We would be remiss to look at the evolution of punishment from the 1700’s forward without examining the use of torture. As philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault emphasizes in his influential book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were sobering times for wrongdoers. Punishment often took the form of displays of torture and brutality for individuals thought guilty of an offense. These were years of public spectacles, notes Foucault, setting the stage for his study of prisons.