The publication of the book was "widely noted in major French cultural venues" of the time such as Le Nouvel Observateur and Le Monde.[5]: 148 After its publication in English in 1977 it was "widely reviewed in non-academic venues", however scholarly reviews were "far less common".[5]: 149
The historian Peter Gay described Discipline and Punish as the key text by Foucault that has influenced scholarship on the theory and practice of 19th century prisons. Though Gay wrote that Foucault "breathed fresh air into the history of penology and severely damaged, without wholly discrediting, traditional Whig optimism about the humanization of penitentiaries as one long success story", he nevertheless gave a negative assessment of Foucault's work, endorsing the critical view of Gordon Wright in his 1983 book Between the Guillotine and Liberty: Two Centuries of the Crime Problem in France. Gay concluded that Foucault and his followers overstate the extent to which keeping "the masses quiet" motivates those in power, thereby underestimating factors such as "contingency, complexity, the sheer anxiety or stupidity of power holders", or their authentic idealism.[6]
Law Professor David Garland wrote an explication and critique of Discipline and Punish. Towards the end, he sums up the main critiques that have been made. He states, "the major critical theme which emerges, and is independently made by many different critics, concerns Foucault's overestimation of the political dimension. Discipline and Punish consistently proposes an explanation in terms of power—sometimes in the absence of any supporting evidence—where other historians would see a need for other factors and considerations to be brought into account."[7]
Another criticism leveled against Foucault's approach is that he often studies the discourse of "prisons" rather than their concrete practice; this is taken up by Fred Alford:
"Foucault has mistaken the idea of prison, as reflected in the discourse of criminologists, for its practice. More precisely put, Foucault presents the utopian ideals of eighteenth-century prison reformers, most of which were never realized, as though they were the actual reforms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One can see this even in the pictures in Discipline and Punish, many of which are drawings for ideal prisons that were never built. One photograph is of the panopticon prison buildings at Stateville, but it is evidently an old photograph, one in which no inmates are evident. Nor are the blankets and cardboard that now enclose the cells."[8]
