ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault used the privileges provided by the position to divert time and energy into political organizing. He gave his first lecture as chair at the end of 1970, and only two months later, held a press conference to announce the founding of Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons—the Prison Information Group —to expose harsh conditions of confinement and push for change. Foucault used “the panopticon”—a form of prison architecture—as a metaphor for the whole operation of power in modern society. Discipline and Punish was published in French in 1975 and quickly became one of the most cited texts in all the social sciences. Yet ironically, Foucault’s rise to celebrity as prison scholar took place as the institution was being transformed in ways that undermined his basic image of it. Contemporary criminal justice scholars have also developed Foucault by emphasizing distinct racial patterns in the dispersal social control.
