Foucault on Institutions

While Foucault does not deny that the abolishment of torture is itself an achievement, he, however, develops a more critical thesis of societies that are not only maintained by coercive apparatuses of the state such as the army or the police “but precisely those techniques of dressage, discipline, and diffused power at work in ‘carceral’ institutions.”(Sheridan, 1980) In other words, there is no real need to torture the body since controlling the mind had become a more effective alternative. Consequently, the new system of punishment produced different experts on the behavior sciences, “small scale legal systems and parallel judges have multiplied around the principal judgment: psychiatric and psychological experts, magistrates concerned with implementation of sentences, educationalists, members of the prison service, all fragment the legal power to punish.”(Foucault, 1977) As Foucault explains, within the modern penal system, there exists the participation of “extra-judicial” elements that are in fact not there to be integrated into the “actual power to punish” but “in order to exculpate the judge from being purely and simply he who punishes.” So in this sense, the penal system justifies its decisions by referring to the extra-judicial elements that serve as legal systems’ sources of knowledge, and knowledge thus becomes a source of power.

References:

Michel F. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Book.
Sheridan, A. (1990) Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth. London: Routledge