Michel Foucault Quotes

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

Punishment alone governs all created beings.

The purpose of punishment is fulfilled, crime is repressed by penalties of just, not tormenting, severity, its repetition is prevented, and hope is given for the reformation of the criminal.

Crimes are more effectually prevented by the certainty than the severity of punishment.

The object of punishment is, prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

The cure for crime is not the electric chair, but the high chair.

The act of policing is, in order to punish less often, to punish more severely.

It is not according to my mode of doing things, to bring a suit against a man that I have the power in my own hands to punish.

Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.

Punishment is not for revenge, but to lessen crime and reform the criminal.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

Criminals are punished, that others may be deterred.

I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them…

The essence to reducing violent crime in our society is to take these people [criminals] off the street.

Retribution is no longer the dominant objective of the criminal law. Reformation and rehabilitation of offenders have become important goals of criminal jurisprudence.

Reward and punishment are the twin instruments of power in the State; they must not be revealed to anyone.

The end of punishment, therefore, is no other than to prevent the criminal from doing further injury to society, and to prevent others from committing the like offence. Such punishments, therefore, and such a mode of inflicting them, ought to be chosen, as will make the strongest and most lasting impressions on the minds of others, with the least torment to the body of the criminal

In revenge and punishments we must have our eye not at the evill past, but the future good. That is: It is not lawfull to inflict punishment for any other end, but that the offender may be corrected, or that others warned by his punishment may become better

To correct senseless people, the sword has to be taken up.

Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable.

It is wonderful to hear what account we at present give ourselves of the punishment of criminals. No "revenge"--O Heavens, no; all preachers on Sunday strictly forbid that; and even (at least on Sundays) prescribe the contrary of that. It is for the sake of "example," that you punish; to "protect society" and its purse and skin; to deter the innocent from falling into crime; and especially withal, for the purpose of improving the poor criminal himself,--or at lowest, of hanging and ending him, that he may not grow worse. For the poor criminal is, to be "improved" if possible:

Every first year law student learns that sentencing has four goals: retribution, incapicitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation.

Prison is not meant to be comfortable. It's not meant to be somewhere anyone would ever want to go back to.

We do not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him.

To conceive that compulsion and punishment are the proper means of reformation is the sentiment of a barbarian.