I would like to turn my attention to Foucault's book, Discipline & Punish:
The Birth of the Prison, to try to analyze the relations between power and
the body. Having worked as a teacher in the biggest prison in Europe,
Fleury-Mérogis (not far from Paris), which opened in 1969 and holds an
average of 5000 detainees in spite of a capacity of just 3400 places, my
first impression was indeed one of an immense cage. Fleury controls the
population, organizes and sorts the influx and in its immense goodness it
protects the bodies from suicide by covering the cages of high staircases
with protective nets. Reading Discipline & Punish has always been
precious to me, even if, admittedly, to read Foucault whilst working in a
prison is a form of masochism.
In 1971, Foucault organized a seminar at the Collège de France about
parricide through the "red" eyes of Pierre Rivière, who was responsible
for a triple murder and was tried in August 1835 at the law courts of
Caen, Normandy. In the same year, he created the GIP (Groupe
d'Information sur les Prisons
