ABSTRACT

Foucault published Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality in consecutive years—in the same period in which he made his remarks on rape and sex with minors. Foucault juxtaposes texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that raise critiques of the prison such as these almost word for word. Foucault himself only reflected on two kinds of sex crimes, rape and child molestation; however, sex crimes are a contested and capacious category. Prisons produce criminals and thus more crime; they do this both by turning one-time lawbreakers into hardened criminals and by depriving families and communities of parents and wage-earners, leading to more crimes arising from poverty and familial and community dysfunction. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that just as criminology has constituted rather than discovered its object of knowledge, so too have the sexual sciences created rather than informed themselves about what we now call "sexualities." The chapter also presents an overview of this book.