The present text of the French thinker, although prior to his famous work “Vigilar y punición” (Foucault, 2005 [1975]) not only gives a look at ideas that partly shaped the other, but is an enriching reading in his own right. There are a number of proposals to think about the problem of criminal punishment, the formation of a punitive society, in the words of the perpetrator, and imprisonment as the dominant form of penalty. Faculty of Humanities and Education Sciences