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In 1973 at the Collège de France, Foucault presented a seminar entitled ‘The Punitive Society’. This as yet unpublished seminar introduced Foucault’s first great theoretical propositions regarding the origin of the prison. He then took them up, corrected them and reformulated them in Discipline and Punish. But in 1973, they were presented with a conceptual clarity and a polemical edge that they lost afterwards. Three great notions were defined: the ‘penitentiary’ system, the ‘carceral’ system and the ‘coercive’ system. It was the intertwining of these three dimensions that accounted for the invention of the prison.