푸코의 형벌론과 형사정책적 함의

This article aims to introduce Foucault's penal theory and analyze its implication for criminal policy discussion. He is perhaps the best critical theorist whose philosophical and historical work seeks to question the forms of power and rationality which structure the modern world. The work of Michel Foucault ‘Discipline and Punish’ has recently become a central reference in the theory of punishment. Instead of highlighting moral foundations of penality, Foucault's work takes us straight to the internal workings of apparatus itself, focusing upon the actual technologies of penal power and their mode of operation. His analyses of penal power with other areas of governance and discipline serves to understand the character of penal institutions like prison, jail or reformatory. Foucault starts from a study of penal history which brings into focus the way in which violent, repressive forms of governance, such as corporal and capital punishment, gave way at a particular time to the milder regulative techniques represented by the prison. This focus is then broadened out to produce a general picture of the gentler forms of control - inspection, discipline, 'normalization', etc. In his account the prison is conceived as epitomizing these wider social forms - not because it is a ‘typical’ institution but rather because it is the place where modern techniques of control are revealed in their full unbridled operation. Consequently a close analysis of the machinery of imprisonment, and of the knowledge on which it is based, can form the basis for a general anatomy of modern forms of power and control. As a result of Foucault's work there is now a much greater sensitivity to the nuances of penal measures and regulatory means through which we are governed and the forms of subjectivity into which offenders are pressed.