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🪵 The Threshold

The prison's apparent failure is actually its designed success at producing delinquency

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tagsja-picks, xref, deepthinking, contrarian_or_surprising, trade, singleton, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@foucault_discipline_1975, loc. 425

4 min read

The prison’s apparent failure is actually its designed success at producing delinquency

Evidence

If this is the case, the prison, apparently ‘failing’, does not miss its target; on the contrary, it reaches it, in so far as it gives rise to one particular form of illegality in the midst of others, which it is able to isolate, to place in full light and to organize as a relatively enclosed, but penetrable, milieu. It helps to establish an open illegality, irreducible at a certain level and secretly useful, at once refractory and docile; it isolates, outlines, brings out a form of illegality that seems to sum up symbolically all the others, but which makes it possible to leave in the shade those that one wishes to – or must – tolerate. This form is, strictly speaking, delinquency. One should not see in delinquency the most intense, most harmful form of illegality, the form that the penal apparatus must try to eliminate through imprisonment because of the danger it represents; it is rather an effect of penality (and of the penality of detention) that makes it possible to differentiate, accommodate and supervise illegalities. No doubt delinquency is a form of illegality; certainly it has its roots in illegality; but it is an illegality that the ‘carceral system’, with all its ramifications, has invested, segmented, isolated, penetrated, organized, enclosed in a definite milieu, and to which it has given an instrumental role in relation to the other illegalities. In short, although the juridical opposition is between legality and illegal practice, the strategic opposition is between illegalities and delinquency. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 425

Categorization

  • XREF: Directly ties into the reader’s Orwell-Bentham-Foucault synthesis: the carceral system’s power works by producing and supervising a visible, isolated criminal class rather than eliminating crime — a production-of-subjects logic parallel to the telescreen producing self-policing subjects. — connects to: The prison and the delinquent are mutually produced in a single technological ensemble — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 390; The prison’s failures were denounced at its very inception — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 401; Prisons demonstrably fail to reduce the crime rate — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 402 (+4 more)
  • DEEPTHINKING: The core inversion — failure is success; the target is producing delinquency, not eliminating crime — is dense enough that a reader would sit with it for days considering its implications for all institutions.

Broader Connections

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