Discipline in New Clothes: The Controversial Use of Punishments in A Montreal Rehabilitation Centre for Young Offenders

Abstract

Abstract Based on an ethnography of the treatment of indiscipline in a Montreal closed-custody unit for young offenders, this article questions some of the most controversial discipline production practices, legitimized in the name of rehabilitation. Starting from a Foucauldian conceptualization of ‘the carceral’ and of discipline as a ‘counter-law’, It examines how educators play with the law (and with words) in order to use everyday forms of isolation that can no longer legally be called by their name after some much-publicized scandals. It then shows how educators are obliged to rewrite their disciplinary practices into the clinical script of the cognitive-behavioural approach, drawing the boundaries of an ‘acceptable’ discipline that reproduces, in ‘new’ forms, the oldest tensions of youth confinement.