"The prison should not be seen as an inert institution, shaken at intervals by reform movements. The theory of the prison was its constant set of operational instructions rather than its incidental criticism - one of its conditions of functioning. The prison has always formed part of an active field in which projects, improvements, experiments, theoretical statements, personal evidence and investigations have proliferated. The prison institution has always been a focus of concern and debate. Is the prison still, then, a dark, abandoned region? Is the fact that one has ceased to say so for almost 200 years sufficient proof that it is not? In becoming a legal punishment, it weighted the old juridico-political question of the right to punish with all the problems, all the agitations that have surrounded the corrective technologies of the individual."
"In recent decade the nursing home industry has quickly extended, and particular regions of the country have become huge territorial nursing homes where we hide the aged and they hide from us. Long before their death, they are buried in the folds of the total institution, hidden, out of sight and out of mind. In the United States, dying in a total institution has become a common experience."