MICHEL FOUCAULT
457
Foucault:
The break between public opinion and criminals has the same
origin as the prison system itself. Or, rather, it is one of the great benefits
that the power structure has reaped from that system. In fact, the hostile
relationship that we see today between criminals and the lower strata of
society did not exist until the eighteenth century-and in some parts of
Europe not until the nineteenth or even early twentieth century. The gap
between rich and poor was so wide that the thief-the redistributor of
wealth-was welcome among the poor. Until the seventeenth century,
thieves and bandits were popular heroes, some of whom remain as shad–
owy but positive figures in our mythology. The same is true of the bandits
of Corsica and Sicily and the thieves of Naples. But in an urban industrial
setting, pilfering and petty theft became too costly and these infractions
tolerated by th'e masses began to be seen as a serious threat. At that point,
a new form of economic discipline calling for honesty, accuracy, punctual–
ity, thrift, and an absolute respect for property was imposed at all levels
of society. It became necessary on the one hand to assure more efficient
protection of wealth, and on the other to create in the popular mind an
openly hostile attitude toward illegality. Thus with the aid of prisons,
those in power created a hard core of criminals who had no real communi–
cation with the masses and were no longer tolerated by them. This isola–
tion facilitated both the infiltration of the criminal element by the police
and the development, in the course of the nineteenth century, of an
underworld ideology. The contempt, suspicion, and hatred aroused by
criminals should not come as any surprise: it is the result of 150 years of
effort on the part of politicians, ideologues, and police . One should not
be surprised either by the fact that the same phenomenon is found in
the U.S.S .R.
Int:
One month after the Riga documentary was shown on French television,
the release of the mathematician Leonid Plyushch focused attention on
another all too familiar
aspe~t
of Soviet repression: the imprisonment of
dissidents in psychiatric hospitals.
Foucault:
The internment of dissidents in mental hospitals constitutes an
extraordinary paradox in a country that calls itself socialist. In the case of
a murderer or child molester, a search for the psychological roots of the
crime and an attempt to cure the perpetrator can be justified; the pro–
cedure is in any case not illogical. But the dissenter-I mean the one who
does not accept the regime, repudiates it, or does not understand it-is of
all Soviet citizens the one who should not be considered mentally ill.
Instead, he should be the object of political instruction designed to make
