The Normal Delinquint

7 Pages 1806 Words

The ‘Normal Delinquent’
In “Discipline and Punish”, Michael Foucault presents an account of how criminals were understood in relation to the development of the modern prison system. He begins his account with what he calls the “official opening” of the Mettray prison where a French farm is transformed into a commune where juvenile criminals are sent (1611). Foucault specifically focuses on a moment, “when a child in Mettray remarked as he lay dying: ‘What a pity I left the colony so soon’” (1611). We see by these remarks how this child yearns to stay part of this community and how successful the work of this infrastructure was because “they [the prison staff] were in a sense technicians of behavior: engineers of conduct, orthopaedists of individuality” where, “their task was to produce bodies that were both docile and capable”(1611), and the staff have lead this child believe and desire to maintain his pursuit of betterment or ‘the norm’.
The outcomes of this movement of were a series of six results establishing the idea of this program as a simple, gradual gradation that enabled each juvenile to eventually return to ‘the norm’. In the following outcome, Foucault remarks that the “carceral… network allows… recruitment of major ‘delinquents’”(1613), a word which eventually replaces the concept of ‘prisoners’. The ‘delinquent’ is part of a small-hardened group of criminals identified with lower social classes and defined as ‘abnormal’. Foucault believes the ‘delinquent’ is created in a response to the dangers presented by the lower class to the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. Thus, the advantage of the term ‘delinquent’ over ‘prisoners’ is that the aforementioned seems to separate the problem from society, making it easy to identify, supervise, and control.
Thirdly, the argument substantiates the carceral system saying that it gives discipline an...