In this essay, I examine arguments from Durkheimian, conflict and Foucauldian theoretical approaches to punishment, ultimately analyzing the state’s role in the punitive process. In regards to Emile Durkheim, I am analyzing David Garland’s “Punishment and Social Solidarity: the Work of Emile Durkheim”, originally published in 1991. For the conflict theorists, I am working with Meda Chesney-Lind’s “Girl’s Crime and Woman’s Place: Toward a Feminist Model of Female Delinquency”, originally published in 1989. Finally, I analyze Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, originally published in 1975. Specifically, I am interested in how the institutionalization of punishment perpetuates existing power of the state and privileged classes, and how these power
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Early “childsaving” movements, which pushed for separate institutions for juveniles, “revolved around the monitoring of young girls’, particularly immigrant girls’ behavior to prevent their straying from the path”. Social purists pushed for reform that ultimately led to more intense regulation of female sexuality. Chesney-Lind notes that “In Honolulu, during the period 1920-1930, over half of the girls referred to court were charged with ‘immorality’, which meant evidence of sexual intercourse”. Invasive gynecological examinations “were routinely ordered in virtually all girls’ cases”. Incarceration was used as a tactic to isolate girls until marriageable age to produce subordinated, controlled women. Institutional punishment served the function of forcing girls into their established roles, securing patriarchal power …show more content…
He illuminates the institution’s effect on the mind of the individual, the institutional construction of the soul, and the manipulated mind’s effect on the body. For Foucault, to analyze the state is to analyze its role in the construction of knowledge, and the subsequent submission of the people’s mind, soul and body.
Foucault’s understanding of institutionalized punishment is grounded in the concept of power-knowledge. Durkheim’s model of the mutually reinforcing relationship of morality and punishment is helpful in understanding Foucault’s power-knowledge; knowledge gives rise to the possibility of power, and the exertion of power reinforces and affirms knowledge. Foucault describes power-knowledge in terms of the ways that power reciprocally constitutes and implies existing knowledge. there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. [...] In short, it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of
Early “childsaving” movements, which pushed for separate institutions for juveniles, “revolved around the monitoring of young girls’, particularly immigrant girls’ behavior to prevent their straying from the path”. Social purists pushed for reform that ultimately led to more intense regulation of female sexuality. Chesney-Lind notes that “In Honolulu, during the period 1920-1930, over half of the girls referred to court were charged with ‘immorality’, which meant evidence of sexual intercourse”. Invasive gynecological examinations “were routinely ordered in virtually all girls’ cases”. Incarceration was used as a tactic to isolate girls until marriageable age to produce subordinated, controlled women. Institutional punishment served the function of forcing girls into their established roles, securing patriarchal power …show more content…
He illuminates the institution’s effect on the mind of the individual, the institutional construction of the soul, and the manipulated mind’s effect on the body. For Foucault, to analyze the state is to analyze its role in the construction of knowledge, and the subsequent submission of the people’s mind, soul and body.
Foucault’s understanding of institutionalized punishment is grounded in the concept of power-knowledge. Durkheim’s model of the mutually reinforcing relationship of morality and punishment is helpful in understanding Foucault’s power-knowledge; knowledge gives rise to the possibility of power, and the exertion of power reinforces and affirms knowledge. Foucault describes power-knowledge in terms of the ways that power reciprocally constitutes and implies existing knowledge. there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. [...] In short, it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of