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🪵 The Threshold

Imprisonment came to seem humane because it punishes all equally regardless of bodily sturdiness.

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tagsja-picks, definitional_content, singleton, xref, category/definitional-content

3 min read

Imprisonment came to seem humane because it punishes all equally regardless of bodily sturdiness.

Evidence

If the penality in its most severe forms no longer addresses itself to the body, on what does it lay hold? The answer of the theoreticians – those who, about 1760, opened up a new period that is not yet at an end – is simple, almost obvious. It seems to be contained in the question itself: since it is no longer the body, it must be the soul. The expiation that once rained down upon the body must be replaced by a punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations. Mably formulated the principle once and for all: ‘Punishment, if I may so put it, should strike the soul rather than the body’ (Mably, 326). — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 55 (#complicates, via linked claim)

‘Here the principle takes root that one should never apply ‘inhumane’ punishments to a criminal, who, nevertheless, may well be a traitor and a monster. If the law must now treat in a ‘humane’ way an individual who is ‘outside nature’ (whereas the old justice treated the ‘outlaw’ inhumanely), it is not on account of some profound humanity that the criminal conceals within him, but because of a necessary regulation of the effects of power. It is this ‘economic’ rationality that must calculate the penalty and prescribe the appropriate techniques. ‘Humanity’ is the respectable name given to this economy and to its meticulous calculations. ‘Where punishment is concerned, the minimum is ordered by humanity and counselled by policy.’ — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 150 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Modern humane punishment rests on treating subjective suffering as objectively comparable. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 524; Modern punishment targets liberty, not bodily pain — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 46; The prison was originally embraced as a humane replacement for capital and corporal punishment. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 101 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

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