Much of today’s prison-reform and abolitionist literature rests on the Foucauldian view of incarceration as a distinctly modern cruelty. Foucault’s thesis, advanced as much by oracular assertion as by sustained scholarly argument, was that, before modernity, punishment was almost always physical and absolute. Those designated as criminals, he contended, were torn apart, hanged, or thrown to wild beasts, but rarely locked away alone for decades in institutions designed for the purpose. Temporary confinement in a dungeon might precede crucifixion or a trip to the lions, but the notion of serving a fixed sentence in a cell was, to Foucault, a historically recent development. Instead, punishment was more likely to take the form of fines or of exile—the fate that befell the poet Ovid.