Discipline & Punish by Michel Foucault

As if writing a trailer for a bad slasher movie, Michel Foucault opens his treatise on punishment with a gruesome account of the apparently inhumane execution of the regicide Damiens in 1757. I say “apparently inhumane” because Foucault appears to believe that elimination of death by torture in favor of incarceration is no improvement.
Although Mr. Foucault’s very complex book discusses “reforms” in punishment systems beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it is evident that he attacks the present-day descendants. Furthermore, he uses his treatment of penal institutions as a means to draw the reader into his criticisms of other (or perhaps all) societal institutions. In doing so, Foucault is not pleased.
As someone with a legal background and a past participant in the military criminal justice system, I found most interesting Foucault’s demonstration of the reversal of roles of the two sides of the judicial procedure, trial and se...