Key Arguments

• Foucault explicitly cautions that the new system does not aim at total eradication: “A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all.”
• He calls for a reorientation of objectives and scale: “Shift the object and change the scale. Define new tactics in order to reach a target that is now more subtle but also more widely spread in the social body.”
• He insists on the need for new techniques: “Find new techniques for adjusting punishment to it and for adapting its effects. Lay down new principles for regularizing, refining, universalizing the art of punishing. Homogenize its application.”
• The reform must increase effectiveness while lowering costs: “Reduce its economic and political cost by increasing its effectiveness and by multiplying its circuits.”
• He summarizes this as the core raison d’être of eighteenth‑century reform: “In short, constitute a new economy and a new technology of the power to punish: these are no doubt the essential raisons d’être of penal reform in the eighteenth century.”
• Earlier in the passage he links this to the replacement of the old spectacular, sporadic punitive economy by one of continuity: “It became necessary to define a strategy and techniques of punishment in which an economy of continuity and permanence would replace that of expenditure and excess.”

Source Quotes

That is to say, although the new criminal legislation appears to be characterized by less severe penalties, a clearer codification, a marked diminution of the arbitrary, a more generally accepted consensus concerning the power to punish (in the absence of a more real division in its exercise), it is sustained in reality by an upheaval in the traditional economy of illegalities and a rigorous application of force to maintain their new adjustment. A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all. Shift the object and change the scale.

A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all. Shift the object and change the scale. Define new tactics in order to reach a target that is now more subtle but also more widely spread in the social body. Find new techniques for adjusting punishment to it and for adapting its effects.

Define new tactics in order to reach a target that is now more subtle but also more widely spread in the social body. Find new techniques for adjusting punishment to it and for adapting its effects. Lay down new principles for regularizing, refining, universalizing the art of punishing. Homogenize its application. Reduce its economic and political cost by increasing its effectiveness and by multiplying its circuits.

Homogenize its application. Reduce its economic and political cost by increasing its effectiveness and by multiplying its circuits. In short, constitute a new economy and a new technology of the power to punish: these are no doubt the essential raisons d’être of penal reform in the eighteenth century.

Reduce its economic and political cost by increasing its effectiveness and by multiplying its circuits. In short, constitute a new economy and a new technology of the power to punish: these are no doubt the essential raisons d’être of penal reform in the eighteenth century. At the level of principles, this new strategy falls easily into the general theory of the contract.

It became necessary to get rid of the old economy of the power to punish, based on the principles of the confused and inadequate multiplicity of authorities, the distribution and concentration of the power correlative with actual inertia and inevitable tolerance, punishments that were spectacular in their manifestations and haphazard in their application. It became necessary to define a strategy and techniques of punishment in which an economy of continuity and permanence would replace that of expenditure and excess. In short, penal reform was born at the point of junction between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the infra-power of acquired and tolerated illegalities.

Key Concepts

• A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all.
• Shift the object and change the scale. Define new tactics in order to reach a target that is now more subtle but also more widely spread in the social body.
• Find new techniques for adjusting punishment to it and for adapting its effects. Lay down new principles for regularizing, refining, universalizing the art of punishing. Homogenize its application.
• Reduce its economic and political cost by increasing its effectiveness and by multiplying its circuits.
• In short, constitute a new economy and a new technology of the power to punish: these are no doubt the essential raisons d’être of penal reform in the eighteenth century.
• It became necessary to define a strategy and techniques of punishment in which an economy of continuity and permanence would replace that of expenditure and excess.

Context

In the latter part of this excerpt, after arguing that reform responds to a new configuration of illegalities and a need for permanent policing of property offences, Foucault generalizes the function of modern penality as an administrative technology: adjusting, regularizing, and circulating punishment through the social body rather than theatrically eradicating crime.