ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault seeks to make theoretical sense of how the nature of punishment could change so radically in such a short period of time. Fundamental to Foucault’s explanation of penal development, and a theme which runs throughout his work, is the power-knowledge dyad. The reading included maps out some of Foucault’s key ideas, and outlines an approach which has had an enormous influence on subsequent theorising and research on surveillance. The regulations of the disciplinary establishments may reproduce the law, the punishments imitate the verdicts and penalties, the surveillance repeat the police model; and, all the multiple establishments, the prison, which in relation to them is a pure form, unadulterated and unmitigated, gives them a sort of official sanction. The carceral, with its long gradation stretching from the convict-ship or imprisonment with hard labour to diffuse, slight limitations, communicates a type of power that the law validates and that justice uses as its favourite weapon.
