The carceral system’s true completion arrived with the inmate’s internalized desire for Mettray
Evidence
The date I would choose would be 22 January 1840, the date of the official opening of Mettray. Or better still, perhaps, that glorious day, unremarked and unrecorded, when a child in Mettray remarked as he lay dying: ‘What a pity I left the colony so soon’ (Ducpétiaux, 1852, 383). This marked the death of the first penitentiary saint. Many of the blessed no doubt went to join him, if the former inmates of the penal colonies are to be believed when, in singing the praises of the new punitive policies of the body, they remarked: ‘We preferred the blows, but the cell suits us better.’ — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 448
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The child’s dying lament as the penitentiary’s founding moment is a paradigm-level insight: the prison’s triumph is not that it confines bodies but that inmates come to love their own confinement. This is the internalization thesis made concrete.
- BMF: The dying child’s regret at leaving the colony evokes Winston Smith’s eventual longing for O’Brien and the Thought Police in ‘1984’ — the victim’s internalized love for the system that destroyed them — though that book is not in the library list.
- XREF: connects to: The prison’s failure, reform, and discipline form one simultaneous carceral system — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 418
Broader Connections
- The prison’s failure, reform, and discipline form one simultaneous carceral system
#expands(0.85) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 418