The Body of the Condemned

The main purpose of The Body of the Condemned is to discuss the transformation from the spectacle of punishment to more subtle reforms of correction. Contrary to the way punishment operated in the good-old days, Foucault says that contemporary politics have brought the end of the “gloomy festival of punishment” mainly because of the end of the spectacle of torturous punishment – not only punishment of the sort described at the beginning of this essay, but rather the entirety of public punishment including public works-services etc. The main reason for this was the inversion of roles…the criminal became the victim of the state, and the public viewed the executioner as the criminal and the offender as the victim to pity.
The obvious reaction to this by the state/sovereign power was to withdraw punishment from the public domain and make it the least visible part. Foucault extracts several important implications from this transformation from visibility to hiding. First, punishment leaves our everyday thoughts and enters the realm of what he calls “abstract consciousness,” where we recognize its importance not by bearing witness to it, but by knowing that punishment is inevitable for all transgressors. Second, and related to the inevitability claim, Foucault points out that the deterrent factor of punishment comes from the guarantee of punishment instead of the so-called spectacle of punishment. Third, the practice of execution is no longer a display of the sovereign’s awesome power, but has become an obligatory blemish on justice. The trial and conviction have been cast into the public domain to display the criminal’s guilt and complicity with evilness and the execution becomes something to pity the sovereign for for having to carry it out.
Another important transformation in the realm of punishment was in the area of intent. Instead of desiring to inflict pain upon criminals, punishment has now become corrective in nature – a direct part of the project of normalization.
Fifth, the body served no longer as the site of punishment but has become a vehicle for restricting non-physical parts of individuals’ lives – things like liberty and freedom, in what Foucault has labeled the “economy of suspended rights.” Here, life is taken away completely devoid from physical pain.
When physical pain was necessary because of the severity of the crime, it was no longer a long, drawn-out process but a quick and almost painless process. This can be seen in the historical creation of a more efficient gallows and the European guillotine, both designed to bring about the fastest death possible. Even more specifically, the guillotine revolutionalized the death penalty by reducing the contact between the state, or sovereign, and the criminal to a mere tenth of a second – much the same way contact between the law and punishment was reduced to a miniscule amount of time. This separation in turn was even further enhanced by representing the execution of death sentences in words and representations instead of pictures, and by covering the body in cloth to prevent its visibility.
So where then, if not in the body, does he sovereign exact punishment? As Michel Foucault points out, the answer is the soul. Specifically, Foucault says punishment “acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations.” This represents the other major transformation in the criminal realm: the attachment of psychological aspects to crimes. Not only are crimes like murder and rape punished, but so too the mental desires and thoughts that accompany them. These “attenuating circumstances” are used not only to explain the criminal’s actions, but also the way we can expect the criminal to act in the future. And, more importantly, punishment has begun to attempt to alter these future projections. A modern day example of this normalization attempt can be seen in parole boards and the reduction of sentences. If inmates display certain tendencies of community service, apologetics, or more ‘normal’ ways, they’re allowed to return to society more quickly. Another contemporary example is found in the punishment of the mentally challenged or unstable individuals who commit crimes. Since it’s considered heinous and unusual torture to physically punish these individuals, they are placed in special homes to be rehabilitated and mentally stabilized. Here the institutional discipline of science finds a fantastic home where it can expand its knowledge/power base and provide an excuse for the sovereign to plan and manage the lives of the scientifically altered individuals. In addition, the application of the power/knowledge dynamic makes it possible to “ground judgment in truth” because it can lay judgment on the motivations, the crime, and the proper fixing.
Finally, the entirety of this transportation can be described by the desire to obtain a cure for the criminally ill individuals among us. In analyzing this technique, Foucault reminds us to keep four important principles in mind: punishment is a complex social function that serves to deter citizens from engaging in “evil” behaviors; punishment is a political tactic used by the sovereign to normalize those who have gone astray via criminal action; the history of science and penal law have are intertwined to create a humanization of the penal system that alleviates evilness from the sovereign’s inaction of punishment; and finally that the control of the soul of the criminal allows the investment of power relations within the criminal mind. One final point that Foucault addresses is that this last point of the investment of power relations in the soul is critical to the repression and restraint of the body through non-physical means. In Foucault’s own words, “the soul is the prison of the body.”