Disciplinary power, prison and penality in the twenty-first century

Abstract

Although Michel Foucault’s lecture at the Collège de France given on February 1, 1978, popularising the notion of governmentality had been already published, Foucauldian post-discipline reflection did not significantly called the attention of socio-legal and criminological scholars until the courses Sécurité, territoire, population and Naissance de la biopolitique were released in 2004. Both courses had a noteworthy impact on conversations on penal policies and penal rationales, since they were seen as providing new insights to explore a post-disciplinary carceral model in the framework of the new political economy of punishment emerging at the turn of the twentieth century. Against this backdrop, concepts such as governmentality and apparatuses of security were leveraged to scrutinise new penal rationales associated with the government of risks and the management of surplus individuals and groups. However, this literature was too quick in concluding that the disciplinary penality was declining. This paper examines the subsistence of normalising forms of control and punishment through the exploration of two dimensions of current penality, namely a) the emergence of new manifestations of the disciplinary prison; and b) the consolidation of a disciplinary rationale in an era of prison without factory, and the coercive management of noncitizen groups. In so doing, the paper reflects on certain critical aspects of current debates on the political economy of punishment, bringing them beyond the impasse created by the reductionist analysis of penal policies from a governmentality perspective.