This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge.

We have then a public execution and a timetable. They do not punish the same type of crimes or the same type of delinquent. But they each define a certain penal style.

The Panopticon is a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power.

Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

We are now far away from the country of tortures, dotted with wheels, gibbets, gallows, pillories; we are far, too, from that dream of the reformers, less than fifty years before.