Perhaps today we are ashamed of our prisons. As for the 19th century, it was proud of the fortresses it built on the outskirts, and sometimes in the center, of cities. It was fascinated by this new gentleness that replaced the scaffolds. It boasted that it no longer punished bodies and that it now knew how to reform souls. These walls, these security measures, these cells represented a comprehensive project of social orthopedics.

If someone steals, they go to prison. If they rape, they go to prison. If they kill, they go to prison. Where did this strange practice and this mysterious plan of penal confinement promoted by modern penal codes come from? Could it be an old legacy from the dungeons of the Middle Ages? It is more likely a new technology: the shaping, from the 16th to the 19th century, of a set of processes that allocate, control, weigh, train individuals, making them simultaneously "docile and useful." Surveillance, exercises, drills, scores, ranks and positions, classifications, examinations, records. A whole endeavor for the subjugation of bodies, for controlling human multiplicities and processing their powers developed during the centuries of the classical era in hospitals, the army, schools, colleges, or laboratories: discipline.

The 18th century perhaps invented liberties; however, it offered them a deep and solid foundation, the disciplinary society to which we still belong. Prison must be related to the formation of this surveillance society. The modern penal system no longer dares to claim that it punishes crimes. It asserts that it reforms criminals.

For two centuries it has maintained close and familial ties with the "human sciences." This is its pride, its way of ultimately not being ashamed of itself: "Perhaps it is not yet entirely fair. Be patient, see how much knowledge I have begun to acquire." But how could psychology, psychiatry, criminology justify modern justice when their history refers to the very same political technology, at the point where both were formed?

Behind the knowledge focused on humans and beneath the humanity of punishments lies a disciplinary investment of bodies, a mixed form of subjugation and objectification, a common "power-knowledge." Can we present the genealogy of modern morality based on a political history of bodies?

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]