'Crime' and 'punishment'.

Byline: Arifa Noor

IN 1773, in France, a young servant girl who had killed her employer was sentenced to death. But the judgement did not simply end there.

It was ordered that she be taken to the place of execution in a cart used to collect rubbish. At the spot, she was to sit on the same chair on which her mistress had been sitting at the time of the murder. Her right hand was to be cut off and burnt, after which she was to be dealt four blows with the murder weapon two on her head, one on the left forearm and the fourth on the chest. This was to be followed by her being hung and strangled. Two hours after this, her head was to be removed and hung on a pole.

This incident is narrated in a famous but hard-to-read for the faint-hearted book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault.

The book traces Western society's changing views of the idea of punishment over time. Earlier, the writer argues, the punishment was a public spectacle. Torture was part of the investigation as well as the sentence, and the punishment was linked inextricably to the body of the accused.

Society will need to accept that correction rather than punishment should be the aim.

No wonder then, according to the book, capital punishment came in a variety of forms, gory by modern standards hanging, or having hands or tongues cut off before being hanged, burnt alive, or killed and burnt; flogged and killed, hung up and left to die of hunger. The list goes on.

In fact, he provides an eyewitness account of a man punished for attempted regicide which goes on for three pages he is burnt, quartered by horses and then the limbs burnt at the stake.

Foucault argues that with time, the focus on the body of the accused changed. In his words, the body was touched as little as possible. 'One intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work ... physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty. From being an art of unbearable sensations, punishment has become an economy of suspended rights.'

Foucault comes to mind when a story or an incident in Pakistan lays bare the workings of the local judicial system.

In recent times, there was the call for a child rapist to be publicly hanged. And back in 2000, the courts sentenced a self-confessed killer of children. Javed Iqbal, who had confessed to murdering 100 children, was ordered to be chopped into pieces and dissolved in acid in front of the victims' parents.

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