One God One People

by

Ben Garcia

Topic: Examine Michel Foucault's argument on discipline and how that may apply to prison ministry.

Research question: How does Foucault's analysis of the power to punish and discipline delinquents into docile subjects translate into how we conduct prison ministry to disciple teenagers while in and then transitioning out of juvenile hall.

Abstract:  We are all disciplined beings.  But to what end?  Michel Foucault presents a historical account of how modern society uses power to maintain and enforce a system of control within institutions. Discipline within the juvenile hall system does little to transform and redirect the teen away from a life of crime.  The purpose of this blog is to present how discipline within a healthy, caring community may transform the life of a delinquent teen toward a path of discipleship in Christ.

I.            Introduction to Power & The Scarlet “A”

 The purpose of this blog is to provide an exposition on Michel Foucault’s book “Discipline & Punish,” discussing key points on power and discipline from secondary resources, and finally articulating how Juvenile Hall Ministry is an alternative form of power in disciplining and transforming at-risk teenagers who are often branded as permanent delinquents.  We are all disciplined beings, but to what end?  What would a healthy and effective juvenile Hall Ministry look like based on the arguments and observations of Foucault in “Discipline & Punish.” 

In “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester Prynne arrives at the New England colony in the 17^th century with the purpose of establishing a home for herself and her husband who is still in England.  The plot thickens when Hester has a secret affair with the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale.  The local government finds out as well as the rest of the townspeople. Hester becomes pregnant and refuses to tell the name of her child's father.  She is sent to jail where she gives birth to her daughter, Pearl.  Hester is portrayed as a malignant spectacle, as she stands on a scaffold in public, an abnormality in the new colony, and is mandated to wear a scarlet red "A" as a mark of "adultery" on all her clothing for the rest of her life: “Let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.”[1] 

II.            Visible Power of the Sovereign

Like Hester Prynne in the “Scarlet Letter,” both imprisoned and publicly humiliated and marked with a scarlet, red letter “A” to inscribe her crime (adultery), public torture and humiliation acted as “both visible judicial rituals, creating the illusion of justice, and asserting the sovereign’s infinite power over bodies.”[1]  Torture and public humiliation functioned to produce a confession, to punish the body versus the mind to reveal truth.[2] Hester Prynne was publicly humiliated and marked with a scarlet “A” because she would not confess whom her lover was, to tell the truth.   However, public execution did not “bolster sovereign power in the minds of the populace.”[3]  By the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, “the gloomy festival of punishment was dying out,” because the populace often sympathized with the tortured and the punished.[4]

A shift occurred when it was no longer the body that was to be subjected to rituals of public execution; it was the mind.  To transform the soul was the new punishment.[5]  The new mechanism of power was to effect the “mind as a surface of inscription of power, with semiology as its tool: the submission of bodies through the control of ideas.”[6]  Instead of power being public, highly visible, as in the case of “The Scarlet Letter,” the new “disciplinary technology operates in a process that are invisible, dispersed, secret and autonomous.”[7]  The old method of punishment was to make a public example of what was right and wrong.  The modern method was to simply remove a deviant from society and to render that individual into a docile subject.

III. New Economy of Power

A key to unlocking power is given by Foucault’s argument that methods of punishment reflect modes of production.  The old punishment did not focus so much on property as did the new economy of power.  The locus of wealth accumulation shifted from force to enterprise, and the target of crime shifted from bodies to goods.  Principles of training and regimentation that made the military efficient began to be applied in schools, factories, and hospitals.[1]  The question was how one can capitalize on the time of individuals for higher productivity and profit: “for regulating the relations of time, bodies and forces; for assuring an accumulation of duration; and for turning to ever-increased profit for use the movement of passing time.”[2]

Though no longer publicly punished, Foucault argues that it is not a progressive step in human history, but rather the emergence of a new form of domination, a new economy of power that favors the wealthy and disadvantages the worker.[3]  Foucault argues that the introduction of the new criminal legislation creates a redistribution of illegalities that grounds the wealthy in human rights versus the poor who are subjected to the criminal law grounded in property.[4]  This setting up of a new economy of power allowed for a better distribution: “Power is to be distributed in homogeneous circuits capable of operating everywhere, in a continuous way, down to the fine grain of the social body.”[5]

IV. Power to Punish Efficiently

Power is always some type of control over others.[1]  There are struggles of power throughout society, whether they are between men and women, parents over children, of administration over employees.  Rather than asking what power is, Foucault questions how it is exercised.  Foucault emphasizes two important features of power relations: it is decentralized and anonymous.  This type of power relation is more communal, focusing on family.[2]  Foucault postulates the precise goal of decreasing domination to the greatest extent possible is where “power and freedom are constantly intertwined.  This does not necessarily mean seeking a minimum of power relations; power in and of itself is not bad.”[3]  Power is also a positive web of strategic relations that should aim at balancing and protecting against complete domination or self-enslavement.

On the other end of the spectrum, power can also be exercised from the top down in a vertical relationship rather than it being horizontally communal.  It is characterized by a central governing body that seeks to use power efficiently from an external vantage point:

“Define new tactics in order to reach a target that is now more subtle but also more widely spread in the social body.  Find new techniques for adjusting punishment to it and for adapting its effects.  Lay down new principles for regularizing, refining, universalizing the art of punishing.  Homogenize its application.  Reduce its economic and political cost by increasing its effectiveness and by multiplying its circuits.  In short, constitute a new economy and a new technology to punish.”[4]

This centralized power, such as the state, must also be subject to critique.  How is this power exercised and, more importantly, what new disciplines do they bring along with them?

V. Invisible Power of Prisons

Based on the new economy of power, “between the crime and the return to right and virtue, the prison would constitute the space between two worlds; the place for the individual transformation that would restore to the state the subject it had lost.”[1]  The history of prison can be segmented into four phases: first, public torture was used as a form of control in a pre-industrialized society; second, more prisons materialized as industrialization brought higher theft of goods; third, schools, factories, hospitals and other institutions began to resemble the power structures found in prisons; fourth, recidivism made criminals lifelong deviants.[2]  The aim of the prison ultimately became the transformation of inmates into docile, productive individuals, reflecting the market demands of the new economy.[3]

The Enlightenment produced a type of universal and statistical language that attempted to establish a norm.  Any individual outside the normal standard distribution were deviations from the norm.  These deviations, or deviants, meant that they were not disciplined or traditioned well to fit into society in the first place.  The process to normalize these deviants was threefold: isolate, control daily work activity, and transform the deviant into a normal individual, one that falls within the standard distribution curve of a population, to cure the abnormality.[4]  The prison was merely a reflection of a larger societal phenomenon, to create normalcy that fit the parameters of the new economy of power and production.

A. Power to Isolate

Isolation and Surveillance was the first step, a moral discipline.[1]  From the time the crime was committed, the administration within the prison would receive a full report concerning the criminal, notes on their past and psychological profile.  Behavior is monitored of each individual to better assess states of mind; the prisons became a place to observe inmates.[2]  Prisoners were classified and categorized, according to their potentiality of danger, through strict surveillance and detailed knowledge on each individual.[3]

The use of strict confinements was to establish “presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, . . . to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits.”[4]  Cellular isolation forced inmates into a state of self-reflection, pushing them to incorporate authority into their daily life.  Moreover, surveillance played a key part, especially through the use of the Panopticon.  The Panopticon, a central tower which overlooked all the jail cells with a search light, is a mechanism of power to induce in the inmate a sense of constant surveillance, an automatic function of power, with its general gaze of being seen.[5]