Pain was calibrated to crime, criminal, and victim by a detailed legal code
Evidence
But there is more to it: this production of pain is regulated. Torture correlates the type of corporal effect, the quality, intensity, duration of pain, with the gravity of the crime, the person of the criminal, the rank of his victims. There is a legal code of pain; when it involves torture, punishment does not fall upon the body indiscriminately or equally; it is calculated according to detailed rules: the number of lashes of the whip, the positioning of the branding iron, the duration of the death agony on the stake or the wheel (the court decides whether the criminal is to be strangled at once or allowed to die slowly, and the points at which this gesture of pity must occur), the type of mutilation to be used (hand cut off, lips or tongue pierced). All these various elements multiply the punishments and are combined according to the court and the crime. ‘The poetry of Dante put into laws,’ was how Rossi described it; a long course in physico-penal knowledge, in any case. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 83
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Military legal codes linked each crime to a fixed exact punishment; Punishment must make the crime-punishment code immediate in act and reality — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 180; Codified legal punishment works by creating mental associations of crime and punishment. (+2 more)
Related
- Punishment must make the crime-punishment code immediate in act and reality (similarity 0.84)
- The example shifted from terror to the decipherable lesson of crime and punishment (similarity 0.83)
- Execution sites and torments mirrored the crime’s form and setting (similarity 0.81)
- The guillotine aimed to punish a juridical abstraction rather than a pain-feeling body (similarity 0.80)
- Penalty operates through the idea of pain, not pain itself (similarity 0.78)
- Painless execution drugs are the logical terminus of non-corporal penality (similarity 0.78)
- Modern punishment targets liberty, not bodily pain (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Military legal codes linked each crime to a fixed exact punishment
#corroborates(0.90) - Penalty operates through the idea of pain, not pain itself
#expands(0.90) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 155 - Execution sites and torments mirrored the crime’s form and setting
#exemplifies(0.85) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 97 - Punishment must make the crime-punishment code immediate in act and reality
#expands(0.80) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 180 - Codified legal punishment works by creating mental associations of crime and punishment.
#expands(0.80)