The Prison and the Delinquent in the Carceral Continuum

[The "reformatory" of Mettray, north of Tours, France]

[Continues "The Panoptic Society (of Surveillance)"]

Despite (modal/technological) changes in the way that power is exercised—despite, that is to say, the (systemic/structural) change in the regime of power—one function/element remains central to society: namely, penality. This is true even of the panoptic society (of surveillance). The disciplinary regime, like previous regimes, had to figure out (given the modality of power operative in it) how it can punish (this time heavily based on (the results of) surveillance) certain individuals (whom it branded delinquents) in the group (a group, all groups, the organization, the institution, society, the nation, the world, . . .) legally (i.e. under the auspices/discretion of the State). The disciplinary society executed this function in its own—individual(izing) economic disciplinary—way, making disciplinary penality a specifically disciplinary exercise (of power).

Consequent with this change in penality is the change (in face/mode) in the subject (to be) punished. That is to say, the subject constituted by disciplinary penality is different from the subject of other regimes. Different aspects/capacities of this subject are focused on, in line with (according to) disciplinary power’s own demands. Testifying to the coherence of the disciplinary regime (as a system), however, is that fact that this subject is no different from the subject seen elsewhere in the same (disciplinary) regime. It is the same subject found in other activities in which disciplinary power is exercised, i.e. the same subject in other institutions (other “disciplines” such as the school, the hospital, the economy, the military, the government . . .) (performing other functions) (and even non-institutions) exercising the same technology of power.

Foucault describes this new penal subject:

What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, its ‘useful’ object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual (227) (my emphasis).

(Even in penality,) The same disciplinary subject, in other words: the subject that is both a docile body and a disciplining soul—individualized.

This subject (to be) punished, then, is suitable—suited—to disciplinary power’s mechanisms and objectives. This subject has been molded (trained) well for (disciplinary activities, reaching its height in) (disciplinary) penalization. The subject’s constitution, in effect, (was done in such a way that the subject so constituted) is apt/ready for punishment. It is known (in the disciplinary regime) how to deal with this subject (potentially to be penalized) because it is the same subject on whom, in other aspects of life (for other objectives, in other (non-)institutions), (disciplinary) power is (already) being exercised—well and economically. Thus the measures/mechanisms in place in the disciplinary regime ensure that its subject—the disciplinary subject—is ready to be, is ripe for, can be punished (disciplinarily).

Foucault lays down the characteristics—or the ideal, at least—of disciplinary penality, characteristics that are consistent with (if not echoing) the workings of disciplinary power in general. Foucault writes:

The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgment that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity (227) (my emphases).

A truly economic exercise of power, in other words (true to the disciplinary ideal).

Thus power—in its disciplinary mode—is exercised in all (or at least the vast majority of) social institutions (and non-institutions)—especially and reaching its height in penality/punishment. Thus (the exercise of) disciplinary power ensures the coherence of its structure (in different (non-)institutions, in different functions), gives coherence to the regime. Thus the disciplinary regime secures/perpetuates itself as different institutions/functions in it employ a unified mechanism of power (i.e. disciplinary power), in fact even feeding back, supporting, and reinforcing this form in each other. Thus is society—in a very real sense—panoptic/disciplinary. (Disciplinary) Penality thus proves to be but one of disciplinary society’s functions (or at least this ancient function can be appropriated such that it becomes essential to (the exercise of) disciplinary power), in fact, (not having lost its potency) (even as surveillance now comes side by side with it) proves to be one of the most important. Hence the title of the book in the French original: Surveiller et punir.

The instrument that carried out this task of punishing—i.e. the instrument that fulfilled the task of disciplinary penality—is none other than the (modern-day) prison. It was in the prison, Foucault claims, that “the theme of the Panopticon [. . .] found [. . .] its privileged locus of realization” (249). The Panopticon (the model, the design, of (the exercise of) disciplinary power in general and disciplinary penality in particular), in other words, found its realization—actualized itself (into an actual, concrete structure) in the prison. The prison actualized the Panopticon. (Some prisons, of course, actualized the Panopticon better than others, based on how meticulously they followed the (intensive) framework.)

Now, as this happened, i.e. as the Panopticon was actualized, Foucault suggests that the prison, from being a mere instrument of penality (i.e. an instrument for enclosure and punishment) (as in its pre-modern form), became an instrument of penitentiary (i.e. an instrument capable of making (bodies) docile, of fulfilling the disciplinary goal). The prison, true to the (new) regime that it’s in, thus became an instrument for (the exercise of) (disciplinary) power (251). Thus the (pre-modern) prison, at its appropriation (by the disciplinary regime), was given a specifically disciplinary form/actualization—turned, that is, into a true disciplinary instrument: the penitentiary.

As mentioned earlier, power in the disciplinary regime does not operate alone. It is intertwined with knowledge, which it reinforces and reinforces it: power/knowledge. The prison (the disciplinary actualization of the most economic individuated exercise of disciplinary power, the Panopticon) is not exempt from this. Thus, the prison, as a means for penality/punishment (in the form of enclosure), mixed the exercise of (penitential) power (on the outlaw as his/her body is made docile) with the additional (yet inextricable (truly economic!)) mechanism of (through surveillance) the formation of knowledge (about the delinquent). True to the French title: surveillance/knowledge and punishment/power.

Knowledge thus comes to play an important role in (the exercise of) power (specifically, in the disciplinary prison). In Foucault’s description:

The prison, the place where the penalty is carried out, is also the place of observation of punished individuals. This takes two forms: surveillance, of course, but also knowledge of each inmate, of his behavior, his deeper states of mind, his gradual improvement; the prisons must be conceived as places for the formation of clinical knowledge about the convicts (249) (my emphases).

Thus, at the same time that s/he is punished and made docile, “the offender becomes an individual to know” based on what is (attempted to be) surveyed about him/her (25). Not just a subject surveyed, then, but “an object of possible knowledge” (251).

Foucault foresees in this additional mechanism (which builds up on but goes beyond mere surveillance)—the formation of knowledge about the subject (in prison)—the constitution of another (aspect of the) subject (so as to better intervene, do something with him, exercise more economically (disciplinary) power). As Foucault says,

From the hands of justice, [the prison] certainly receives a convicted person; but what it must apply itself to is not, of course, the offense, nor even exactly the offender, but a rather different object, one defined by variables which at the outset at least were not taken into account in the sentence, for they were relevant only for a corrective technology” (251) (my emphasis).

This object “relevant only for a corrective technology”—i.e. the object to be intervened with, developed, improved (i.e. the second meaning of the term docile)—that the prison must apply itself to (as a penitentiary apparatus) is none other than the delinquent, a specifically disciplinary penitentiary character (251).

Foucault describes it:

The delinquent is to be distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him. The penitentiary operation, if it is to be a genuine re-education, must become the sum total existence of the delinquent, making of the prison a sort of artificial and corrective theater in which his life will be examined from top to bottom. The legal punishment bears upon an act; the punitive technique on a life; it falls to this punitive technique, therefore, to reconstitute all the sordid detail of a life in the form of knowledge, to fill in the gaps of that knowledge and to act upon it by a practice of compulsion. It is a biographical knowledge and a technique for correcting individual lives (251-2) (my emphases).

In constituting the delinquent, (the exercise of) disciplinary power—in the actual instance of the penitentiary prison—thus works on—corrects, improves, knows, subjects—a whole/unified biographical individual life—an unprecedented focus on what can be called a “person.”

This person/life is then related to the act/crime committed. As Foucault continues,

The delinquent is also to be distinguished from the offender in that he is not only the author of his acts (the author responsible in terms of certain criteria of free, conscious will), but is linked to his offense by a whole bundle of complex threads (instincts, drives, tendencies, character). The penitentiary technique bears not on the relation between author and crime, but on the criminal’s affinity with his crime (252-3) (my emphases).

Knowledge, thus, not only of the total person but of the totality of everything that affects this person (the “complex threads”) and that this person affects (e.g. the criminal acts, behavior in prison . . . (Has there been any improvement with this subject? Should we parole him/her? What do you think, Doc?)). The target is of course (pertaining both to acts and characteristics) deviance, anomaly, difference. As Foucault explains, “The correlative of penal justice may well be the offender, but the correlative of the penitentiary apparatus is someone other; this is the delinquent, a biographical unity, a kernel of danger, representing a type of anomaly”” (254) (my emphasis). In other words, the strayings from the norm of the total individual person.

This character, it must be remembered, is constituted as a tactic not only of knowledge but of power/knowledge. The delinquent is thus constituted not only to be known—but to have a subject to be known—and intervened (i.e. exercised power on). Power (with the help of knowledge) creating its own object—subject—as it were. As part of its (mutually-reinforcing (in terms of power/knowledge), ever-improving (in terms of the exercise of power)) economy.

In Foucault’s words:

Although it is true that to a detention that deprives of liberty, as defined by law, the prison added the additional element of the penitentiary, this penitentiary element introduced in turn a third character who slipped between the individual condemned by the law and the individual who carries out this law. At the point that marks the disappearance of the branded, dismembered, burnt, annihilated body of the tortured criminal, there appeared the body of the prisoner, duplicated by the individuality of the ‘delinquent,’ by the little soul of the criminal, which the very apparatus of punishment fabricated as a point of application of the power to punish and as the object of what is called today penitentiary science (254-5) (my emphases).

Thus a subject of power/knowledge is constituted: the delinquent.

Moreover, with the addition of knowledge on power, another soul (even though, as established earlier, the focus of disciplinary power is on the body) emerges: the delinquent’s soul (to be known). Thus, in the penitentiary, the soul undergoes a further transformation: it becomes no longer merely the disciplining soul (as in the Panopticon)—but (on top of that) a soul to know—which, as mentioned above, feeds the disciplining of the soul (through the exercise of power). Thus power/knowledge combines the disciplining soul and the soul of social reformist power. A soul to be known that disciplines itself (to be known, to discipline itself . . .). The soul thus becomes an even more economic prison of the body. Contributing to the further mutually reinforcing working of power and knowledge—contributing to the ever more economic exercise of (disciplinary) power.

This delinquent (capable of being known, on whom (disciplinary) power is conveniently exercised) was constituted (as is the trademark of disciplinary power) uniquely and flexibly to make possible this economic working of power/knowledge (under the disciplinary regime). This intermingling of power/knowledge then comes under the banner of that lethal word known as truth. Foucault explains:

The penal justice defined in the eighteenth century by the reformers traced two possible but divergent lines of objectification of the criminal: the first was the series of ‘monsters,’ moral or political, who had fallen outside the social pact; the second was that of the juridical subject rehabilitated by punishment. Now the ‘delinquent’ makes it possible to join the two lines and to constitute under the authority of medicine, psychology or criminology, an individual in whom the offender of the law and the object of a scientific technique are superimposed—or almost—one upon the other. [. . .] In fabricating delinquency, it gave to criminal justice a unitary field of objects, authenticated by the ‘sciences,’ and thus enabled it to function on a general horizon of ‘truth.’ (256) (my emphases).

In this way, the prison (as penitentiary)—following the “truth,” improving individuals (who have become delinquents (who have strayed from the norm and whose lives can be known/understood))—fulfills the demand of disciplinary power to justify itself as it remains out of sight. In Foucault’s words:

The prison [. . .] is the place where the power to punish, which no longer dares manifest itself openly, silently organizes a field of objectivity in which punishment will be able to function openly as treatment and the sentence be inscribed among the discourses of knowledge (256).

Thus the assertion that the prison (as the replacement of public execution) is not so much a “massive enclosure [. . . as a] carefully articulated disciplinary mechanism” (264). The prison, in other words, as the actual (material) fulfillment not only of the Panopticon but of the (rigorous) exercise of disciplinary power itself.

The prison—like the adaptive sophisticated economic regime (of power) it is a part of (i.e. of which it is an actual instantiation)—has its way of incorporating elements that seem to resist it—in fact produces its own (ostensible) resistances as part of its systemic mechanism. This is particularly true, Foucault asserts, in the “critiques” of the prison (which, Foucault claims, “are today repeated almost unchanged”) (265). Critiques of the prison, Foucault notes, did not arise following the prison’s establishment (i.e. when sufficient time has passed and its mechanisms have been observed) nor out of its shortcomings/failings—but rather developed at once, simultaneous with the prison’s establishment (264). Rather than a challenge to the prison, these critiques were, in truth, part of the workings of the system (of prisons). This is the reason, Foucault argues, that the answer to these critiques is (never the abolishment of the prison but) always the improvement—i.e. the making more effective, more economic—of the prison system.

In Foucault’s words:

The answer to these criticisms was invariably the same: the reintroduction of the invariable principles of penitentiary technique. For a century and a half the prison had always been offered as its own remedy: the reactivation of the penitentiary techniques as the only means of overcoming their perpetual failure; the realization of the corrective project as the only method of overcoming the impossibility of implementing it (268) (my emphasis).

Foucault sums up this (State) systemic (prison) mechanism:

One must not, therefore, regard the prison, its ‘failure’ and its more or less successful reform as three successive stages. One should think rather of a simultaneous system that historically has been superimposed on the juridical deprivation of liberty; a fourfold system comprising: the additional, disciplinary element of the prison—the element of ‘superpower’; the production of an objectivity, a technique, a penitentiary ‘rationality’—the element of auxiliary knowledge; the de facto reintroduction, if not actual increase, of a criminality that the prison ought to destroy—the element of inverted efficiency; lastly, the repetition of a ‘reform’ that is isomorphic, despite its ‘idealism,’ with the disciplinary functioning of the prison—the element of utopian duplication (271) (my emphases).

The third element that Foucault mentions—the deliberate duplication of the object/subject on which power is exercised (i.e. criminality)—especially reveals the intent of the exercise of (disciplinary) power (in this case, in the prison; more broadly, in disciplinary mechanisms in general). Briefly said, it reveals a basic mechanism of (disciplinary) power: its creation of the object/subjects on which it can be exercised—for the sake (i.e. with the intent) of exercising (disciplinary) power. The exercise of (disciplinary) power, in other words, for the exercise of (disciplinary) power (in which, in the process, a subject (in this case, the delinquent) is constituted). Foucault uncovers this stunt of (disciplinary) power:

The prison, and no doubt punishment in general, is not intended to eliminate offenses, but rather to distinguish them, to distribute them, to use them; that it is not so much that they render docile those who are liable to transgress the law, but that they tend to assimilate the transgression of the laws in a general tactics of subjection (272) (my emphases).

The prison thus itself maintains the delinquency it creates and is supposed to quell—to make use of it, render it useful (to itself), render it docile—so that (more) (disciplinary) power can be (further) exercised. In this way, the prison’s failure (to eliminate delinquency) (as expressed in its critiques), as Foucault brilliantly argues, in truth constitutes its success.

It is not only its critiques—resistances/objections to it—that are part of the (disciplinary (penitentiary)) system, however. Foucault’s even more important insight is that the very object/subject that is the ostensible target of (i.e. supposed to be solved/eliminated by) (the exercise of) (disciplinary) power is tolerated—in fact, forged—to continue existing so that (the exercise of) (disciplinary) power is itself perpetuated. Resistance to the system—in a very real sense—as itself part of the system—indeed deliberately constituted by the system so as to perpetuate itself. Thus (disciplinary) power’s very purpose—what it is supposed to eliminate, what legitimates its exercise in the first place, the reason it is exercised in the first place—as itself perpetuating (disciplinary) power’s exercise and the (disciplinary) system (of power).
Foucault calls this mechanism (of power creating its own object/subject to exercise (and at the same time legitimate) more power) as the carceral system. In his words:

It is this complex ensemble that constitutes the carceral system. [. . .] The carceral system combines in a single figure discourses and architectures, coercive regulations and scientific propositions, real social effects and invincible utopias, programs for correcting delinquents and mechanisms that reinforce delinquency (271) (my emphases).

Both the delinquent’s correction and reinforcement—for the perpetuation of (the exercise of) (disciplinary) power.

There is a class element in this carceral system (i.e. in the constitution of delinquency (pursued as a “truth”) that (rather than being eliminated) is maintained so as to perpetuate the exercise of (disciplinary) power). Foucault makes the observation that one effect of the disciplinary regime with “the new forms of law, the rigors of the labor regulations, the demands either of the state, or of the landowners, or of the employers, and the most detailed techniques of surveillance”—with the prison at the center—is that “criminals, who were once to be met with in every social class, now emerged ‘almost all from the bottom rank of the social order’” (274, 275).

The prison, in addition, is able to make economic use of this social filtering. As Foucault notes, the prison “isolates, outlines, brings out a form of illegality that seems to sum up symbolically all the others [i.e. delinquency], but which makes it possible to leave in the shade those that one wishes to—or must—tolerate [i.e. those who commit acts distinguished from delinquency]” (277). By thus creating, sustaining, and targeting delinquency (which are often constrained to the bottom class and whose definition can be modified as deemed appropriate), the disciplinary penitentiary system gets to brush aside—thus tolerating—other illegalities (usually committed by those belonging to the upper classes). In thus focusing on delinquency, other (upper class) illegalities are tolerated.

Thus Foucault demystifies “delinquency” as a conceptual tool of (disciplinary) power:

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 (277) (my emphases).

A tool of disciplinary power in which the prison—disciplinary power’s actual instantiation—plays an important part. Foucault continues:

This process that constitutes delinquency as an object of knowledge is one with the political operation that dissociates illegalities and isolates delinquency from them. The prison is the hinge of these two mechanisms; it enables them to reinforce one another perpetually, to objectify the delinquency behind the offense, to solidify delinquency in the movement of illegalities. So successful has the prison been that, after a century and a half of ‘failures,’ the prison still exists, producing the same results, and there is the greatest reluctance to dispense with it (277) (my emphasis).

Testifying that it is connected not only with the (virtual) mode of power (i.e. disciplinary power) but also with that mode’s (intensive) individuation (i.e. the Panopticon), the (actual) prison, like the Panopticon, disciplines not only its object/subject proper, the delinquent. Taking Mettray as the concrete example (“a prison in that it contained young delinquents condemned by the courts; and yet something else, too, because it contained minors who had been charged but acquitted [. . .] and boarders held [. . .] as an alternative to paternal correction,” “the limit of strict penality,” “the completion of the carceral system”), Foucault notes not only that it bore the hallmarks of the (“complete and austere”) disciplinary institution but also the presence of what he calls the “technicians of behavior” (296-7, 293). These so-called technicians, i.e. those that supervised/administered the convicts/inmates, Foucault points out, were themselves trained and observed—themselves disciplined. Reminiscent of the Panopticon perfecting itself.

Foucault marks this mechanism as the point in which disciplining itself became a discipline. In his words:

[Mettray] was the first training college in pure discipline: the ‘penitentiary’ was not simply a project that sought its justification in ‘humanity’ or its foundations in a ‘science,’ but a technique that was learned, transmitted and which obeyed general norms. The practice that normalized by compulsion the conduct of the undisciplined and dangerous could, in turn, by technical elaboration and rational reflection, be ‘normalized.’ The disciplinary technique became a ‘discipline’ which also had its school (295) (my emphases).

Simultaneous with this was another development: the formation/emergence of the carceral continuum. Foucault explains:

If the apparatus of the great [neo]classical form of confinement was partly (and only partly) dismantled, it was very soon reactivated, rearranged, developed in certain directions. But what is still more important is that it was homogenized, through the mediation of the prison, on the one hand with legal punishments and, on the other, with disciplinary mechanisms. The frontiers between confinement, judicial punishment and institutions of discipline, which were already blurred in the classical age, tended to disappear and to constitute a great carceral continuum that diffused penitentiary techniques into the most innocent disciplines, transmitting disciplinary norms into the very heart of the penal system and placing over the slightest illegality, the smallest irregularity, deviation or anomaly, the threat of delinquency. A subtle, graduated carceral net, with compact institutions, but also separate and diffused methods, assumed responsibility for the arbitrary, widespread, badly integrated confinement of the classical age (297) (my emphases).

In the same way that society has become disciplinary/panoptic, the “disciplines” that compose it—as a direct consequence (they are, after all, the actualization of the same virtual mode of power (i.e. discipline) and intensive schema (i.e. the Panopticon))—became components of the carceral continuum as borders between them are broken down and they each take on the mechanisms of the prison (the, as it were, prime actualization (of discipline and the Panopticon)). Hence carceral continuum: continuum because everything—all (non-)institutions—are connected (in the disciplinary regime/society) in their carceral function, i.e. because they all—each of them—function like prisons. Societal (non-)institutions as a set of prisons to be entered and exited (to enter another one . . .). Society as a prison—the carceral continuum. Thus “the prison transformed the punitive procedure into a penitentiary technique; the carceral archipelago transported this technique from the penal institution to the entire social body” (298).

This great continuity contributes to the economy of (the exercise of) disciplinary power as it gets to apply its vague catch-all term/trap—delinquency—to the whole (continuous) social field. The continuity throughout the social field, as Foucault describes, “made it possible to pass naturally from disorder to offense and back from a transgression of the law to a slight departure from a rule, an average, a demand, a norm,” making the field of illegalities and delinquency fluid and continuous (focused on selectively by the law (of the State), of course (which determines which delinquencies to punish)) (298). “As a result, a certain significant generality moved between the least irregularity and the greatest crime,” thus making it easier to deal with (the amorphous set of) individuals and exercise (disciplinary) power (299).

The basis for the category of delinquency is none other than the norm, the same standard by which (the exercise of) disciplinary power measures individuals (in other activities in which it is operative). Thus, in the penitentiary disciplinary system, the criteria became “no longer the offense, the attack on the common interest [. . . but] the departure from the norm, the anomaly” (299). The norm, in other words, becomes the criteria for (disciplinary) power’s exercise (in this case, to incarcerate), a criteria broad and vague—the more so, the better to make disciplinary power’s exercise more convenient. Thus, as Foucault describes, “With th[e] new economy of power, the carceral system, which is its basic instrument, permitted the emergence of a new form of ‘law’: a mixture of legality and nature, prescription and constitution, the norm” (304).

This criteria is applied not only to the prison or one carceral institution but—being a continuum—the whole carceral continuum, thus (like the Panoptic mechanisms, like the carceral structure) generalizing what Foucault calls “the activity of judging” (304). Everyone thus starts to judge—no longer just him/herself but also others: all. Even greater tasks, in other words, for the disciplining (and known) soul. Foucault describes this mechanism:

Born along by the omnipresence of the mechanisms of discipline, basing itself on all the carceral apparatuses, it has become one of the major functions of our society. The judges of normality are everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements. The carceral network, in its compact or disseminated forms, with its systems of insertion, distribution, surveillance, observation, has been the greatest support, in modern society, of the normalizing power (304) (my emphasis).

At the same time, “replacing the adversary of the sovereign, the social enemy was transformed into the deviant, who brought with him the multiple danger of disorder, crime and madness,” all linked to each other continually in an equally continuous (social) field—consistent with the total individuality of the person of the delinquent (299-300) (my emphasis). Thus “the carceral network linked, through innumerable relations, the two long, multiple series of the punitive and the abnormal” (300).

At the same time that the total person (i.e. the delinquent) is examined in the totality of his/her alleged/potential “abnormality” (both in terms of health and the law), since what is involved this time is not simply a prison but the whole of society as a carceral continuum, the totality of the social becomes subject to the operations of disciplinary penitentiary power, among whose operations (as explained above) is the constitution of its own object/subject (the delinquent) on which it is exercised. This is the sense that Foucault wants to give when he says that in the carceral continuum there is no outside. In his elaboration:

The carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there is no outside. It takes back with one hand what it seems to exclude with the other. It saves everything, including what it punishes. [. . .] In this panoptic society of which incarceration is the omnipresent armature, the delinquent is not outside the law; he is, from the very outset, in the law, at the very heart of the law, or at least in the midst of those mechanisms that transfer the individual imperceptibly from discipline to the law, from deviation to offense. Although it is true that prison punishes delinquency, delinquency is for the most part produced in and by an incarceration which, ultimately, prison perpetuates in its turn. [. . .] The delinquent is an institutional product [of that which is supposed to cure/assimilate him . . .]. It is not on the fringes of society and through successive exiles that criminality is born, but by means of ever more closely placed insertions, under ever more insistent surveillance, by an accumulation of disciplinary coercion. In short, the carceral archipelago assures, in the depths of the social body, the formation of delinquency on the basis of subtle illegalities, the overlapping of the latter by the former and the establishment of a specified criminality” (301) (my emphases).

Another thing that the continuity of this carceral network achieves is by connecting all “abnormalities”—from the health to the law—the exercise of (disciplinary) power in all aspects (and not just the law) is legalized, justified, legitimated. The exercise of (disciplinary) power thus loses its arbitrary nature an comes to acquire an almost natural authority—no matter how arbitrary its effects may be. In Foucault’s words:

The great continuity of the carceral system throughout the law and its sentences gives a sort of legal sanction to the disciplinary mechanisms, to the decisions and jugments that they enforce. Throughout this network, which comprises so many ‘regional’ institutions, relatively autonomous and independent, is transmitted, with the ‘prison-form,’ the model of justice itself. The regulations of the disciplinary establishments may reproduce the law, the punishments imitate the verdicts and penalties, the surveillance repeat the police model; and above all these multiple establishments, the prison, which in relation to them is a pure form, unadulterated and unmitigated, gives them a sort of official sanction. [. . .] How could the disciplines and the power that functions in them appear arbitrary, when they merely operate the mechanisms of justice itself, even with a view to mitigating their intensity? (302) (my emphases).

Thus it seems that

the prison does not [. . .] represent the unleashing of a different kind of power, but simply an additional degree in the intensity of a mechanism that has continued to operate since the earliest forms of legal punishment. Between the latest institution of ‘rehabilitation,’ where one is taken in order to avoid prison, and the prison where one is sent after a definable offense, the difference is (and must be) scarcely perceptible. There is a strict economy that has the effect of rendering as discreet as possible the singular power to punish. [. . .] Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline. By means of a carceral continuum, the authority that sentences infiltrates all those other authorities that supervise, transform, correct, improve. [. . . Thus,] in its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating. It receives from them, and from their lesser, smaller task, a sanction from below; but one that is no less important for that, since it is the sanction of technique and rationality. The carceral ‘naturalizes’ the legal power to punish, as it ‘legalizes’ the technical power to discipline. In thus homogenizing them, effacing what may be violent in one and arbitrary in the other, attenuating the effects of revolt that they may both arouse, thus depriving excess in either of any purpose, circulating the same calculated, mechanical and discreet methods from one to the other, the carceral makes it possible to carry out th[e] great economy of power (302-3) (my emphases).

The carceral continuum thus constitutes a univocal field in which everything (all activities, no matter the differences in nature) is connected, in which (disciplinary) power is exercised in the same way (as in the prison)—naturalizing the ways of discipline (both surveillance and punishment), ensuring/fulfilling the efficient and effective—economic—exercise of (disciplinary) power.

Foucault ends the book (in some ways, a punishing survey) by describing the society he considers discipline to have produced—the society that has remained since its inception (in the modern (Neoclassical) age) and despite its supersession (by later regimes)—the society that he calls the carceral society:

At the center of this city, and as if to hold it in place, there is, not the ‘center of power,’ not a network of forces, but a multiple network of diverse elements—walls, spaces, institution, rules, discourse; that the model of the carceral city is not, therefore, the body of the king, with the powers that emanate from it, nor the contractual meeting of wills from which a body that was both individual and collective was born, but a strategic distribution of elements of different natures and levels. That the prison is not the daughter of laws, codes or the judicial apparatus; that it is not subordinated to the court and the docile or clumsy instrument of the sentences that it hands out and of the results that it would like to achieve; that it is the court that is external and subordinate to the prison. That in the central position that it occupies, it is not alone, but linked to a whole series of ‘carceral’ mechanisms which seem distinct enough—since they are intended to alleviate pain, to cure, to comfort—but which all tend, like the prison, to exercise a power of normalization. That these mechanisms are applied not to transgressions against a ‘central’ law, but to the apparatus of production—‘commerce’ and ‘industry’—to a whole multiplicity of illegalities, in all their diversity of nature and origin, their specific role in profit and the different ways in which they are dealt with by the punitive mechanisms. And that ultimately what presides over all these mechanisms is not the unitary functioning of an apparatus or an institution, but the necessity of combat and the rules of strategy. That, consequently, the notions of institutions of repression, rejection, exclusion, marginalization, are not adequate to describe, at the very center of the carceral city, the formation of the insidious leniencies, unavowable petty cruelties, small acts of cunning, calculated methods, techniques, ‘sciences’ that permit the fabrication of the disciplinary individual. In this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of ‘incarceration,’ objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle (308).

Bibliography

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.