Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison

And ‘reform’, in the strict sense, as it was formulated in the theories of law or as it was outlined in the various projects, was the political or philosophical resumption of this strategy, with its primary objectives: to make of the punishment and repression of illegalities a regular function, coextensive with society; not to punish less, but to punish better; to punish with an attenuated severity perhaps, but in order to punish with more universality and necessity; to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body.

It was not so much, or not only, the privileges of justice, its arbitrariness, its archaic arrogance, its uncontrolled rights that were criticized; but rather the mixture of its weaknesses and excesses, its exaggerations and its loopholes, and above all the very principle of this mixture, the ‘super-power’ of the monarch. The true objective of the reform movement, even in its most general formulations, was not so much to establish a new right to punish based on more equitable principles, as to set up a new ‘economy’ of the power to punish,

From the end of the seventeenth century, in fact, one observes a considerable diminution in murders and, generally speaking, in physical acts of aggression; offences against property seem to take over from crimes of violence; theft and swindling, from murder and assault; the diffuse, occasional, but frequent delinquency of the poorest classes was superseded by a limited, but ‘skilled’ delinquency; the criminals of the seventeenth century were ‘harassed men, ill-fed, quick to act, quick to anger, seasonal criminals’; those of the eighteenth, ‘crafty, cunning, sly, calculating’ criminals on the fringes of society