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🪵 The Threshold

Enclosing delinquency in a supervised group neutralizes broader popular illegality

Properties2
tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@foucault_discipline_1975, loc. 428

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Enclosing delinquency in a supervised group neutralizes broader popular illegality

Evidence

The establishment of a delinquency that constitutes something like an enclosed illegality has in fact a number of advantages. To begin with, it is possible to supervise it (by locating individuals, infiltrating the group, organizing mutual informing): for the vague, swarming mass of a population practising occasional illegality, which is always likely to spread, or again for those loose bands of vagabonds, recruiting as they move from place to place, and according to circumstances, from the unemployed, beggars, ‘bad characters’ of all kinds, which sometimes reach such proportions – as we saw at the end of the eighteenth century – as to form formidable forces for looting and rioting, is substituted a relatively small and enclosed group of individuals on whom a constant surveillance may be kept. Moreover, it is possible to divert this self-absorbed delinquency to forms of illegality that are less dangerous: maintained by the pressure of controls on the fringes of society, reduced to precarious conditions of existence, lacking links with the population that would be able to sustain it (as was once the case with smugglers or certain forms of bandits – cf. Hobsbawm), delinquents inevitably fell back on a localized criminality, limited in its power to attract popular support, politically harmless and economically negligible. Now this concentrated, supervised and disarmed illegality is directly useful. It may be useful in relation to other illegalities: isolated from them, turned inwards upon its own internal organization, dedicated to a violent criminality, of which the poorer classes are often the first victims, hemmed in on every side by the police, exposed to long prison sentences, followed by a permanently ‘specialized’ life – delinquency – this alien, dangerous and often hostile world obstructs or at least maintains at a sufficiently low level everyday illegal practices (petty thefts, minor acts of violence, routine acts of law-breaking); it prevents them from leading to broader, more obvious forms, rather as though the exemplary effect once expected of the spectacle of the scaffold was now sought not so much in the rigour of the punishments, as in the visible, branded existence of delinquency itself: while differentiating itself from other popular illegalities, delinquency serves to keep them in check. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 428

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Ambivalence toward criminals marked the popular attitude to illegality — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 139; Police, prison, and delinquency form a self-reinforcing circuit producing delinquents — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 432; New crime literature dispossessed common people of their criminal glory — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 124 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

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