforming the evil-doer. Once this reform has
men, women and children' (Faucher 20). come about, the criminal must return to society' (C. Lucas, quoted
3. But prison goes beyond the mere privation of liberty in a in the Gcqette des tribunaux, 6 April 1837).
more important way. It becomes increasingly an instrument for the The quality and content of detention should no longer be deter-
modulation of the penalty; an apparatus which, through the execu- mined by the nature of the offence alone. The juridical gravity of a
tion of the sentence with which it is entrusted, seems to have the crime does not at all have the value of a univocal sign for the
right, in part at least, to assume its principle. Of course, the prison character of the convict, whether or not he is capable of reform. In
institution was not given this 'right' in the nineteenth century or particular the crime-offence distinction, which the penal code
even in the twentieth, except in a fragmentary form (through the recognized in drawing the corresponding distinction between mere
oblique way of release on licence, semi-release, the organization of imprisonment and imprisonment with hard labour, is not opera-
reformatories). But it should be noted that it was claimed very tional in terms of reform. This was the almost universal opinion
early on by those responsible for prison administration, as the very expressed by the directors of the maisons centrales, during an inquiry
condition of the good functioning of a prison, and of its efficiency carried out by the ministry in 1836: 'The minor offenders are gener-
in the task of reformation that the law itself had given it. ally the most vicious. . . Among the criminals, one meets many
The same goes for the duration of the punishment; it makes it men who have given in to the violence of their passions and to the
possible to quantify the penalties exactly, to graduate them accord- needs of a large family.' 'The behaviour of criminals is much better
ing to circumstances and to give to legal punishment the more or less than that of the minor offenders; the former are more submissive,
explicit form of wages; but it also runs the risk of having no correc- harder-working than the latter, who, in general, are pickpockets,
tive value, if it is fixed once and for all in the sentence. The length debauchees and idlers.'11 Hence the idea that punitive rigour must
of the penalty must not be a measurement of the 'exchange value' not be in direct proportion to the penal importance of the offence -
of the offence; it must be adjusted to the 'useful' transformation of nor determined once and for all.
the inmate during his term of imprisonment. It is not a time- As an operation of correction, imprisonment has its own require-
measure, but a time finalized. The form of the operation, rather ments and dangers. It is its effects that must determine its stages, its
than the form of the wages. 'Just as the prudent physician ends his temporary increases, its successive reductions, in severity; what
medication or continues it according to whether the patient has Charles Lucas called the 'mobile classification of moralities'. The
or has not arrived at a perfect cure, so, in the first of these two progressive system applied at Geneva since 1825 was often advo-
hypotheses, expiation ought to end with the complete reform of the cated in France (Fresnel, 29-31). It took the form, for example, of
prisoner; for, in this case, all detention has become useless, and from three areas: a trial area for prisoners in general, a punishment area
then on as inhuman to the reformed individual as it is vainly burden- and a reward area for those who had embarked on the way of reform
some for the State.'10 The correct duration of the penalty must be (Lucas, n,v44o). Or it » o k the form of four phases: a period of
calculated, therefore, not only according to the particular crime and intimidation (deprivation of work and of any internal or external

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relations); a period of work (isolation, but work which, after the complaint' (Bonneville, 5). All this 'arbitrariness' which, in the
phase of forced idleness, would be welcomed as a benefit); a regime old penal system, enabled the judges to modulate the penalty
of moralization (more or less frequent 'lectures' from the directors and die princes to ignore it if they so wished, all this arbitrariness,
and official visitors); a period of work in common (Duras). Although which the modern codes have withdrawn from the judicial power,
the principle of the penalty was certainly a legal decision, its has been gradually reconstituted on the side of the power that
administration, its quality and its rigours must belong to an autono- administers and supervises punishment. It is the sovereignty of
mous mechanism that supervises the effects of punishment within the knowledge possessed by the warder: 'He is a veritable magistrate
very apparatus that produces them. A whole regime of punishments called upon to reign as sovereign in the prison... who, in order not
and rewards that is a way not simply of gaining respect for the prison to fall short in his mission, must combine the most eminent virtue
regulations, but of making the action of the prison on the inmates with a profound knowledge of mankind' (Berenger).
effective. The legal authority itself came to accept this: 'One should
And so we arrive at a principle, clearly formulated by Charles
not be surprised, said the supreme court of appeal, when consulted
Lucas, which, although it marks the virtual beginning of modern
on the subject of a bill concerning the prisons, at the idea of granting
penal functioning, very few jurists would dare to accept today
rewards, which might consist either for the most part in money, or
without some hesitation; let us call it the Declaration of Carceral
in a better diet, or even in a reduction of the duration of the penalty.
Independence - in it is claimed the right to be a power that not only
If anything can awaken in the minds of convicts the notions of good
possesses administrative autonomy, but is also a part of punitive
and evil, bring them to moral reflections and raise them to some
sovereignty. This affirmation of the rights of the prison posits as a
extent in their own eyes, it is the possibility of obtaining some
principle: that criminal judgement is an arbitrary unity; that it must
reward' (Lucas, II, 441-2).
be broken down; that the writers of the penal codes were correctin
And it must be admitted that the legal authorities can have no distinguishing the legislative level (which classifies the acts and attri-
immediate control over all these procedures that rectify the penalty butes penalties to them) and the judicial level (which passes the
as it proceeds. It is a question, in effect, of measures that by sentences); that the task today is to analyse in turn this later judicial
definition can intervene only after the sentence and can bear only on level; that one should distinguish in it what is properly judicial
something other than the offences. Those who administer detention (assess not so much acts as agents, measure 'the intentionalities that
must therefore have an indispensable autonomy, when it comes to give human acts so many different moralities', and therefore rectify
the question of individualizing and varying the application of the if it can the assessments of die legislator); and to give autonomy to
penalty: supervisors, a prison governor, a chaplain or an instructor 'penitentiary judgement', which is perhaps the most important; in
are more capable of exercising this corrective function than those relation to it the assessment of the court is merely a 'way of pj»-
who hold the penal power. It is their judgement (understood as judging9, for die morality of the agent can be assessed 'only when
observation, diagnosis, characterization, information, differential put to the test. The judge, therefore, requires in turn a compulsory
classification) and not a verdict in the form of an attribution of guilt, and rectifying supervision of his assessments; and this supervision
that must serve as a support for this internal modulation of the is that provided by the penitentiary prison' (Lucas, II, 418-22).
penalty - for its mitigation or even its interruption. When in 1846, One may speak, therefore, of an excess or a series of excesses on
Bonneville presented his project of release on licence, he defined it the part of imprisonment in terms of legal detention - of the 'car-
as 'the right of the administration, with the previous approval of the ceral' in relation to the 'judicial'. Now this excess was observed very
legal authority, to place in temporary liberty, after a sufficient period early on, from the,very birth of the prison, either in the form of real
of expiation, the completely reformed convict, on condition that he practices, or in the form of projects. It did not come later, as a
will be brought back into prison on the slightest well-founded secondary effect. The great carceral machinery was bound up with

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the very functioning of the prison. The sign of this autonomy is whole of penal justice and to imprison the judges themselves, it was
very apparent in the 'useless' acts of violence perpetrated by warders because it was able to introduce criminal justice into relations of
or in the despotism of an administration that has all the privileges of knowledge that have since become its infinite labyrinth.
an enclosed community. Its roots lie elsewhere: precisely in the fact The prison, the place where the penalty is carried out, is also the
that the prison is required to be 'useful', that the deprivation of place of observation of punished individuals. This takes two forms:
liberty - that juridical levying on an ideal property - must, from surveillance, of course, but also knowledge of each inmate, of his
the outset, have exercised a positive technical role, operating trans- behaviour, his deeper states of mind, his gradual improvement; the
formations on individuals. And, for this operation, the carceral prisons must be conceived as places for the formation of clinical
apparatus has recourse to three great schemata: the politico-moral knowledge about the convicts; 'the penitentiary system cannot be
schema of individual isolation and hierarchy; the economic model an a priori conception; it is an induction of the social state. There are
of force applied to compulsory work; the technico-medical model moral diseases, as well as breakdowns in health, where the treatment
of cure and normalization. The cell, the workshop, the hospital. depends on the site and direction of the illness' (Faucher, 6). This
The margin by which the prison exceeds detention is filled in fact involves two essential mechanisms. It must be possible to hold the
by techniques of a disciplinary type. And this disciplinary addition prisoner under permanent observation; every report that can be
to the juridical is what, in short, is called the 'penitentiary'. made about him must be recorded and computed. The theme of the
Panopticon - at once surveillance and observation, security and
This addition was not accepted easily. To begin with, there was knowledge, individualization and totalization, isolation and trans-
the question of principle: the penalty must be nothing more than parency - found in the prison its privileged locus of realization.
the deprivation of liberty; like our present rulers, but with all the Although the panoptic procedures, as concrete forms of the exercise
freshness of his language, Decazes says: 'The law must follow the of power, have become extremely widespread, at least in their less
convicted man into the prison where it has sent him' (Decazes). But concentrated forms, it was really only in the penitentiary institu-
very soon - and this is a characteristic fact - these debates were to tions that Bentham's Utopia could be fully expressed in a material
become a battle for appropriating control of this additional peni- form. In the 1830s, the Panopticon became the architectural pro-
tentiary element; the judges were to demand a right of inspection gramme of most prison projects. It was the most direct way of
over the carceral mechanisms: 'The moral enlightenment of the expressing 'the intelligence of discipline in stone' (Lucas, I, 69); of
inmates requires innumerable cooperators; it is only by visits of making architecture transparent to the administration of power;11
inspection, commissions of surveillance and charity associations that of making it possible to substitute for force or other violent con-
this may be accomplished. Auxiliaries, then, are needed and it is the straints the gentle efficiency of total surveillance; of ordering space
judges who must provide them' (Ferrus, viii; an ordinance of 1847 according to the recent humanization of the. codes and the new
had set up commissions of surveillance). From this period, the penitentiary theory: 'The authorities, on the one hand, and the
penitentiary order had become sufficiently well established for there architect, on the other, must know, therefore, whether the prisons
to be no question of dismantling it; the question was how to get are to be based on the principle of milder penalties or on a system
control of it. This gave rise to the figure of the judge obsessed by a of reforming convicts, in accordance with legislation which, by
desire for prison. A century later, this was to give birth to a bastard, getting to the root cause of the people's vices, becomes a principle
yet deformed child: the magistrate entrusted with the determination that will regenerate the virtues that they must practice' (Baltard, 4-5).
of penalties.
In Short, its task was to constitute a prison-machine18 with a cell
But, if the penitentiary, in so far as it went well beyond mere of visibility in which die inmate will find himself caught as 'in the
detention, was able not only to establish itself, but to entrap the glass house of the Greek philosopher' (Harou-Romain, 8) and a

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•a-

central point from which a permanent gaze may control prisoners of the established regulations: it has to extract unceasingly from the
and staff. Around these two requirements, several variations were inmate a body of knowledge that will make it possible to transform
possible: the Benthamite Panopticon in its strict form, the semi- the penal measure into a penitentiary operation; which will make of
circle, the cross-plan, the star shape. In the midst of all these dis- the penalty required by the offence a modification of the inmate that
cussions, the Minister of the Interior in 1841 sums up the funda- will be of use to society. The autonomy of the carceral regime and
mental principles: 'The central inspection hall is the pivot of the the knowledge that it creates make it possible to increase the utility
system. Without a central point of inspectipn, surveillance ceases of the penalty, which the code had made the very principle of its
to be guaranteed, continuous and general; for it is impossible to punitive philosophy: 'The governor must not lose sight of a single
have complete trust in the activity, zeal and intelligence of the inmate, because in whatever part of the prison the inmate is to be
warder who immediately supervises the cells... The architect must found, whether he is entering or leaving, or whether he is staying
therefore bring all his attention to bear on this object; it is a question there, the governor must also justify the motives for his staying in
both of discipline and economy. The more accurate and easy the a particular classification or for his movement from one to another.
surveillance, the less need will there be to seek in the strength of the He is a veritable accountant. Each inmate is for him, in the sphere
building guarantees against attempted escape and communication of individual education, a capital invested with penitentiary interest'
between the inmates. But surveillance will be perfect if from a central (Lucas, II, 449-50). As a highly efficient technology, penitentiary
hall the director or head-warder sees, without moving and without practice produces a return on the capital invested in the penal system
being seen, not only the entrances of all the cells and even the inside and in the building of heavy prisons.
of most of them when the unglazed door is open, but also the Similarly, the offender becomes an individual to know. This
warders guarding the prisoners on every floor... With the formula demand for knowledge was not, in the first instance, inserted into
of circular or semi-circular prisons, it would be possible to see from the legislation itself, in order to provide substance for the sentience
a single centre all the prisoners in their cells and the warders in the and to determine the true degree of guilt. It is as a convict, as a point
inspection galleries' (Ducatel, 9). of application for punitive mechanisms, that the offender is con-
But the penitentiary Panopticon was also a system of individual- stituted himself as the object of possible knowledge.
izing and permanent documentation. The same year in which But this implies that the penitentiary apparatus, with the whole
variants of the Benthamite schema were recommended for the technological programme that accompanies it, brings about a
building of prisons, the system of 'moral accounting' was made curious substitution: from the hands of justice, it certainly receives
compulsory: an individual report of a uniform kind in every prison, a convicted person; but what it must apply itself to is not, of course,
on which the governor or head-warder, the chaplain and the the offence, nor even exactly the offender, but a rather different
instructor had to fill in their observations on each inmate: 'It is in a object, one defined by variables which at the outset at least were not
way the vade mecum of prison administration, making it possible to taken into account in the sentence, for they were relevant onfy for
assess each case, each circumstance and, consequently, to know a corrective technology. This other character, whom the peniten-
what treatment to apply to each prisoner individually' (Ducpetiaux, tiary apparatus substitutes for the convicted offender, is the
56-7). Many other, much more complete, systems of recording were delinquent.
planned or tried out (cf., for example, Gregory, 199ft; Grellet- The delinquent is to be distinguished from the offender by the
Wammy, 23-5 and 199-203). The overall aim was to make the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in char-
prison a place for the constitution of a body of knowledge that acterizing him. The penitentiary operation, if it is to be a genuine
would regulate the exercise of penitentiary practice. The prison has re-education, must become the sum total existence of the delinquent,
not only to know the decision of the judges and to apply it in terms making of the prison a sort of artificial and coercive theatre in which

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• ' %

his life will be examined from top to bottom. The legal punishment that he is not only the author of his acts (the author responsible in
bears upon an act; the punitive technique on a life; it falls to this terms of certain criteria of free, conscious will), but is linked to his
punitive technique, therefore, to reconstitute all the sordid detail of offence by a whole bundle of complex threads (instincts, drives,
a life in the form of knowledge, to fill in the gaps of that knowledge tendencies, character). The penitentiary technique bears not on the
and to act upon it by a practice of compulsion. It is a biographical relation between author and crime, but on the criminal's affinity with
knowledge and a technique for correcting individual lives. The his crime. The delinquent, the strange manifestation of an overall
observation of the delinquent 'should go back not only to the phenomenon of criminality, is to be found in quasi-natural classes,
circumstances, but also to the causes of his crime; they must be each endowed with its own characteristics and requiring a specific
sought in the story of his life, from the triple point of view of treatment, what Marquet-Wasselot called in 1841 the 'ethnography
psychology, social position and upbringing, in order to discover the of the prisons'; 'The convicts are . . . another people within the
dangerous proclivities of the first, the harmful predispositions of the same people; with its own habits, instincts, morals' (Marquet-
second and the bad antecedents of the third. This biographical Wasselot, 9). We are still very close here to the 'picturesque'
investigation is an essential part of the preliminary investigation for descriptions of the world of the malefactors - an old tradition that
the classification of penalities before it becomes a condition for the goes back a long way and gained new vigour in the early nineteenth
classification of moralities in the penitentiary system. It must century, at a time when the perception of another form of life was
accompany the convict from the court to the prison, where the being articulated upon that of another class and another human
governor's task is not only to receive it, but also to complete, super- species. A zoology of social sub-species and an ethnology of the
vise and rectify its various factors during the period of detention' civilizations of malefactors, with their own rites and language, was
(Lucas, II, 440-42). Behind the offender, to whom the investigation beginning to emerge in a parody form. But an attempt was also
of the facts may attribute responsibility for an offence, stands the being made to constitute a new objectivity in which the criminal
delinquent whose slow formation is shown in a biographical belongs to a typology that is both natural and deviant. Delinquency,
investigation. The introduction of the 'biographical' is important a pathological gap in the human species, may be analysed as morbid
in the history of penality. Because it establishes the 'criminal' as syndromes or as great teratological forms. With Ferrus's classifica-
existing before the crime and even outside it. And, for this reason, tion, we probably have one of the first conversions of the old
a psychological causality, duplicating the juridical attribution of 'ethnography' of crime into a systematic typology of delinquents.
responsibility, confuses its effects. At this point one enters the The analysis is slender, certainly, but it reveals quite clearly the
'criminological' labyrinth from which we have certainly not yet principle that delinquency must be specified in terms not so much
emerged: any determining cause, because it reduces responsibility, of the law as of the norm. There are three types of convict; there are
marks the author of the offence with a criminality all the more for- those who are endowed 'with intellectual resources above the average
midable and demands penitentiary measures that are all the more of intelligence that we have established', but who have been perverted
strict. As the biography of the criminal duplicates in penal practice either by the 'tendencies of their organization' and a 'native pre-
the analysis of circumstances used in gauging the crime, so one sees disposition', or by 'pernicious logic', an 'iniquitous morality', a
penal discourse and psychiatric discourse crossing each other's 'dangerous attitude to social duties'. Those that belong to mis cat-
frontiers; and there, at their point of junction, is formed the notion egory require isolation day and night, solitary exercise, and, when one
of the 'dangerous' individual, which makes it possible to draw up a is forced to bring them into contact with the others, they should
network of causality in terms of an entire biography and to present wear 'ajjght mask made of metal netting, of the kind used for stone-
a verdict of punishment-correction.14 cutting orTencing'. The Second category is made up of'vicious, stupid
The delinquent is also to be distinguished from the offender in or passive convicts, who have been led into evil by indifference to
 Prison Complete and austere institutions
-i

either shame or honour, through cowardice, that is to say, laziness, appeared the body of the prisoner, duplicated by the individuality
and because of a lack of resistance to bad incitements'; the regime of the 'delinquent', by the little soul of the criminal, which the very
suitable to them is not so much that of punishment as of education, and apparatus of punishment fabricated as a point of application of the
if possible of mutual education: isolation at night, work in common power to punish and as the object of what is still called today
during the day, conversations permitted provided they are conducted penitentiary science. It is said that the prison fabricated delinquents;
aloud, reading in common, followed by mutual questioning, for which it is true that it brings back, almost inevitably, before the courts those
rewards may be given. Lastly, there are the 'inept or incapable who have been sent there. But it also fabricates them in the sense
convicts', who are 'rendered incapable, by an incomplete organiza- that it has introduced into the operation of the law and the offence,
tion, of any occupation requiring considered effort and consistent the judge and the offender, the condemned man and the executioner,
will, and who are therefore incapable of competing in work with the non-corporal reality of the delinquency that links them together
intelligent workers and who, having neither enough education to and, for a century and a half, has caught them in the same trap.
know their social duties, nor enough intelligence to understand this
fact or to struggle against their personal instincts, are led to evil by The penitentiary technique and the delinquent are in a sense twin
their very incapacity, For these, solitude would merely encourage brothers. It is not true that; it was the discovery of the delinquent
their inertia; they must therefore live in common, but in such a way through a scientific rationality that introduced into our old prisons
as to form small groups, constantly stimulated by collective the refinement of penitentiary techniques. Nor is it true that the
operations, and subjected to rigid surveillance' (Ferrus, i82ff and internal elaboration of penitentiary methods has finally brought to
278ff). Thus a 'positive' knowledge of the delinquents and their light the 'objective' existence of a delinquency that the abstraction
species, very different from the juridical definition of offences and and rigidity of the law were unable to perceive. They appeared
their circumstances, is gradually established; but this knowledge is together, the one extending from the other, as a technological
also distinct from the medical knowledge that makes it possible to ensemble that forms and fragments the object to which it applies its
introduce the insanity of the individual and, consequently, to efface instruments. And it is this delinquency, formed in the foundations
the criminal character of the act. Ferrus states the principle quite of the judicial apparatus, among the 'basses ceuvres', the servile tasks,
clearly: 'Considered as a whole, criminals are nothing less than from which justice averts its gaze, out of the shame it feels in punish-
madmen; it would be unjust to the latter to confuse them with ing those it condemns, it is this delinquency that now comes to
consciously perverted men.' The task of this new knowledge is to haunt the untroubled courts and the majesty of the laws; it is this
define the act 'scientifically' qua offence and above all the individual delinquency that must be known, assessed, measured, diagnosed,
qua delinquent. Criminology is thus made possible. treated when sentences are passed. It is now this delinquency, this
The correlative of penal justice may well be the offender, but the anomaly, this deviation, this potential danger, this illness, this form
correlative of the penitentiary apparatus is someone other; this is the of existence, that must be taken into account when the codes are
delinquent, a biographical unity, a kernel of danger, representing a rewritten. Delinquency is the vengeance of the prison on justice.
type of anomaly. And, although it is true that to a detention that It is a revenge formidable enough to leave the judge speechless.
deprives of liberty, as defined by law, the prison added the addi- It is at this point that the criminologists raise their voices.
tional element of the penitentiary, this penitentiary element intro- But we must not forget that the prison, that concentrated and
duced in turn a third character who slipped between the individual austere figure of all the disciplines, is not an endogenous element in
condemned by the law and the individual who carries out this law. the penal system as defined at the turn of the eighteenth and nine-
At the point that marks the disappearance of the branded, dis- teenth centuries. The theme»of a punitive society and of a general
membered, burnt, annihilated body of the tortured criminal, there semio-technique of punishment that has sustained the 'ideological'

254
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codes - Beccarian or Benthamite - did not itself give rise to the

universal use of the prison. This prison came from elsewhere - from
the mechanisms proper to a disciplinary power. Now, despite this
heterogeneity, the mechanisms and effects of the prison have spread
right through modern criminal justice; delinquency and the delin-
quents have become parasites on it through and through. One must
seek the reason for this formidable 'efficiency' of the prison. But one
thing may be noted at the outset: the penal justice defined in the
eighteenth century by the reformers traced two possible but diver-
gent lines of objectification of the criminal: the first was the series
of 'monsters', moral or political, who had fallen outside the social
pact; the second was that of the juridical subject rehabilitated by
punishment. Now the 'delinquent' makes it possible to join the two
lines and to constitute under the authority of medicine, psychology
or criminology, an individual in whom the offender of the law and
the object of a scientific technique are superimposed - or almost -
one upon the other. That the grip of the prison on the penal system
should not have led to a violent reaction of rejection is no doubt
due to many reasons. One of these is that, in fabricating delinquency,
it gave to criminal justice a unitary field of objects, authenticated
by the 'sciences', and thus enabled it to function on a general
horizon of 'truth'.
The prison, that darkest region in the apparatus of justice, is the
place where the power to punish, which no longer dares to manifest
itself openly, silently organizes a field of objectivity in which
punishment will be able to function openly as treatment and the
sentence be inscribed among the discourses of knowledge. It is
understandable that justice should have adopted so easily a prison
that was not the offspring of its own thoughts. Justice certainly owed
the prison this recognition.

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