> On Wed, 2009-04-01 at 02:24 +0100, Philip Pilkington wrote:
> > I'm actually not being a smartass when I say this, but: did you read what
> I
> > wrote? This has nothing to do with translation issues or anything else.
> My
> > claim is that these institutions which are supposed to generate the
> norms,
> > value judgements etc. are totally fucked and they no longer function. The
> > prisons, for example, nowadays, with their serious overcrowding seem to
> > resemble some sort of basic social segregation where troubled elements
> can
> > be fenced in from society. There is very little in the way of aspiring to
> > inculcate a regime of norms into the prisoner.
>
> It may be a mistake to see this as a failure of the prison system,
> though - after all, Foucault was very interested in how systems achieve
> their wider function by not achieving their stated aims. The last part
> of Discipline and Punish is all about this - about how the carceral
> system produces delinquency, a break-down of social order that provides
> the pretext for continuing low-level intervention by the police. If this
> system of control is now moving from outside the prison into it, that's
> not necessarily a failure of the prison system, but rather a modulation
> of the way it functions.
>
>
Voyou just wrote what I'd been trying to formulate... What he said. -A