Foucault and The Shawshank Redemption: Disciplinary Power and the Prison
Foucault describes the transition from disciplinary power into psychiatric power within the asylum throughout his lectures from 1973–1974. He places the asylum within the historical trajectory of the development of power and analysis in what he calls the ‘Psy-functions’ of new medical specialties like psychiatry. Much of what he writes can be seen as applicable to other such ‘total institutions’ like prisons, schools, hospitals, etcetera, and further the prison is a useful example utilized by Foucault in much of his early positioning within the lectures, especially of disciplinary power. I believe that the film, The Shawshank Redemption illustrates disciplinary power at its finest, bringing forth a depiction of men within a prison setting and how the guards, walls, and new ways of living within the prison come to dominate their lives and thoughts.
The Shawshank Redemption, filmed in 1994 and based upon a short story written by Stephen King, is about a man who is a banker (Andy Dufresne) that is wrongly convicted and sentenced to life in prison for killing his wife and her lover in the 1940s. Dufresne befriends a motley crew while in the Shawshank Prison in Maine that includes the elderly librarian, Brooks and a man who can ‘get’ things named Red. Andy finds himself in prison at a time when Brooks has served about 40 years on his life sentence and Red has served 30 of his. We see throughout the movie that the prison is set up as a panopticon and shows the principles of heavy prisoner surveillance. There are three times daily inmate checks and various mechanisms that Andy must get used to within the prison. Andy makes himself useful within the prison by using his education in finance to work on special projects for the Warden. He ends up doing the taxes for all the guards and when the Warden comes up with a plan to launder money through inmate work programs, Andy is charged with cooking the books. He works out of Brooks’ library and they become fast friends, and when it is tax season Red is his helper with all the paperwork. At this point in the film, Brooks gets approved for a release of parole and finds himself holding another prisoner hostage with a knife to his throat. A prisoner finds Andy and Red and they come to diffuse the situation. It comes out that Brooks wanted to kill the man so he could stay in prison but Andy talks him down and he lets the man go. A week later, Brooks is released and you see him living at a halfway house and working in a grocery store. He hates his new life and eventually he writes a letter to the inmates and he kills himself.
It is the next part of the movie that makes for a dramatic account of disciplinary power. We are shown the reactions of the friends of Brooks, including Andy and Red sitting on some steps within the prison yard. The following lines are spoken by Red in response to a comment by one of the men about Brooks,
“He’s been institutionalized. The man’s been in here 50 years. Fifty years. This is all he knows. In here he is an important man, an educated man. Outside he is nothing. Probably couldn’t get a library card. These walls are funny. First you hate them, then you get used to them. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized. They send you here for life and that’s what they take. The part of you that counts anyway.”
This monologue spoken by Red describes the powerful backbreaking push of the disciplinary forces of power. The ability of disciplinary power to drive a man to be unable to live any other way than within the walls and within the confines of the prison is almost a hidden goal of the power to subject someone to be at once mentally inside the prison and physically outside of it. The prison acts in a way such that a person is stripped of all power of their own and with little forces of resistance available to them, the prisoners submit to these mechanisms of control. So much so in this example, that Brooks cannot live any other way than that which he has known for the last 50 years and he kills himself rather than taking a life to get back inside of it. He will be freed of the bonds of the prison by leaving it all together the only way he knows how. The disciplinary power has infected him and controls him to the end.
Later on in the film, a new man, Tommy, appears on the cell block and befriends Andy. The man hears about Andy’s crime that landed him in jail and then tells Andy and Red about a prison he was at several years before. He had gotten a new cell mate who was loud and mean and bragged about killing a woman and her lover and then laughed that the rich, fancy banker husband was blamed for his crime. Andy goes to the Warden with this information because with it he hopes to get a new trial and be freed from prison. The Warden then calls Tommy to a meeting outside on the yard at night and asks him if all this is true and he replies that it is. The warden asks him if he would testify to help out Andy and Tommy says he would. The Warden then nods at a shadowy figure of a guard in a tower, and the guard shoots Tommy six times and kills him. The Warden cannot risk Andy being free with all of knowledge about what goes on in the prison.
At the end of the film, Andy has had a poster (on and off of different beautiful women) on his wall for the 30 years he is in prison and one morning he does not come out of his cell for the morning roll call. The guards and Warden storm into his empty cell and demand to know how someone can vanish into thin air. There is no sign of Andy. The Warden then discovers that behind the poster is a tunnel dug out of the wall that leads to the sewer system. Then the audience gets a glimpse of how smart and resistant to the forms of disciplinary power that Andy really was. We then see a montage of Andy crawling out the hole, breaking open the sewer pipe and crawling the length of the pipe till he reached the river, which is 500 yards. He swims for a while and then goes to a local bank, once cleaned up, and pulls all of the money from the money laundering scheme out of the seven banks in the area and drives to Mexico.
Andy was compliant with the forces of disciplinary power within the prison but unlike Brooks we see someone who has remained able to integrate himself successfully into the real world, outside of the prison once he is free. There is huge message of a subversion of power on the part of Andy within the prison system. He is useful to the men who run the prison because with his useful knowledge of money and finances he has kept the prison’s secret inner workings going. The Warden had to trust Andy in some way to have him hold such secrets, but when it came down to it the Warden knew he could not risk having Andy out free in the world so he regains power over the situation by controlling the knowledge and truth of the situation. He kills the man who knew Andy’s secret. Andy finds a way out of the situation through his own powers of resistance, but we see early on that people like Brooks are not always so lucky. Some will never be able to escape the power/knowledge of the prison and the life that it requires seems to benefit some prisoners who needed the schedule and rigor of life on the inside.
For Foucault, “everyone benefits” within this system of controlling the people who are outside of the normative views of everyday life. People like prisoners, the mad, and the sick, are not to be dealt with, but when they have to be, it should be in an institution. This is the only way for those who know how to handle people like this to do their work. They need the physical appearance of the prison, the other prisoners, and the figure of the all knowing and all seeing Warden. All of this comes together to show the criminal who they are in the world and where they belong. Those who take these disciplinary measures and internalize them (as every good prisoner should) will be as Red says, “institutionalized” and cannot and will not survive without the walls to guide them. Others as Andy proves can resist the forces placed upon them and be normalized back into the real world outside the confines of the prison. As this one example shows, out of all the prisoners we see at Shawshank Prison, only two ever make it resisting the powerful forces: Andy and Red, but Red makes it with Andy’s help on the outside.
