Jail Time?

From Foucault's article Body of the Condemned comes the quote “The prisoners’ day will begin at six in the morning during winter and at five in the summer. They will work for nine hours a day throughout the year. Two hours a day will be devoted to instruction. Work and the day will end at nine o’clock in winter and eight in summer…At ten o’clock the prisoners’ leave their work and go to the refectory; they wash their hands in their courtyards and assemble in divisions. After the dinner, there is recreation until twenty minutes to eleven”

Although this quote is discussing the life of a prisoner, the reality is that most of the institutional life that our society has created is just this. We wake up at a designated time, we go to work or school, where there we are told what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. We are not given many options or the ability to use our heads. Just like the prisoners we are herded from place to place-school to the working world until we can no longer handle it. Then we retire and do what we want. It takes us until we are elder until we finally break out of our caged institutional lives. This is terrible and ridiculous!!