From Joe Martin, Keeper of the Protocols, ©1996 by Peter Lang Publishing, New York. Used by permission.
As with Foucault, Bjørneboe's work with his prison material would offer insights that would contribute to his more general critique of society. Foucault will reveal how, at a certain historical juncture, philosophers and social thinkers had brought society to the point of choosing between treating offenders as "juridical subjects" or "obedient subjects." In the first case the goal would have been to create a system of crime/punishment "signs," in which all punishments would be specific and appropriate to individual crimes. This would be the punishment of the "social pact."
The latter approach, that of the obedient subject, placed priority on the obedience of the person to be corrected to some power. This was the choice that society took, according to Foucault, leading to the generalized punishment of the prison for all crimes, i.e., "forms of coercion, schemata of constraint, applied and repeated. Exercises, not signs: timetables, compulsory movements, regular activities, solitary meditation, work in common, silence, application, respect, good habits". Foucault will point out that the foundation of such a system is a special relationship between the individual being punished, and the individual punishing him: "The agent of punishment must exercise a total power, which no third party can disturb; the individual to be corrected must be entirely enveloped in the power being exercised over him." In such a system secrecy is imperative, and there must be a discontinuity between the external legal authorities that establish guilt, and a punishment that is essentially carried out in the shadows.
Foucault's volume will appear the year before Bjørneboe's death—fifteen years after the appearance of his prison essays, and also after the completion of his "History of Bestiality."* In the early prison material, Bjørneboe does not yet prove himself to be the kind of social theorist we find in Foucault—although his analysis will come strikingly near that of Foucault's in parts of the trilogy, and in his later essays on hierarchy and authoritarianism written from the theoretical perspective of anarchism. At the time his first works on the prisons appeared, he was more concerned with recording what he saw as being the truth, to break the myths and complacency, set the records straight and bring the dilemma out into the open. One might say that he did not at the time see himself in the role of a social theorist, as much as a kind of servant of justice.