 In 1977, British psychiatrist David Cooper asked Foucault the same question which Claude Bourdet had formerly asked Viktor Fainberg during a press conference given by Fainberg and Leonid Plyushch: when the USSR has the whole penitentiary and police apparatus, which could take charge of anybody, and which is perfect in itself, why do they use psychiatry? Foucault answered it was not a question of a distortion of the use of psychiatry but that was its fundamental project. In the discussion Confinement, Psychiatry, Prison, Foucault states the cooperation of psychiatrists with the KGB in the Soviet Union was not abuse of medicine, but an evident case and "condensation" of psychiatry's "inheritance", an "intensification, the ossification of a kinship structure that has never ceased to function." Foucault believed that the abuse of psychiatry in the USSR of the 1960s was a logical extension of the invasion of psychiatry into the legal system. In the discussion with Jean Laplanche and Robert Badinter, Foucault says that criminologists of the 1880 — 1900s started speaking surprisingly modern language: "The crime cannot be, for the criminal, but an abnormal, disturbed behavior. If he upsets society, it's because he himself is upset". This led to the twofold conclusions. First, "the judicial apparatus is no longer useful." The judges, as men of law, understand such complex, alien legal issues, purely psychological matters no better than the criminal. So commissions of psychiatrists and physicians should be substituted for the judicial apparatus. And in this vein, concrete projects were proposed. Second, "We must certainly treat this individual who is dangerous only because he is sick. But, at the same time, we must protect society against him." Hence comes the idea of mental isolation with a mixed function: therapeutic and prophylactic. In the 1900s, these projects have given rise to very lively responses from European judicial and political bodies. However, they found a wide field of applications when the Soviet Union became one of the most common but by no means exceptional cases.
