Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

Little information is published on prisons, it is one of the hidden regions of our social system, one of the dark zones of our life.

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body

It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.

Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.

Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.