In the first quarter of 1973, Michel Foucault will deliver these thirteen lectures at the College de France on the "punitive society", examining the way in which the relationships of justice and truth that govern modern criminal law are formed and exploring their connection to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still governs contemporary society. This series of lectures, which was supposed to be preparatory to Discipline and Punish, a work that will be published in 1975, develops completely differently from it, going beyond the penitentiary system and embracing the whole of society with a capitalist economy, within which a special management of the multiplicity of offenses and their interrelationships first appears.

The entire study focuses on previously unpublished historical material related to classical political economy, the Quakers, and the English Dissenters, with their philanthropy - those who introduce penitentiary into the criminal system and also related to the moralization of working time. Through his critique of Hobbes, Foucault gives us an analysis of the civil war, which is not a war of all against all, but a "general matrix" that allows us to understand the functioning of penal strategy, which is aimed not so much at the criminal as at the internal enemy.

"The Punitive Society" has a place among the major texts on the history of capitalism. The "sciences of man" are always, in a Nietzschean sense, "moral sciences". This was the focus of my interest: the prison as a social form, that is, as a form in which power is exercised within a society - the way in which power draws the knowledge it needs in order to be exercised and on the basis of which it will distribute orders, commands, instructions. We could thus seek the images that symbolize the form of power. We have the medieval image of the throne, the point from which the monarch listens and judges: it is the form of power from the pulpit. Then we have the absolutist form of the head that commands the body, that presides: it is the first form of power as it appears in the frontispiece of Leviathan.

Finally, we have the modern image of a center from which the gaze radiates, which observes and controls, where a flow of knowledge converges and from which a flow of decisions emanates: it is the central form of power. My opinion is that in order to understand the institution of the prison, we should study it in depth, that is, not so much on the basis of criminal theories or legal concepts, nor again on the basis of a historical sociology of criminality, but by asking the question: in what system of power does the prison operate?"
Michel Foucault