Key Arguments

• Foucault explains that the demand for knowledge focuses on the subject as convict rather than on the legal act: ‘It is as a convict, as a point of application for punitive mechanisms, that the offender is constituted himself as the object of possible knowledge.’
• This entails a ‘curious substitution’: the apparatus receives ‘a convicted person’ from justice, but ‘what it must apply itself to is not, of course, the offence, nor even exactly the offender, but a rather different object … relevant only for a corrective technology. This other character, whom the penitentiary apparatus substitutes for the convicted offender, is the delinquent.’
• He defines the delinquent by reference to life rather than act: ‘The delinquent is to be distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him.’
• Accordingly, ‘The penitentiary operation, if it is to be a genuine re-education, must become the sum total existence of the delinquent, making of the prison a sort of artificial and coercive theatre in which his life will be examined from top to bottom.’
• Legal punishment ‘bears upon an act; the punitive technique on a life’; it must therefore ‘reconstitute all the sordid detail of a life in the form of knowledge, to fill in the gaps of that knowledge and to act upon it by a practice of compulsion. It is a biographical knowledge and a technique for correcting individual lives.’
• Lucas is cited to show how ‘The observation of the delinquent “should go back not only to the circumstances, but also to the causes of his crime; they must be sought in the story of his life, from the triple point of view of psychology, social position and upbringing”’, indicating a systematic biographical inquiry.
• Foucault stresses that ‘The introduction of the “biographical” is important in the history of penality. Because it establishes the “criminal” as existing before the crime and even outside it.’
• This biographical perspective allows a ‘psychological causality, duplicating the juridical attribution of responsibility’, and leads into what he calls the ‘“criminological” labyrinth’: ‘any determining cause, because it reduces responsibility, marks the author of the offence with a criminality all the more formidable and demands penitentiary measures that are all the more strict.’
• He notes that as biography duplicates the analysis of circumstances, ‘one sees penal discourse and psychiatric discourse crossing each other’s frontiers; and there, at their point of junction, is formed the notion of the “dangerous” individual, which makes it possible to draw up a network of causality in terms of an entire biography and to present a verdict of punishment-correction.’

Source Quotes

This demand for knowledge was not, in the first instance, inserted into the legislation itself, in order to provide substance for the sentence and to determine the true degree of guilt. It is as a convict, as a point of application for punitive mechanisms, that the offender is constituted himself as the object of possible knowledge. But this implies that the penitentiary apparatus, with the whole technological programme that accompanies it, brings about a curious substitution: from the hands of justice, it certainly receives a convicted person; but what it must apply itself to is not, of course, the offence, nor even exactly the offender, but a rather different object, one defined by variables which at the outset at least were not taken into account in the sentence, for they were relevant only for a corrective technology.

But this implies that the penitentiary apparatus, with the whole technological programme that accompanies it, brings about a curious substitution: from the hands of justice, it certainly receives a convicted person; but what it must apply itself to is not, of course, the offence, nor even exactly the offender, but a rather different object, one defined by variables which at the outset at least were not taken into account in the sentence, for they were relevant only for a corrective technology. This other character, whom the penitentiary apparatus substitutes for the convicted offender, is the delinquent. The delinquent is to be distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him.

This other character, whom the penitentiary apparatus substitutes for the convicted offender, is the delinquent. The delinquent is to be distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him. The penitentiary operation, if it is to be a genuine re-education, must become the sum total existence of the delinquent, making of the prison a sort of artificial and coercive theatre in which his life will be examined from top to bottom.

The delinquent is to be distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him. The penitentiary operation, if it is to be a genuine re-education, must become the sum total existence of the delinquent, making of the prison a sort of artificial and coercive theatre in which his life will be examined from top to bottom. The legal punishment bears upon an act; the punitive technique on a life; it falls to this punitive technique, therefore, to reconstitute all the sordid detail of a life in the form of knowledge, to fill in the gaps of that knowledge and to act upon it by a practice of compulsion.

The penitentiary operation, if it is to be a genuine re-education, must become the sum total existence of the delinquent, making of the prison a sort of artificial and coercive theatre in which his life will be examined from top to bottom. The legal punishment bears upon an act; the punitive technique on a life; it falls to this punitive technique, therefore, to reconstitute all the sordid detail of a life in the form of knowledge, to fill in the gaps of that knowledge and to act upon it by a practice of compulsion. It is a biographical knowledge and a technique for correcting individual lives. The observation of the delinquent ‘should go back not only to the circumstances, but also to the causes of his crime; they must be sought in the story of his life, from the triple point of view of psychology, social position and upbringing, in order to discover the dangerous proclivities of the first, the harmful predispositions of the second and the bad antecedents of the third.

Behind the offender, to whom the investigation of the facts may attribute responsibility for an offence, stands the delinquent whose slow formation is shown in a biographical investigation. The introduction of the ‘biographical’ is important in the history of penality. Because it establishes the ‘criminal’ as existing before the crime and even outside it. And, for this reason, a psychological causality, duplicating the juridical attribution of responsibility, confuses its effects.

At this point one enters the ‘criminological’ labyrinth from which we have certainly not yet emerged: any determining cause, because it reduces responsibility, marks the author of the offence with a criminality all the more formidable and demands penitentiary measures that are all the more strict. As the biography of the criminal duplicates in penal practice the analysis of circumstances used in gauging the crime, so one sees penal discourse and psychiatric discourse crossing each other’s frontiers; and there, at their point of junction, is formed the notion of the ‘dangerous’ individual, which makes it possible to draw up a network of causality in terms of an entire biography and to present a verdict of punishment-correction.14 The delinquent is also to be distinguished from the offender in that he is not only the author of his acts (the author responsible in terms of certain criteria of free, conscious will), but is linked to his offence by a whole bundle of complex threads (instincts, drives, tendencies, character). The penitentiary technique bears not on the relation between author and crime, but on the criminal’s affinity with his crime.

Key Concepts

• It is as a convict, as a point of application for punitive mechanisms, that the offender is constituted himself as the object of possible knowledge.
• This other character, whom the penitentiary apparatus substitutes for the convicted offender, is the delinquent.
• The delinquent is to be distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him.
• The penitentiary operation, if it is to be a genuine re-education, must become the sum total existence of the delinquent, making of the prison a sort of artificial and coercive theatre in which his life will be examined from top to bottom.
• The legal punishment bears upon an act; the punitive technique on a life; it falls to this punitive technique, therefore, to reconstitute all the sordid detail of a life in the form of knowledge, to fill in the gaps of that knowledge and to act upon it by a practice of compulsion. It is a biographical knowledge and a technique for correcting individual lives.
• The introduction of the ‘biographical’ is important in the history of penality. Because it establishes the ‘criminal’ as existing before the crime and even outside it.
• there, at their point of junction, is formed the notion of the ‘dangerous’ individual, which makes it possible to draw up a network of causality in terms of an entire biography and to present a verdict of punishment-correction.

Context

Middle of the passage, where Foucault shows how penitentiary techniques shift the focus of punishment from discrete acts to whole lives, giving rise to biographical investigation, overlapping penal and psychiatric discourses, and the modern figure of the ‘delinquent’ and the ‘dangerous individual’ as central objects of knowledge and correction.