blame – Discipline & Punish

Powers

mtt3e — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 06:16:46 +0000

Childlike- Usually childlike is used in a positive way, but Powers is childlike in the sense that he lacks foresight, perspective, and a grip on reality. He thinks only of the present. In jail, he forgets that he is about to be executed because people are smiling at him. He is completely self-involved, like a two-year-old who wants a toy, but since he’s physically a grown man, he demands sex instead.

Pilfering- Powers describes his stealing as pilfering, which seems like a good word for it because he is destructive when he steals. Unlike Mountain’s planned thefts, he just impulsively decides to take things. He is the classic brutish figure who rapes and pilfers.

Blame- Powers’ childishness is evident again when he blames his later crimes on an overly lenient punishment from his master for stealing. He says “If I had received my just deserts I might possibly have escaped the fate which now awaits me.” This seems unlikely because he is so wrapped up in moment-to-moment existence that it does not seem like he’d remember or focus on an earlier punishment. It seems more likely that, after his death sentence, if he were to be released, he’d commence his life of crime again.

Levi Ames

mtt3e — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 17:16:51 +0000

Recompense– Ames repays people he steals from with other stolen goods. He does not elaborate on why he chooses to recompense certain people for their losses. Maybe he only repays people who know he stole from him so they won’t report him to the authorities, but still it seems like a stranger bartering system. Perhaps, because he seems to steal almost compulsively, he feels bad about his thefts later. He says at one point “but though I lived such a wicked life, it was not without some severe checks of conscience. For after I had stolen, I had been so distressed at times, as to be obliged to go back and throw the stolen goods at the door, or into the yard, that the owners might have them again.”

Personalization– In these narratives, it is common for the condemned to read Bible passages and think that God is speaking directly to them. These passages usually have something to do with redemption. Ames says of one passage “[I] could not help looking on this as God’s gracious promise to me, and I tho’t that as I knew God could not lie, if I would not believe this, I would believe nothing.”

Blame– A lot of the texts vilify minorities and women, but Ames blatantly blames women for his stealing (although the two are completely unrelated). He warns youth against “bad women” who he says “have undone many, and by whom I have suffered much, the unlawful intercourse with them I have found by sad experience, leading to almost every sin.” He makes it sound as though he were tricked into intercourse by these women.

body of the condemned

chard3ah — Wed, 23 May 2007 19:07:22 +0000

Spectacle- Foucault argues that as the “gloomy festival of punishment was dying out,” one of the first things to go was “the spectacle of punishment”. He uses the word spectacle to describe the public torture and execution of prisoners used until the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What is particularly interesting about the word spectacle is that it serves more of a function for the viewers than for the person being punished. Interestingly the spectacle of public executions was criticized, although they continued to be carried out. Foucault traces the end of the spectacle of punishment and notes that now a prisoner’s trial is watched by the public rather than his punishment. Although this chapter certainly does focus on a prisoner’s physical punishment, the use of the word spectacle suggests that any public display of physical punishment becomes psychologically painful as well.

Judge- Foucault’s first real mention of judging is on page 21 with his mention of a trial judge who “certainly does more than ‘judge’”. The notion of judgment, however, is prevalent throughout this chapter: those watching a public execution are judgmental of both the condemned man and the public punishment that he faces (as we see through multiple criticisms of the practice). Foucault notes that in the penal system more people have the power to judge (psychological experts, magistrates, etc) than actually have the power to punish. The new legal system seems to have “led judges to judge something other than crimes,” they must determine an appropriate punishment, and often “pass sentence not in direct relation to the crime”.

Blame- Foucault notes that when punishment shifted from the public to private sphere, “the apportioning of blame is redistributed”: that is, the shame of a public execution which often brought “pity or glory” to the victim has been replaced by a more secret shame of a modern execution, something that is made private in order to separate it from the justice system that ordered it. The secrecy surrounding executions makes them seem more like a necessary evil than a spectacle that the public is a part of. The increasing secrecy of executions seems to point of a sense of shame about the penal system, a feeling that the justice system is blamed for them. By eliminating the “glory in punishing”, the justice system separates itself from the ugliness of executions and the blame that they receive for them.