The Body of the Condemned Analysis
Michael Foucault’s classic “The Body of the Condemned” covers that drastic changes that crime and punishment has seen in the past couple centuries, both in morality and in practice. The inherent message of the literature is that public displays of punishment — particularly capital punishment — has moved from graphic displays of dismemberment, torture, zeal, into more hidden practices governed by the bureaucratic system that is called law. But why has this shift happened so quickly, especially across most modern and developing countries? Three arguments will be made in this short writing. First, the weakening power of religion in the ninetieth and twentieth century brought on reduced moral regulation by the church, making public punishment immoral in the eyes of society. Secondly, the social flexibility of law through time makes punishment equally flexible according to the needs of society (again tied to religion). Third, crime, and consequently civil and criminal punishment, serve a very specific social function; it identifies social ills and remediates social solidarity.
Prior to the bureaucratic underpinning of present day law and order, most societies were regulated by religion, or centers of religion like churches. The purpose of religion was to control people’s behavior, both physically and in spirit. Many methods were used to make the church especially powerful, like the fact that the only literate in town was typically a priest or that the creation of the afterlife served to regulate behavior. This gave the church special authority to be the mural and offender of morality, the validator and executer of life, and the end-all teller of right and wrong. When this happens, crime and its punishment, become the reasoning of a select few, bound by sacred being higher than the self.
This didn’t of course last forever. The onset of capitalism, division of labor, and sovereignty through private property gave people within society a validation and opportunity to become more educated, self-reliant (to an extent), and capable of opting out of religion. Drawing on Durkheim’s use of moral regulation, people began to receive this moral regulation from areas other than religion. Thus, the church began to lose much of its power and its public manifestations of punishment — as graphic as they were back then — began to shift in form. Today, society is regulated through various forms of societal pressures, most of which are now disconnected from religion. The point of which I make is that society no longer needed public torture to regulate people’s civil and criminal behavior.
Besides natural or human law, most law is transient and changes according to the demands and norms of society. In the last century, we have seen dramatic changes in law around the world — from anti-Jewish laws of Nazi Germany, to immigration laws of japan, to the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1960’s. These and many other examples suggest that law is headed by leaders and common ideologies throughout time, which shift as the general public understands and changes their perception of such ideologies. It suggests a punishment system that is dependent on the morality of crime at a given time. Therefore, the tortured body of the early nineteenth century is no less important as a symbol, than the stigma behind homelessness.
So what use does crime have? To the recipient of crime, it serves no purpose other than a hassle, inconvenience, and so on. Yet as a whole, for society, it helps illuminate social ills at the current, and helps predict those in the future. For example, the importation and use of drugs is not a single event that proposes a single crime. The consistent use of drugs can lead to addiction and eventually increased crime in the form of robberies, assault and battery, and other violent crimes. The increased consumption of drugs (indicated through increased drug importation) can generally predict patterns of ills in the community. Generally, people do not consume potent and dangerous drugs when the economy is doing well and when people are stable in their families.
