Crime And Punishment.

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
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(These are some ideas I have been gathering by reading Michel Foucault in the book; " Discipline And Punishment". )

Punishment always equals reform.

Punishment is always a discouragement on men from acting on their own insights and instincts.

Punishment is devised to treat all criminal offenders.

We punish in the hope to obtain a cure for individuals who act in states of criminality.

Punishment is a political ideological tactic.

Punishment is always about branding the accused with infamy.

Justice ceremonially expresses all its force through that of torture, imprisonment, and execution.

Through the courts and dictations of law the accused are forced to take part in the ritual of producing penal truth.

Through confession the accused in forced participation sings the truth of preliminary investigation.

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It is no longer simply: 'Has the act been established and is it punishable?

'But also: ’ What is this act, what is this act of violence or this murder?

To what level or to what field of reality does it belong?

Is it a phantasy, a psychotic reaction, a delusional episode, a perverse action?

It is no longer simply: 'Who committed it? ’ But: How can we assign the casual process that produced it?

Where did it originate in the author himself? Instinct, unconscious, enviroment, heredity?

It is no longer simply: What law punishes this offense?

But: What would be the most appropriate measures to take?

How do we see the future development of the offender?

What would be the best way of rehabilitating him?

A whole set of assessing, diagnostic, prognostic, normative judgements concerning the criminal have become lodged in the framework of penal judgement.

The assertion of guilt has turned into a strange scientifico- juridicial complex.

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I believe the biggest assumption of so called " Justice Systems", “Courts”, “Governments”, and " Legal Frameworks of various legalities" is that judgement of decrying criminality as wrong.

What is wrong, what is right?

[b]The origins of punishment can be surmised with this statement:

If one commits something that the law forbids, even if there is neither harm nor injury to the individual, it is an offence that demands reparation because the the right of the superior man is violated and because it offends the dignity of his character.[/b]

To this I would add:

Where the does a demand of reparation originate from?

What are rights? Do rights exist?

Why shouldn’t one violate another?

If the so called superior man is violated and thoroughly held up against his own will by a criminal is he really all that superior?

So what if his dignity is offended? People’s dignity are constantly exploited, disenfranchised, and utilized in many infamous acts of the economical pursuasion everyday by that of intentional government legalization.

Why does any of this matter?

( I will add more to this thread later on.)

4

Behavorial genetics and other studies give us a true grasp of whats really going on. Most murderer’s are shown to have faulty prefrontal cortexes (the part of the brain responsible for rational thinking, self control, emotional stop-points, etc). On top of that, theres a variety of mental problems that are physiological/genetic that can effect behavior.

Should individual A be treated like individual B, if in individual A the hardware is not working, they don’t have the capability that allows most people to rationally avoid those actions or the ability to control their rage from building to insane peaks if they literally don’t have the brain capacity to control it, how can we morally punish these people with others?

How can we morally let them out to society not permantly medicated? Its a complicated situation with no easy anwsers, but the fact that these things do influence behavior, is true.

Someone genetically predisposed to violence (or insanity) can live a normal life as a normal human, but in a slightly different environment be a mass-murderer, this is just the complexity of genes interacting with environment i guess.

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Change your avatar Joker. [-X

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Yes…I know my avatar was messed up.

( Was it too large or somthing?)

I was gone for four days and couldn’t change it. (My bad.)

Anyhow one of the moderators changed my avatar temporarily by giving me a cabbage patch kid instead. ( Chuckles.)

7

The ceremony of punishment is an exercise of terror.

It is a policy of terror to make everyone aware through the body of the criminal of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign government.

Torture, imprisonment, and execution reveals the state’s truth in showing the operation of its ideal power.

It assumes the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public, the procedure of investigation on the operation of the confession; it made it possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal; in the same horror, the crime had to be manifested and annulled.

It also made the body of the condemned man the place where the vengeance of sovereign government was applied, the anchoring point for a manifestation of power, an opportunity of affirming the dissymmetry of forces.

Truth and power relations are the heart of punishment mechanisms.

In order for punishment to disguise its immoral sequences it finds itself in the necessity of describing its atrocious actions as “humane” in order to give off the necessary illusion that it is “right”.

[b]Morality tolerates the under-privileged, the exploited, the disenfranchised, the alienated, the enslaved and the suffering of others legislatively and economically.

Morality then also inflicts the accused with immoral forms of punishment.

How does morality exist with its double standards as a single absolute form of existence with contradiction of this light?

What is justice beyond the pretensious fling of immoral revenge in a never ending spectacle of pretending to be humane in disguise to shield itself from criticism?[/b]

A crime is committed because it procures certain advantages.

If one linked, to the idea of crime, the idea of a slightly greater disadvantage, it would cease to be desirable.

What we call justice, the government and the courts is really a system of semiology that subdues and conquers other people’s minds.

It works by means of the theory of interests, representations, and signs, by the series and geneses that it reconstituted, a sort of general recipe for the exercise of power over men where there exists none nowhere else.

The mind as a surface of inscription for power, is used with semiology as a tool.

It spells the whole submission of bodies through the control of ideas.

It is not enough that you chain people with irons but it is evem more impressive when you chain ideas in other people’s head where they then become at your disposal.

It becomes much more effective to enslave people by the chain of their very own ideas.

Here we see that analogical punishment is the power that hiddenly punishes without ever revealing itself.

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Not always. This is where the judge’s individual virtue comes into play. A wise judge will first of all distinguish if the subject HAS a problem, and will then try to make an exact corrective action; not a vengeful one.

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The corrective action of the judge is just another form of punishment.

( It is society’s punishment of immoral revenge on the accused since all forms of punishments require the deprivation of the accused’s freedom through immoral means.)

10

Joker, do you still want to do this thing we talked about months ago? The offer is still there for you to come here, if you prefer.

Also, let’s discuss this publicly, because I want the offer to extend to others…others who might be carved from the same wood, so to speak.

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Imprisonment is the holding of a person and his body as security; in this sense the imprisonment of a suspect has a role similar to that of a debtor.

It is thought by this application that the victim of a crime has security at the accused’s expense.

Prisons merely replace the old galleys and thus become reformatories.

Prisons exists as a example to be feared, instrument of conversion and a condition for an apprenticeship.

Discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, ‘docile bodies’.

Discipline increases the forces of the body ( in economic terms of utility and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience).

In short it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude’, a ‘capacity’, which it seeks to increase; on the other hand it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it and turns it into a relation of strict subjection.

If economic exploitation seperates the force and the product of labor let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination.

Discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space.

The body is constituted as a part of a multisegmentary machine.

The time of each must be adjusted to the time of others in such a way that the maximum quantity of forces may be extracted from each other and combined with the optimum idealistic result.

To sum up, it might be said that moral discipline creates out of the bodies it controls four types of individuality or rather an individuality that is endowed with four characteristics: it is cellular ( by the play of spatial distribution) it is organic ( by the coding of activities) it is genetic ( by the accumulation of time) it is combinatory ( by the composition of forces).

And in doing so it operates four great techniques: it draws up tables; it prescribes movements; it imposes exercises; lastly in order to obtain the combination of forces it arranges tactics.

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This sort of semantical exercise of yours requires a absolute sense of right or wrong followed by naive understanding of absolute truth in the support of your equally absurd position of social normalcy.

Where amongst the cosmos does it say that one psychological perception is more acceptable or better than the other?

You have nothing. I guess it is true…That pyschology is a modern religious movement that aids and abides with the state’s supervision.

( Cyrene you are a pawn in this cruel game of life.)

13

Modern economics bind all their subjects into a single uniform mass, they seperate, analyze, differentiate, carry their procedures of decomposition to the point of necessary and sufficient single units.

It “trains” the moving, confused, useless multitudes of bodies and forces into a multiplicity of individual elements- small seperate cells, organic autonomies, genetic identities and continuities, combinatory segments.

Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise.

It is not a triumphant power, which because of its own excess can pride itself on its omnipotence; it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated but permanent economy.

Civilization is dominated around the conception of surveillance.

A whole problematic then develops: That of an architecture that is no longer built simply to be seen ( As with the ostentation of palaces) , or to be observed in external space (geometry of fortresses) but to permit an internal articulated and detailed control to render visible those who are inside it.

All school buildings are mechanisms of training as they remain pedagogical machines.

They train vigorous bodies, the imperative of qualification; the imperative of politics; prevent debauchery, the imperative of morality.

Schools are apparatuses for observation and control. In short they are controlled “human” laboratories.

The disciplinary institutions secreted a machine of control that functioned like a microscope of conduct; the fine, analytical, divisions that they created formed around men an apparatus of observation, recording and training.

The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly.

A central point would be both the source of light illuminating everything and a locus of convergence for everything that must be known: A perfect eye that nothing would escape and centre towards which all gazes would be turned.

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At the heart of all disciplinary systems functions a small penal mechanism.

It enjoys a kind of judicial privilege with its own laws, its specific offences, its particular forms of judgement. The disciplines established an ’ infra-penality’ ; they partitioned an area that the laws had left empty; they defined and repressed a mass of behavior that the relative indifference of the great systems of punishment had allowed to escape.

By the word of punishment one must understand everything that is capable of making people feel the offence they have comitted, everything that is capable of humiliating them, of confusing them… a certain coldness, a certain indifference, a question, a removal from office.

What is specific to the disciplinary penality is non-observance, that which does not measure up to the rule, that departs from it.

The whole indefinite domain of the non-conforming is punishable.

Disciplinary punishment has the function of reducing gaps. It is essentially a corrective measure.

Punishment is made to make all persons alike in all and every way.

Normalization in punishment and society implies the domination of idealistic standards.

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A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation.

A panopticon is a royal menagerie: the animal is replaced by man.

The panopticon is a privileged place for expiriments on men.

The panopticon functions as a sort of laboratory of power that constantly seeks to expiriment with men.

Panopticonism is the general principle of a new political anatomy whose object and end are not the relations of sovreignty but the relations of discipline.

Prisons are artificial and coercive fictitious theatres guided by religion in charge of disciplinary change.

[size=200]The End.[/size]

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Bloody hell,

It took me a long time to gather the notes for this thread.

( A reply to it would be appreciated.)

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Punish all infidels for their sins, and have no mercy on their fucking souls :confused:

That the kind’a reply you mean?

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Well I would expect that much from other people but certainly not from you. :slight_smile:

Is that all you have to say? I’m a bit disappointed. [-X :stuck_out_tongue:

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I am a woman of few words, Joker…

…that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the subject, anyway - I’m surprised you expected more from me than this / you know my stance on rapists, murderers etc…

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D & P´s definitely on my to-read list, along with Madness and Civilisation.