OR Reading Circle

OR Reading Circle (posted by Lily)

Our latest reading project at Owens Rhetoric encompasses two books:

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault (1975)

Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, edited by Lola Vollen and Dave Eggers (2005)

Please feel free to read along with us and/or join in with your comments! Meanwhile, here are some of our initial thoughts.

LILY:
In his first chapter, Foucault talks about how the body has increasingly disappeared as the major target of penal repression, and punishment has become the most private/secret part of the justice process. I was thinking about how perfectly Foucault's observation reflects what the first couple of guys describe in the Eggers book - that the worst part of prison, especially death row, is the loneliness; and 2/3 of prison suicides occur in solitary confinement situations. In writing about the paradigm shift from punishing the body to punishing the soul, Foucault writes that, instead of inflicting physical pain, the new trend has been "to supervise the individual, to neutralize his dangerous state of mind, to alter his criminal tendencies."

What's interesting to me here is how this program of "neutralizing the dangerous state of mind" works out when the state of mind you're attempting to neutralize is not actually dangerous - as would be the case for the wrongfully convicted. What happens to an individual when you embark on an aggressive campaign to "alter his criminal tendencies," but he doesn't HAVE any criminal tendencies? To use religious terminology, it's an interesting exercise in futility to try to purge a mind/soul of sin when there is no sin in it.

Hey, and also -- who do y'all think Foucault is talking about when he mentions the "minor civil servants of moral orthopaedics" who thrive on the shame that inflicting punishment causes? I thought it was an interesting turn of phrase.

ANDREW:
My initial response is that it is simply a bummer. Wrongful imprisonment is simply that.

I reckon, though, your question rests its inquiry on the further question of what is happening in the prison. Is it to correct a
criminal propensity? Or to punish?

That, as it turns out, is my question after reading most the first Foucault chapter. His main thrust is that the Justice system disassociated itself from the body. It became something that found guilt, but then ushered over the punishment to administrative entities. It seemed the example of the guillotine was the perfect illustration here . . . that this was the moment where the State became hardly involved with the Punishment. Switch a lever, and hands are clean.

Still, Foucault asserted a few times in the initial chapter that the State still imposes bodily punishment, doesn't he? I carried away a point about ANY deprivation of body was still a state's hold on the body. We limit liberty of movement, food, intimate relations, and so forth. I was hoping to get this clarified. What is his final point on the state/body. It seems to be that Justice has moved from the public spectacle, but that the hold of the body somehow remains?

LILY:
When he poses the question, what would non-corporal punishment look like?, I guess he's getting at the point that we don't have any other way to access the soul, as it were, except through the body. So, any attempts to punish/correct the SOUL must necessarily be done by doing something to the BODY, e.g. solitary confinement, restrictions on liberties, etc. Maybe that's sort of why he says that all punishment, no matter how mental a level it is intended to take place on, must retain a kernel of physical torture.