The Evolution of Punishment

When the word punishment comes into mind, I think of such a word as a tern that refers to the repression of certain privileges due to an unacceptable behavior. Punishment, in my own understanding, has been an important element towards reforming the person from his or her unacceptable behavior in society through the forms of repressed freedom, penalties, fines, and the like. But that was not the same form of punishment Michel Foucault has talked about in his book, “Discipline and Punish”, towards the first few pages.
Through reading the first few pages of Discipline and Punish, one can perfectly visualize the ancient way of punishment, and that is through a means of public humiliation and brutal, merciless, and slow death of the convicted. The description of such a spectacle during the medieval times may be very disturbing and bloody for the modern man like me, but such spectacle was for me the perfect execution of absolute and infinite power of the prince, the kings, and various leaders. This execution of power was able to present to its people the sense of discipline in the eyes of a prince. This imagery of the overwhelming power of the prince (or any leader during the medieval age perhaps) was the primitive form of punishment that has existed.
Imagine: breaking bones, burning hot pincers, beheadings, horse pulling, limb separations, burning bodies - these very graphic images were not of horror for the people back then, but more of a spectacle. It is like they do not care for the body of the convicted. It is like they do not fear God. It is like the princes are the God themselves. And yet this grand execution of power just showed how fragile it is at the same time; these grand representation of power can go down to the ditch. An example? When people would find out that their prince is useless. The overwhelming power of the Prince in this case can be destroyed or overcome by the people, leading to a great downfall to the prince.
And after decades of years, the definition of punishment has drastically transformed from a brutal, spectacular, majestic scene into a humane, static, and reformist scene.
Through the introduction of the prison, the brutal killings were stopped. The majestic power is gone. The people no longer see a fantastic spectacle of a ruthless death. Instead, we are now faced with the reformation of the human convict through going through a daily routine as he is deprived of his freedom, a cause for his unacceptable and immoral behavior in society. To make things simple, punishment in the modern sense has become a light of hope for the convict instead of a fatal nightmare, as represented with the spectacular death of Damiens the regicide in 1757. Eighty years after his spectacular death, the way convicts were punished became a time-table based way of punishment, where the officials reform the convicts instead of killing them publicly.
Sure the way convicts were punished became somewhat very bland and static, but I believe such change occurred for a reason. One main reason is that power is not absolutely strong and overwhelming at all. Through the existence of a time-table based schema for a prisoner’s daily life, the power of officials are re-channeled such that these officials realize after eighty years since Damiens’ death that these prisoners can actually do something less inhumane; simply speaking, I guess that the officials have a more merciful heart and soul as compared to before, that is why they had a one-hundred-eighty degree change on how they would punish the convicts.
Another plausible reason for this is that the rationale behind a time-based schema as a means of punishment is the fact that the objective of punishment was changed by itself: instead of eliminating the convicts and keep the state pure of immoral individuals, they instead insisted on correcting these individuals, which for me is the more appropriate part. Instead of killing them brutally, they are corrected through enclosing them in a protected area, where they have a daily set of activities, from waking up, eating lunch, attending class, praying, to even leisure time. Such time-based principle has helped the convict to reform himself and save himself from humiliation for his inappropriate acts at the same time.
As a result of this, reforming the convicts would mean for the leader better productivity of the state; through reforming them, they go back to society after serving a number of years in the prison, being able to be of help in the constant progression of the state and society.
This long duration of labor being implemented at the prison becomes like a purgatory for the convicts; they stay in this enclosed, heavily guarded area, they follow a certain schedule and a particular set of activities, and become reformed through education, interaction, and the like, coming down to a point wherein once they go out of the prison, they are a totally different person: a person who is no longer a convict but can serve society.