Anyone who works in an institution for a long time comes to view it as a phenomenon as natural (and immovable) as Mount Everest. It is there; it has always been there; it always will be there.

Especially is this so when the work to be done in the institution is both absorbing and dramatic: in my case, during the fifteen years that I worked (often at night) as a doctor in a prison, performing such duties as resuscitating a man who tried to hang himself or relocating a prisoner who was under threat of violence from other prisoners because he appeared as a witness for the prosecution in one of their trials for murder.

But every institution, no matter how seemingly immortal, has a history and even a prehistory. In fact, prisons in their present incarnation, which seem to us so indispensable a part of modern existence, are not by any means immemorial; they are less ancient than hot chocolate. Incarceration is another matter: people have always been held in dungeons, castles, etc., but usually pending trial or execution, rather than as a punishment in itself.

In his book The Prison before the Panopticon, Jacob Abolafia, a political philosopher with an evident background in classics, traces the development of the idea of incarceration as a punishment from ancient times till what Walt W. Rostow would no doubt have called its takeoff. This happened after Jeremy Bentham, that intellectual pneumatic drill of utilitarianism, proposed his