Discipline & Punish

“But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all else, at others, at all the potentially guilty.” 

--Michel Foucault
 

“...if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing.”
--Michel Foucault

Have you ever committed a crime? Have you ever been punished for breaking a rule? Have you ever done anything that others called strange or different or sick? If you are human and if you have a pulse or have ever had one, you probably have experienced all three. The only difference is the degree of your wrong and the degree of your punishment.

What is punishment, after all, but a society's way of telling the wrongdoer that he or she is wrong and simultaneously of telling anyone who might commit the same wrong that they had better not do what this person has done or they will suffer the same fate?

The problem comes in when we consider that it seems what is "wrong" in 2011 or what was wrong in 1911 or 1711 are very different matters. Why is what was wrong in the 1600s not wrong today and vice versa? Is "wrong" an objective matter or is it decided by the groups who hold power at a given time? It seems that it is very much a matter of who holds the power.

In the early days of America, a woman could be clapped in the stocks for no more than disagreeing publically with her husband. In the 19th century in both England and the U.S., a woman or a man could be placed in a mental institution with no proof that she or he was actually mentally ill. During the 1600s, a European citizen who disagreed with the church could be branded a heretic and burned at the stake.

To a modern audience, these terrors sound impossible, yet they were all too real for those who came under the watchful eyes of the power-mongers of the aforementioned ages gone by.

In contemporary America, in matters of discipline and punishment, why and how do the power-holders get to make the decisions regarding so-called moral recourse against so-called criminals? It is sad to note that, the United States has more prisons than all the other nations in the world combined. Most of the prisoners in our teeming jails are in for drug crimes and in many cases crimes for which other countries would only require a fine to be paid. Is this reasonable?

I think it might be a good time to ask the questions: Can we place everyone who doesn't agree with those in power in prison? Can we place everyone who commits even the slightest infraction behind bars? At this rate, it appears that our national leaders want to put these questions to the test.

Everyone is subject to arrest at some point in time if they break--in even the slightest way--the law. The sad thing is that most of us don't ever stop to ask questions about crime and punishment until we are the ones in the hot seat. Unless you land in a courtroom with a judge staring you down, you may not care one way or the other about criminal matters or punishments either. But one day, what will you do if you do err and do get caught and no one--including you--has asked or will ask the questions? You'll go to prison, and then it will be entirely too late for questions.

As citizens of the world, it is our job to ask the hard questions now so that we can prevent a prison nation from being all the U.S. is known as around the world.

We need to criticize most sharply the structure of our current system. As Foucault rightly puts it, we need to challenge all of the assumptions and unexamined ways of thinking that these kinds of wrongful practices are based on so as to "make harder those acts which are now too easy. ”