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Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (French: Surveiller et punir : Naissance de la prison) is a 1975 book by French philosopher Michel Foucault.It is an analysis of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the changes that occurred in Western penal systems during the modern age based on historical documents from France.
Foucault cites the main driving force behind this set of accelerated change was the modern human sciences and the technologies both available to skilled professionals from the 16th century and a whole set of clever techniques used to shift the whole old social order into the new order of things.
[1] [2] This form of analysis developed out of Foucault's genealogical work, where power was linked to the formation of discourse within specific historical periods. Some versions of this method stress the genealogical application of discourse analysis to illustrate how discourse is produced to govern social groups. [ 3 ]
Foucault's theories primarily addressed the relationships between power versus knowledge and liberty, and he analyzed how they are used as a form of social control through multiple institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist , Foucault rejected these labels and sought to critique authority without limits on himself. [ 10 ]
A major theme throughout these lectures is the constantly changing relationship between admitting guilt ("avowal") and achieving justice for both individuals and society. [3] Foucault starts with Pre-Socratic ancient Greece and follows how it's evolved over time. Then he examines "avowal" as applied to professional fields like medicine, law ...
Foucault first used the phrase "carceral archipelago" to describe the penal institution at Mettray, France.Foucault said that Mettray was the "most famous of a whole series of institutions which, well beyond the frontiers of criminal law, constituted what one might call the carceral archipelago."
Normalization process theory [5] is a middle-range theory used mainly in medical sociology and science and technology studies to provide a framework for understanding the social processes by which new ways of thinking, working and organizing become routinely incorporated in everyday work.
That the acceptable ideas change and develop in the course of time, manifested as paradigm shifts of intellectualism, for instance between the "Classical Age" [1] and "Modernity" (from Kant onwards) — which is the period considered by Foucault in the book — is support for the thesis that every historical period has underlying epistemic ...