Rights statement: The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Law, Culture and the Humanities, 13 (1), 2017, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2017 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Law, Culture and the Humanities: http://journals.sagepub.com/home/lch on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/
Accepted author manuscript, 217 KB, PDF document
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Discipline unbound
T2 - patuxent, treatment and the colonization of law
AU - Follis, Luca
N1 - The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Law, Culture and the Humanities, 13 (1), 2017, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2017 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Law, Culture and the Humanities: http://journals.sagepub.com/home/lch on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/
PY - 2017/2/1
Y1 - 2017/2/1
N2 - This article engages Michel Foucault’s thesis that post-sovereign law would be increasingly colonized by the disciplinary norm. It explores, through an analysis of prisoner litigation surrounding Maryland’s Patuxent Institution and its defective delinquency statute, how disciplinary power is enabled, understood, and resisted through law. I argue that Article 31B (as the defective delinquency statute was known) set up a zone of expert prerogative and discretion actively maintained and legitimated through jurisprudence. Yet, paradoxically, law also functioned as a conduit for resistance and contestation pitting the epistemological premises of discipline against the functions of legal jurisprudence and the foundations of criminal law. I contend that this dual character of law’s engagement with discipline (i.e., at once open to expert “colonization” and site of structural incompatibility and resistance) illustrates the intractability of the relationship between the disciplinary and law. That is, law both constitutes disciplinary space (and within this normative envelope, discipline can be “unbound”) and remains in a state of tension with the forms of power that develop within it (which by their very premises seek to exceed the limits law would place upon them).
AB - This article engages Michel Foucault’s thesis that post-sovereign law would be increasingly colonized by the disciplinary norm. It explores, through an analysis of prisoner litigation surrounding Maryland’s Patuxent Institution and its defective delinquency statute, how disciplinary power is enabled, understood, and resisted through law. I argue that Article 31B (as the defective delinquency statute was known) set up a zone of expert prerogative and discretion actively maintained and legitimated through jurisprudence. Yet, paradoxically, law also functioned as a conduit for resistance and contestation pitting the epistemological premises of discipline against the functions of legal jurisprudence and the foundations of criminal law. I contend that this dual character of law’s engagement with discipline (i.e., at once open to expert “colonization” and site of structural incompatibility and resistance) illustrates the intractability of the relationship between the disciplinary and law. That is, law both constitutes disciplinary space (and within this normative envelope, discipline can be “unbound”) and remains in a state of tension with the forms of power that develop within it (which by their very premises seek to exceed the limits law would place upon them).
KW - Michel Foucault
KW - disciplinary power
KW - sovereign power
KW - psychiatric power
KW - clinical knowledge
KW - legal resistance
KW - prisoner rights
U2 - 10.1177/1743872113509916
DO - 10.1177/1743872113509916
M3 - Journal article
VL - 13
SP - 56
EP - 80
JO - Law, Culture and the Humanities
JF - Law, Culture and the Humanities
SN - 1743-8721
IS - 1
ER -