Discipline and Punish: An Overview

Have you ever felt like you’re constantly being watched at work, or that your phone is being tapped? Does your office sometimes feel more like a prison? Paranoia? Not according to Michel Foucault. In his book Discipline and Punish, Foucault explains how schools, factories, the military, hospitals, and prisons are all fundamentally similar—and why. Let’s revisit the key points of this influential work and see how society has become the perfect object for surveillance and punishment.

The Beginning

On March 2, 1757, Damien was sentenced to “public penance at the main gates of the Paris Cathedral”; he was to be brought there in a cart, wearing only a shirt, holding a burning candle weighing two pounds. Then, “in the same cart, he was taken to the Place de Grève, where, after having his nipples, hands, thighs, and calves torn with red-hot pincers, he was placed on a scaffold, holding in his right hand the knife he had intended to use for regicide; that hand was to be burned with burning sulfur, and the wounds made by the pincers were to be doused with boiling lead, oil, pitch, wax, and sulfur. Finally, his body was to be drawn and quartered by four horses, the remains burned to ashes, and the ashes scattered to the wind.”

“He was finally quartered,” reports the Gazette d’Amsterdam. “This last act took a long time, as the horses were not used to pulling; so instead of four, six horses were used, but even that was not enough, and to tear off the poor man’s limbs, his tendons had to be cut and his joints smashed… It is said that, although he was a hardened blasphemer, not a single curse escaped his lips; only unbearable pain made him scream, and he often repeated: ‘Lord Jesus, have mercy, help me, Lord.’”

This is how Discipline and Punish begins.

The Traditional History of Punishment

Foucault recounts the execution of Robert-François Damiens, who attempted to assassinate King Louis XV of France. He was drawn and quartered in Paris on March 28, 1757. This execution was exceptionally brutal, even for the 18th century—France hadn’t used quartering for a hundred years before, and never again after. Such gruesome spectacles were more typical of the Middle Ages. Up until the first bourgeois revolutions, the main goal of punishment was deterrence, with death and bodily harm as the primary methods.

The revolutions changed attitudes toward punishment. The main goal became retribution and the removal of the criminal as the cause of crime. In the 18th and 19th centuries, imprisonment was used to isolate and humiliate the criminal, causing suffering. However, the 19th and 20th centuries saw a shift toward more humane treatment of prisoners, with international law establishing humanitarian standards for incarceration. The stated goals of imprisonment became correction and rehabilitation, with the condition that punishment should not violate basic rights or human dignity.

This brief overview is enough to understand Foucault’s ideas, though it doesn’t cover the full “history” of punishment. The history of punishment is a topic to return to.

Foucault’s History of Punishment

Foucault’s account of the history of punishment doesn’t differ much from the traditional one. In the Middle Ages, public executions and brutal corporal punishments were the norm. The Enlightenment reduced the spectacle and sought to lessen the criminal’s suffering, but still maintained the tradition of physical destruction—ostensibly for public safety. Later, imprisonment replaced all other forms of punishment, still isolating the criminal but now preserving their life.

The meanings, however, changed. Physical suffering was replaced by moral suffering. Life was spared, but what made a person human—their will—was taken away. The declared purpose of imprisonment was to reform and correct (though in practice, the effect was often the opposite).

The main goal of prison is to make a person “normal”—that is, predictable. To train them so their actions become automatic. To instill discipline and adherence to rules. To know and accept that you must obey, that you don’t make the rules, you follow them. This goal is convenient and desirable not just for prisoners. The state, as a manager, has long sought ways to perfectly manage the masses. It’s much easier to control groups of people who act according to routines and rules. And it doesn’t matter whether the group is students, workers, or prisoners. Foucault illustrated this point with a riddle for his students.

The Maestro’s Riddle

“Let me give you a riddle. I’ll describe the rules of an institution that actually existed in France between 1840 and 1845. I won’t specify whether it’s a factory, prison, psychiatric hospital, monastery, school, or barracks; you have to guess what it is.

This institution houses four hundred unmarried people who must get up every morning at 5 a.m.; by 5:50, they must finish their toilette, make their beds, and drink coffee; at 6 a.m., mandatory work begins, ending at 8:15 p.m., with a one-hour lunch break; at 8:15 p.m., dinner and joint prayer; rest in the dormitories begins exactly at 9 p.m.

‘The parish church,’ the rules say, ‘may become a point of contact with the outside world, so a chapel is consecrated inside the institution.’ Outsiders are not allowed. Residents may leave only for Sunday walks, and only under the supervision of church staff. Church staff oversee walks, dormitories, and workshops, ensuring both moral and economic control. Residents receive not wages, but a reward, totaling 40–80 francs a year, paid only upon leaving the institution. If a person of the opposite sex needs to enter for practical or economic reasons, they must be carefully screened and stay only briefly. They must remain silent under threat of expulsion.

In short, two main organizational principles: residents must never be alone in the dormitory, dining room, workshop, or yard; and any contact with the outside world is forbidden—the Holy Spirit alone must rule within.”

So, what is this institution? In reality, the answer doesn’t matter, because it could be any institution: for men or women, young or old, a prison, boarding school, or reformatory.

The answer: it was simply a factory—a women’s enterprise in the Rhône region of France.

Discipline: The Perfect Weapon

What makes us mistake one institution for another in Foucault’s riddle? What makes schools and prisons so similar? The answer is discipline. Discipline in the organization of any institution. Discipline in the control of those being supervised.

There are several organizational principles:

• Separation. The institution must be on its own territory, separated from other spaces—ideally by a fence. Schools have fences, prisons have barbed wire, offices have security systems, factories have gates.
• Cellular division. Each institution is divided into cells—classrooms, wards, cells, offices, and cubicles.
• Functional placement. Every space is used; there are no empty areas—everything is “useful.”
• Rank as the unit. The unit is not territory or place, but rank—your place in the hierarchy. In the army, it’s rank; in school, it’s grade level.

Discipline is the art of rank and the technique of transforming placements. It individualizes bodies through localization—not fixing them in one place, but distributing and circulating them in a network of relationships.

Once space is organized, the activities of the residents must also be organized:

• Allocation of time. Three main methods: establishing rhythms, enforcing specific activities, and introducing repetitive cycles. Marching, standing for the teacher, bells for waking, eating, and resting.
• Detailing actions over time. Every movement is prescribed—direction, scope, duration, sequence. Time penetrates the body, bringing with it all forms of detailed control by authority. The daily schedule is the main commandment of regimented institutions.
• Correlation of body and gesture. The best relationship between gesture and body position is enforced for efficiency and speed—how a soldier assembles a rifle, how a student sits while writing.
• Relationship between body and object. Discipline dictates how the body should interact with objects (like how to hold a pen).
• Exhaustive use or anti-idleness. No time should be wasted; all time allotted by the state or God and paid for by people must be used productively.

Society: The Ideal Object and Victim

All these disciplinary principles are implemented not just in prisons, but throughout our society. Foucault recalls Jeremy Bentham, who in the 18th century proposed a “model of our society in miniature: the famous Panopticon.”

The Panopticon is an architectural structure that allows one person to exercise power over many; a type of institution suitable for schools, hospitals, prisons, reformatories, orphanages, and factories. The Panopticon is a ring-shaped building with a central courtyard and a tower in the middle. The ring is divided into small cells with windows facing both the inner courtyard and the outside. In each cell is placed a student, worker, prisoner, or patient. The supervisor is in the central tower.

Because each cell faces both inward and outward, the supervisor’s gaze can penetrate the entire cell; there is no place to hide, so everything the individual does is visible to the supervisor, who can see everything but remains unseen.

Bentham believed this architectural trick could be used in many institutions. The Panopticon is a utopian vision of society and power—a utopia that has become reality. This type of power can be called “panopticism.” We live in a society ruled by panopticism.

This is a type of power over individuals, exercised through constant surveillance, control, punishment and reward, correction, and the shaping of individuals according to certain norms. The three aspects of panopticism—surveillance, control, and correction—are the main dimensions of power relations in our society.

In the grand social Panopticon, whose function was to transform people’s lives into productive force, the prison played a symbolic and demonstrative role, rather than an economic, punitive, or corrective one. The prison is a mirror image of society—a threat made visible.

Instead of a Conclusion

According to Foucault, we all live in a society under permanent surveillance. We all live in a prison, in a Panopticon.

Many historians and specialists accuse Foucault of “cherry-picking facts.” It’s too easy, they say, to fit historical events into his theory of rational management and, later, biopolitics. Maybe it’s just the philosopher’s skill with words and his wild imagination. Either way, no criminologist, sociologist, or political scientist can ignore these conclusions. Foucault gives us too much to think about.

October 15 marks the 90th anniversary of Michel Foucault’s birth, and our world hasn’t changed much since then…

After all, don’t you sometimes wonder if “Big Brother is watching you” too?