Spectacle- Foucault argues that as the “gloomy festival of punishment was dying out,” one of the first things to go was “the spectacle of punishment”. He uses the word spectacle to describe the public torture and execution of prisoners used until the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What is particularly interesting about the word spectacle is that it serves more of a function for the viewers than for the person being punished. Interestingly the spectacle of public executions was criticized, although they continued to be carried out. Foucault traces the end of the spectacle of punishment and notes that now a prisoner’s trial is watched by the public rather than his punishment. Although this chapter certainly does focus on a prisoner’s physical punishment, the use of the word spectacle suggests that any public display of physical punishment becomes psychologically painful as well.
Judge- Foucault’s first real mention of judging is on page 21 with his mention of a trial judge who “certainly does more than ‘judge’”. The notion of judgment, however, is prevalent throughout this chapter: those watching a public execution are judgmental of both the condemned man and the public punishment that he faces (as we see through multiple criticisms of the practice). Foucault notes that in the penal system more people have the power to judge (psychological experts, magistrates, etc) than actually have the power to punish. The new legal system seems to have “led judges to judge something other than crimes,” they must determine an appropriate punishment, and often “pass sentence not in direct relation to the crime”.
Blame- Foucault notes that when punishment shifted from the public to private sphere, “the apportioning of blame is redistributed”: that is, the shame of a public execution which often brought “pity or glory” to the victim has been replaced by a more secret shame of a modern execution, something that is made private in order to separate it from the justice system that ordered it. The secrecy surrounding executions makes them seem more like a necessary evil than a spectacle that the public is a part of. The increasing secrecy of executions seems to point of a sense of shame about the penal system, a feeling that the justice system is blamed for them. By eliminating the “glory in punishing”, the justice system separates itself from the ugliness of executions and the blame that they receive for them.