The Prison Beyond its Theory. Between Michel Foucault's Militancy and Thought

Among the founders of Gip (Groupe d’Informations sur les Prisons), Michel Foucault was the only one who had researched internment practices during his academical career and he would also be the only one to develop his militancy in a new field of research concerning prisons. In 1971, when the Gip was created, Foucault had already behind him the publication of History of Madness (1961). Then, in 1973, he held at the Collège de France a course entitled The Punitive Society (La société punitive) and in 1975 released Discipline and Punish, book with the subtitle The Birth of the Prison. Despite his will to hold a line of distinction between his activities as a militant and his activities as a researcher, Foucault had to accept that a relationship not only existed, but made him especially sensibile to the reality of prisons and «uncomfortable» towards this research object. So he wrote in the opening chapter of Discipline and Punish : «that punishment in general and the prison in particular belong to a political technology of the body is a lesson that I have learnt not so much from history as from the present». In his perspective, in modern times prison has been the main technology with which our societies provided to manage marginality. Therefore, we have not to abolish prison, or to design the better possible prison, but we have to understand prisoner’s needs and to criticize, through historical means, the way in which we aboard the problem of marginalized people, the primary social gesture of exclusion. All the social oppositions described by Foucault in his work — normal/abnormal, healthy/pathological, mad/reasonable … — were built following the contrast between inclusion and exclusion. To change prison and to make it more livable we don’t have to wait for solutions given by jurists, historians, philosophers, but, according to Foucault, we only have to listen to the prisoners and give them the political role in our institutions they are denied. Those who study societies, at all levels, have a different task to achieve and a specific duty to perform: «to draw a critique of the power that explains the processes by which the present society marginalizes an important part of the population»