I’m cur­rently read­ing and enjoy­ing Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Taken from Wikipedia is the summary/main information:

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is a book writ­ten by the philoso­pher Michel Foucault. Originally pub­lished in 1975 in France under the title Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison, it was trans­lated into English in 1977. It is an exam­i­na­tion of the social and the­o­ret­i­cal mech­a­nisms behind the mas­sive changes that occurred in west­ern penal sys­tems dur­ing the mod­ern age. It focuses on his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments from France, but the issues it exam­ines are rel­e­vant to every mod­ern west­ern soci­ety. It is con­sid­ered a sem­i­nal work, and has influ­enced many the­o­rists and artists.

Foucault chal­lenges the com­monly accepted idea that the prison became the con­sis­tent form of pun­ish­ment due to human­i­tar­ian con­cerns of reformists, although he does not deny those. He does so by metic­u­lously trac­ing out the shifts in cul­ture that led to the prison’s dom­i­nance, focus­ing on the body and ques­tions of power. Prison is a form used by the “dis­ci­plines”, a new tech­no­log­i­cal power, which can also be found, accord­ing to Foucault, in schools, hos­pi­tals, mil­i­tary bar­racks, etc. The main ideas of Discipline and Punishcan be grouped accord­ing to its four parts: tor­ture, pun­ish­ment, dis­ci­pline and prison.

Read the full Wikipedia arti­cle.