Part 2 - ch.1 Generalized punishment, ch2. The gentle way in punishment
A series of objection presented by law-experts in the late 18C
- Let penalties be regulated &proportioned to the offences
- Let the death sentence be passed only on those convicted of murder
- Let the tortures that revolt humanity be abolished
at last, all these challenges supported an effort to adjust mechanisms of power that frame the everyday lives of individuals.
By the legal limit, man was respected &saved from the barbaric death penalty.
Types of crimes changed from blood-causing and irresistible crimes to the cunning and property-related crimes
Popular illegality tolerated by bourgeoisie who accumulated their wealth on the illegality.
- The change of popular illegality's target from right to possess to the property itself
- popular illegalities such as the struggle against property rights, political and religious protests and the refusal of conscription no longer permitted
Need to constitute a new economy and a technology of the power to punish public criminals
->The essential reason of being of penal reform established
The function of punishment as a example turned from ritual to show the absolute power to the symbol to prevent potential crimes. And this transition concerning the function of punishment involved following rules.
1. The rule of minimum quantity: a little more interest in avoiding the penalty than in risking the crime.
2. The rule of sufficient ideality: what must be maximized is the representation of the penalty, its corporal reality.
3. The rule of lateral effects: The penalty must have its most intense effects on those who have not committed the crime.
4. The rule of perfect certainty: With the idea of each crime and the advantages to be expected of it must be associated the idea of a particular punishment with the precise inconveniences that result from it.
5. The rule of common truth: The verification of the crime must obey the general criteria for all truth.
6. The rule of optimal specification: shift in the point of application of this power-it is no longer body, but the soul.
* the fall of physical punishment &the rising of semio-technique of punishment
a technology of subtle, effective, economic powers, in opposition to the sumptuous expenditure of the power of the sovereign.
Despair and time eat away the bonds of iron and steel, but they are powerless against the habitual union of ideas, they can only tighten it still more; and on the soft fibres of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires.(103)
2. The Gentle way in punishment
The new arsenal of penalties constituted by obstacle-signs &their several conditions
1. They must be as unarbitrary as possible: The law must appear to be a necessity of things, and power must act while concealing itself beneath the gentle force of nature.
2. This complex of signs must engage with the mechanics old forces: It reduce the desire that makes the crime attractive and increase that makes the penalty be feared. In other words, It should show criminals what it is to lose the freedom to dispose as one wishes of one's own wealth, honor, time and body.
3. A temporal modulations should be used according to the types and degrees of crimes.
4. For the convict, the penalty is a mechanics of signs, interests and duration: The body of the condemned was no longer king's property, but rather property of society. The condemned show the public their utility to the society.
5. Hence a whole learned economy of publicity. As opposed to the past when the example was based on terror, the example now based on the lessons, the discourse, the discipline sign, the representation of public morality.
6. This will make possible in society an inversion of the traditional discourse of crime: Whether the severities of penalties weref actual or not, according to a strict economy, these all severities teach a lesson.
* The point of application of the penalty is not the representation, but the body, time, everyday gestures and activities.