ABSTRACT
The ways in which penal systems conceptualise offenders’ identities are closely connected with the types and forms of knowledge they are based on. Different forms of knowledge bring with them different forms of control (Foucault 1977, 1980), and give different meanings to the word ‘punishment’. In the following two chapters, I explore further what it means for offenders to be punished in a system which increasingly has difficulties creating narratives, and what it means for offenders to be disciplined ‘in a way that makes their behaviour amenable to data collection’ (Bøhme 1992: 46). The trend opens a number of issues with regard to identity construction and the nature of disciplinary control. It is often easier to get a grasp on the present by comparing it with the past. For that reason, I compare the present notions of the self with some past ones and try to pin down the possible lines of continuity and discontinuity. For a long time, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison has provided a potent image of offenders and penal strategies.1 For Foucault, to punish means to control the ‘soul’. The disciplinary state attempts to get hold of the essence of one’s inner life and to normalise it. However, it will be suggested that we may now be seeing contours of a different strategy. Control of the ‘soul’ may no longer be the main objective of contemporary penal strategies. Often, these strategies seem to be eschewing the notion of the individual altogether. They are increasingly able to avoid dealing directly with offenders’ individualities.
