His publications include For Abolition: Essays on Prisons and Socialist Ethics (2020), Against Imprisonment: An Anthology of Abolitionist Essays (2018), and, with Nick Flynn, Prisons and Punishment: The Essentials (2014). He researches and teaches on prisons, penal abolitionism and the sociology and philosophy of punishment. In the sixth and final lecture, we explore some contemporary penological debates.ĭr David Scott works at the Open University. Michel Foucault is a French historian and philosopher who strongly influenced philosophy, history, gender studies, criminology, and political science. In the fifth lecture, we examine Michel Foucault’s influential account of the emergence of the prison in modern capitalist society. The public spectacle of the tortured body may have all but disappeared, but as philosopher and historian Michel Foucault reminds us in his masterful work, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, we must not be so gullible as to believe that the disappearance of the whipping post signals a move toward a more humanitarian society. Next, we think about the Marxist approach of Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer. In the third lecture, we think about Émile Durkheim’s sociological work on punishment. In the second lecture, we consider the classical philosophical approaches of Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, and William Godwin.

In the first lecture, we introduce some key areas of interest within penology, looking especially at moral justifications for punishment. In this course, Dr David Scott (The Open University) explores key philosophical and sociological approaches to prisons, punishment and penology. In this lecture, we think about the ideas of Michel Foucault, focusing in particular on: (i) Foucault’s account of the shift from capital punishment as the main form of punishment in premodernity to the prison in modernity (ii) his explanation for this in terms of the state’s greater need for control in modern capitalist society and the greater effectiveness of prisons in achieving this (iii) his notion of the disciplinary society and the role of prisons within it (iv) his argument that prisons produce delinquents who can be blamed for social issues to distract from the harms of the powerful.

Michel foucault on prisons