482 Punishment as Reconciliation and as a Warning to Others It is difficult to write of the system of punishment and its change during preindustrial society without referring to the influence Michel Foucault has had on researchers of the last decades. Foucault’s ideas have been interpreted m several different ways and it is no easy task to depict thembriefly. The role of punishment as a social instrument of control is, however, in focus. Foucault states that previously punishment was directed against the individual’s body, but became, primarily during the Age of Enlightenment, to more and more be concentrated on the soul. The death penalty lost in importance and other forms of corporal punishment disappeared gradually. Instead the prisons became the main instrument of the new forms of control. Foucault rejects the idea that it was primarily humanitarian motives which lay behind this change. Criticismagainst Foucault has been specially stringent fromthose historians who have tried empirically to follow the changes in the penal system. Pieter Spierenburg has, amongst other things, pointed out that the prison systemhad evolved long before ideas on enlightenment had gained ground at the end of the 18th century. Spierenburg refers to a mentality-historical tradition and emphasizes the gradual emergence of a disassociation from physical suffering, followed during the 19th century by the bureaucratization of government and thereby even of institutions of punishment. In the footsteps of the Age of Enlightenment and bureaucratization followed undoubtably an increased belief in “reasonable” solutions. This was also the case concerning the function of punishment. This aspect has been emphasized by David Garland, who refers to Max Weber’s theory on the role of rationality in a modern, bureaucratic society. Garland places the emphasis on a change in punishment fromserving an “emotional” and moralising purpose to becoming a “penitentiary science” administered by a very select group of bureaucrats. He means that the emotional, moralising and “irrational” elements are still to be found, however, to a certain extent during court proceedings today. Jukka Kekkonen fromFinland has recently given his, and Heikki Yhkangas, proposals for an interpretation, where the emphasis is instead on the connection between the form of governmental rule, above all the degree of democratic participation, and social control. Amore even distribution of the resources of a community (manifested in political power) leads, according to these researchers, to moderation of the control over individuals, while a concentration of resources leads, amongst other things, to the exact opposite. The growth of absolute sovereignity was followed by, for example, a tightening up of the penal systemand other forms of social control, while the process of democrat!- zation entailed the opposite. I have no intention of giving a comprehensive summary of the debate on the causes of the changes in the penal system in Western Europe in general, and in
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=