be as heroic as having the king's name written on your body, in fact its rather degrading, it's not supposed to be something about which one can write a damn novel. Prisons become more like schools and less like these festivals of atonement. They have become places where people are to be re-normalised, injected back into the social body if possible. What the reformers have done according to Foucault however is not to abolish power in favour of more humanistic treatment, what they have done is to institute a micro-physics of power that has control over what Foucault calls "docile bodies". Power has lost its awesome grandeur; its splendour. The power now in institutions like prisons is a micro-power, its power of observation, of being able to control movements, of being able to force prisoners into "get well" programs and lie to their parole boards after having lied to therapists, after having lied to all the various people they have to lie to in order to get out. And for people who think that prisoners are being let out right and left, watch a little Court TV and see how many people actually win parole. Now in some states where they have stopped building prisons because they are tired of "tax and spend", some prisoners do get out, but by and large it's hard to get through a parole board. What this parole board represents to Foucault is a kind of training, a kind of disciplining of the body so