payment page
Study Tools
Overview
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison was written by French philosopher Michel Foucault and published in 1975 with the French title Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison
. The book was first published in English in 1977. Discipline and Punish is a history of the modern Western penal system in which Foucault seeks to analyze punishment in its social context, and to examine how changing power relations affected punishment.Typical of Foucault’s works in that it was received with a wide range of reactions—generally more positively in France than elsewhere—it is nonetheless widely credited for initiating a useful discussion of the history of penology and causing people to rethink long-held assumptions about penal reform from the 19th century onward.
Read the overall summary, three Question & Answers about key ideas in the work, and explanations of important quotes from Discipline and Punish. Or, learn more by studying SparkNotes guides to other works by Michel Foucault.
