Reforming Foucault: A Critique of the Social Control Thesis

Foucault's work on the prison radically transformed the way social scientists conceive the institutional regulation of life. Drawing on Foucault's thesis about the gradual refinement and expansion of mechanisms of control and discipline in modern society, they quickly began to reveal all the micro-powers and technologies of control at work both inside and outside the criminal justice system. It soon became obvious that every attempt to reform society, to give people more freedom ineluctably becomes its opposite - a technique of domination. No matter where or when, it is the same as it ever was - social control. I challenge this thesis by demonstrating that Foucault's concept of power is not only inscribed in practices of normalization, but, most importantly, in practices of liberation. In light of his work on bio-powers and bio-politics, the constitution of the modern subject through power relations is understood in terms of a 'governmentality' that maximizes life. Hence Foucault's notion of power is better understood as a 'mechanism for life' that includes strategies of self-development that both constrain and enable agency. For the past fifteen years, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking account of the birth of the prison has exerted a powerful influence on the social sciences. Indeed, 'to write today about punishment and classification without Foucault' says criminologist Stanley Cohen 'is like talking about the unconscious without Freud' (1985:10). In Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1979), Foucault provided concepts that radically transformed the discourse in which penal reform was typically thought (e.g. Garland 1986). These concepts- 'power/knowledge', 'disciplinary society', 'micro-powers' - have allowed analysts to deconstruct both the liberal conception of the birth of the prison as a humanistic advance over the brutal punishments administered in pre-modern societies, and the Marxist conception of penality as an epiphenomenon of the mode of production. Under Foucault's influence, scholars have rewritten the history of penal reform as the history of the dispersion of a new mode of domination called 'disciplinary power', a power exercised through techniques of objectification, classification and normalization, a power