Carceral power is naturalized by borrowing the rationality of curing and educating

Evidence

But, conversely, the carceral pyramid gives to the power to inflict legal punishment a context in which it appears to be free of all excess and all violence. … By means of a carceral continuum, the authority that sentences infiltrates all those other authorities that supervise, transform, correct, improve. … But, in its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating. It receives from them, and from their lesser, smaller task, a sanction from below; but one that is no less important for that, since it is the sanction of technique and rationality. The carceral ‘naturalizes’ the legal power to punish, as it ‘legalizes’ the technical power to discipline. In thus homogenizing them, effacing what may be violent in one and arbitrary in the other, attenuating the effects of revolt that they may both arouse, thus depriving excess in either of any purpose, circulating the same calculated, mechanical and discreet methods from one to the other, the carceral makes it possible to carry out that great ‘economy’ of power whose formula the eighteenth century had sought, when the problem of the accumulation and useful administration of men first emerged. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 462

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The two-way naturalization/legalization bind — punishment borrows medicine’s rationality while discipline borrows law’s sanction — is a dense, genuinely paradigm-shifting mechanism.
• XREF: Mirrors the internalized panopticon thesis: as surveillance masquerades as normal everyday care, punishment too is disguised as therapy. — connects to: The carceral regime extracts knowledge that converts punishment into a productive operation. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 384; The prison was conceived as an apparatus for transforming human beings — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 506; Prison education once enabled transformative self-creation even against the regime — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 146

Related

• The carceral regime extracts knowledge that converts punishment into a productive operation. (similarity 0.87)
• The rise of the prison institutionalized the power to punish (similarity 0.84)
• The prison’s disciplinary excess over legal detention was present from its birth (similarity 0.82)
• The carceral system created the norm as a new mixed form of law (similarity 0.82)
• The penal apparatus morally reeducated the poor into legalism (similarity 0.81)
• Penal justice entrapped itself by entering relations of knowledge. (similarity 0.81)
• The prison’s failure, reform, and discipline form one simultaneous carceral system (similarity 0.80)
• Disciplinary penality is irreducible to the traditional penality of law and eventually invested it. (similarity 0.79)
• Prison integrated correctional transformation into legal detention from the start (similarity 0.78)
• Prisons resemble schools, factories, and hospitals because one disciplinary model unifies them (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The prison was conceived as an apparatus for transforming human beings #expands (0.85) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 506
• Prison education once enabled transformative self-creation even against the regime #qualifies (0.75) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 146