Key Arguments

• Prison facilitates post‑release supervision, recruitment of informers, mutual denunciations, and contacts among offenders, thereby ‘precipitat[ing] the organization of a delinquent milieu, closed in upon itself, but easily supervised’.
• Prison and police are described as a ‘twin mechanism’ that ‘assure in the whole field of illegalities the differentiation, isolation and use of delinquency’; the system produces a specific delinquency and simultaneously uses it.
• Foucault summarizes the circuit: ‘Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison.’
• He denies the existence of a penal justice that simply prosecutes all illegal practices with police as auxiliary and prison as mere punitive instrument; instead, he claims, ‘One should regard this justice as an instrument for the differential supervision of illegalities.’
• Criminal justice is positioned as ‘a relay in a general economy of illegalities, whose other elements are (not below it, but beside it) the police, the prison and delinquency’, showing that courts serve as a legal transmission point inside a larger carceral economy.
• What appear as police ‘encroachment on justice’ and carceral ‘inertia’ against justice are said to be ‘a structural feature that characterizes punitive mechanisms in modern societies’, not pathologies or later power shifts.
• Judges are reduced to subordinate functionaries of this apparatus: ‘penal justice, with all its theatrical apparatus, is intended to respond to the daily demand of an apparatus of supervision half submerged in the darkness in which police and delinquency are brought together. Judges are the scarcely resisting employees of this apparatus.’

Source Quotes

Because the prison facilitates the supervision of individuals when they are released, because it makes possible the recruiting of informers and multiplies mutual denunciations, because it brings offenders into contact with one another, it precipitates the organization of a delinquent milieu, closed in upon itself, but easily supervised: and all the results of non-rehabilitation (unemployment, prohibitions on residence, enforced residences, probation) make it all too easy for former prisoners to carry out the tasks assigned to them. Prison and police form a twin mechanism; together they assure in the whole field of illegalities the differentiation, isolation and use of delinquency. In the illegalities, the police-prison system segments a manipulable delinquency.

Prison and police form a twin mechanism; together they assure in the whole field of illegalities the differentiation, isolation and use of delinquency. In the illegalities, the police-prison system segments a manipulable delinquency. This delinquency, with its specificity, is a result of the system; but it also becomes a part and an instrument of it.

In the illegalities, the police-prison system segments a manipulable delinquency. This delinquency, with its specificity, is a result of the system; but it also becomes a part and an instrument of it. So that one should speak of an ensemble whose three terms (police-prison-delinquency) support one another and form a circuit that is never interrupted.

So that one should speak of an ensemble whose three terms (police-prison-delinquency) support one another and form a circuit that is never interrupted. Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison. There is no penal justice intended to prosecute all illegal practices which, to do so, would use the police as an auxiliary and prison as a punitive instrument, and not leave in its wake the unassimilable residue of ‘delinquency’.

There is no penal justice intended to prosecute all illegal practices which, to do so, would use the police as an auxiliary and prison as a punitive instrument, and not leave in its wake the unassimilable residue of ‘delinquency’. One should regard this justice as an instrument for the differential supervision of illegalities. In relation to this instrument, criminal justice plays the role of legal surety and principle of transmission.

In relation to this instrument, criminal justice plays the role of legal surety and principle of transmission. It is a relay in a general economy of illegalities, whose other elements are (not below it, but beside it) the police, the prison and delinquency. Police encroachment on justice and the force of inertia that the carceral institution opposes to justice are not new, nor are they the result of a sclerosis or of a gradual shift in power; it is a structural feature that characterizes punitive mechanisms in modern societies.

The magistrates can say what they like; penal justice, with all its theatrical apparatus, is intended to respond to the daily demand of an apparatus of supervision half submerged in the darkness in which police and delinquency are brought together. Judges are the scarcely resisting employees of this apparatus.18 They assist as far as they can in the constitution of delinquency, that is to say, in the differentiation of illegalities, in the supervision, colonization and use of certain of these illegalities by the illegality of the dominant class. Two figures stand out as representative of this process, which developed in the first thirty or forty years of the nineteenth century.

Key Concepts

• Prison and police form a twin mechanism; together they assure in the whole field of illegalities the differentiation, isolation and use of delinquency.
• In the illegalities, the police-prison system segments a manipulable delinquency.
• This delinquency, with its specificity, is a result of the system; but it also becomes a part and an instrument of it.
• Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison.
• One should regard this justice as an instrument for the differential supervision of illegalities.
• It is a relay in a general economy of illegalities, whose other elements are (not below it, but beside it) the police, the prison and delinquency.
• Judges are the scarcely resisting employees of this apparatus.

Context

Early part of this passage in ‘Illegalities and delinquency’, where Foucault moves from describing surveillance and post‑prison controls to theorizing the structural linkage between police, prison, delinquency, and penal justice as a general economy of illegalities.