Discipline and Punish

From Torture to Prison

In the middle of the eighteenth century, punishment was a public event. When Damiens was executed for attempting to kill the king, the sentence was carried out through prolonged torture in front of a crowd. The point was not only to kill him, but to show the full force of royal power on his body. The scene made visible the idea that an attack on the law was an attack on the ruler himself.

Less than a century later, punishment looked very different. Instead of a scaffold in a public square, there was a prison timetable, a locked cell, and a regulated daily routine. Time, movement, labor, and silence became the new tools of control. The body was no longer torn apart in public, but trained in private.

This change is often described as moral progress, but the shift was more complex. Physical cruelty became less visible, yet punishment reached further into everyday life. Executions moved behind walls, and justice became quieter, more regular, and harder to see. Violence did not disappear so much as change form.

At the same time, the target of punishment changed. Courts no longer focused only on the act itself. They began to ask who the offender was, what kind of character they had, what in their past explained the act, and whether they might offend again. Punishment moved from the body toward conduct, habits, and personality.

This opened the door to new experts. Doctors, psychiatrists, teachers, prison officials, and social workers began to speak alongside judges. Their role was not simply to advise the law, but to help classify, monitor, and reshape the person being punished. What looked like a more humane system also became a deeper and more detailed form of control.

From this point on, power worked through what Foucault calls discipline. Discipline makes people both useful and obedient by organizing their space, their time, and their actions. It does not rely mainly on dramatic force. Instead, it works through routine, observation, and training until people begin to regulate themselves.