In prisons people are accustomed to the same routine of waking up at a certain time of the day, going to “work”, school, lunch, etc. Prisoners are given schedules to fulfill throughout the whole day. Prisoners become loyal to their schedule because they do not want to get punished even more. Prisoners become disciplined, they are taught and guided through a different path and punished for their disobedience. Michel Foucault states in Docile Bodies that schools and military have disciplined very well their systems. Michael Faculot states, “The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body — to the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces.” The body becomes an object to the person who is giving orders to it, and then becomes docile. As Michel Foucault states that the schools and military are very disciplined the prisons are another example of discipline and punishment. Prisons are meant to discipline and punish the criminals and as they are in prison they learn to be disciplined.
In a Brazilian prison there was a prison break where 3 women seduced the guards and drugged them in order to escape, 28 women were able to escape and the rest of the women prisoners stayed and did not bother escaping.
Why do you think these women did not escape? In my opinion the women were loyal somehow to discipline and punishment. The other women were too docile to escape because they did not want to get furthered punished if they were to get caught. The body becomes docile and will not do anything that will punish them because it is basically engraved in them to not misbehave because if they do they will get punished. Prisoners act as if they were being watched 24/7 even if they were not being watched. Most of the time prisoners act as if they are being watched because they have been punished so much that they are too scared to act against the authority.
There was a prison experiment called the Panopticon,
it was built where the prisoners thought they were being watched over. The thing was that the prisoners never saw the person who was “watching” them because when the prisoners looked up they were blinded by the sun, or simply cannot see the guard. Whether the prisoners were being watched or not they knew how to act because they did not want to be punished if they were being watched. Just as the military is very disciplined and the students are disciplined as well, prisoners know how to be disciplined so they will not be punished. These 3 categories are trained under the same tactics to receive the same outcome.
As we should all think that all prisoners are docile for the fear of being punished if they disobey any orders they are given. Also, prisoners being watched over by guards do not attempt to do anything that will get them a punishment. A prison in Argentina placed a dummy in the watch tower and 2 prisoners were able to escape. These prisoners not knowing if the dummy was real or not or not knowing if they were being watched or not, they did not care and decided to escape either way. These prisoners did not think about the punishment they would receive if they were to get if they were to be caught. Basically discipline and punishment does not work for everyone, just like the Brazilian women who escaped.
