Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 411, if you can't do the time.

When I was in graduate school, my chief interests were political and military history.

I was not much drawn to subjects like the history of law or of criminal justice, which is, of course,

mildly ironic, given the projects I now work on, but life just works out funny like

that sometimes, Criminal Records Podcast.com, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe.

But even in my relative ignorance of the subject, as someone with no particular interest in it,

or even friends who were interested in it, I was familiar with one of the key works on the field,

Michel Foucault's 1975 Discipline and Punish. If you're not familiar with it, well, first, I can't

say I blame you. Foucault never met a comma he didn't prefer to a period, not to mention the rather

obtuse and indirect writing style so common to post-war French intellectual types.

And I know that characterization will get me some pushback from all you Foucault heads out there,

but only because deep down, you know it's true.

Anyway, in short, and I want to emphasize very short form,

Foucault's basic argument is that over the course of the modern era,

prisons, as well as the justice system more broadly, have seen a substantial shift in function.

Where once they were the sites of violence, torture, as Foucault puts it, intended to scare the population

straight, they have since shifted into places of discipline,

making use of the technologies and organizational capabilities of the modern state to do this.

In an analogy familiar to edgy middle schoolers everywhere, Foucault likens this process of discipline

to the ways in which schools are used to mold individuals into citizens of nation-states.

Of course, I'm being a bit unfair in my quick summary of Foucault, but in fairness, the book is over 300 pages long, and frankly, my summary of it is objectively much funnier than the original.

Discipline and punish has been enormously influential since it first came out.

...