ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the work that made Foucault famous among those who study criminal law and criminology the book published in English under the title Discipline and Punish, but whose original title was the slightly different: Surveiller et Punir. As Foucault notes, the ideas about criminal justice in a civilized, enlightened society that Beccaria and other late eighteenth-century criminal-law reformers disseminated sounded good in theory, but were very difficult to translate into criminal law statutes and criminal justice policies. Few prisons built in the nineteenth century, or at any other time, actually implemented the panopticon idea put forward by Jeremy Bentham. But Bentham's plan nevertheless exemplified the disciplinary idea, and is thus discussed at some length in what may be the most famous pages ever written by Foucault. Older prisons and gaols featured masses of people, usually thrown together in large rooms where they constantly interacted with one another and with their gaolers.
