Think Prison Reform with Michel Foucault. Contributions and Limitations

In the face of an over-hyped reform of the French prison system, Michel Foucault elaborated in Discipline & Punish a conception of the reform as a strategy to legitimize the penitentiary as such. To what extent is Foucault's view of the reform as a government tool heuristic in its perception of the 18 January 1994 law to reorganize prison management? It would seem that although focusing on the institution of prisons as such enables Foucault to adopt a more critical view, it runs the risk of relegating professional struggles to a matter of secondary importance -- & producing a disembodied sociology. So if we wish to study the 1994 reform, we need to give it back its historicity and, to that end, shift the sociological focus from the effects of the reform to the conditions that made it possible in the first place. Adapted from the source document.