It's true, as Ezra Klein says, that the release of Paris Hilton from prison after only three days puts the lie to any pretense of class equality in America—but I would hope that we might also take this moment to ask what the point of prison is supposed to be again.

What this debacle really exposes is not unfairness of Hilton "weaseling out" of "serving her time" but the vacuity of prison as a response to nonviolent antisocial behavior. I don't want to send her back, I want to let the others out.

For the observation that prison fails to eliminate crime, one should perhaps substitute the hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency, a specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous—and, on occasion, usable—form of illegality; in producing delinquents, in an apparently marginal, but in fact centrally supervised milieu; in producing the delinquent as a pathologized subject. The success of the prison, in the struggles around the law and illegalities, has been to specify a "delinquency." We have seen how the carceral system substituted the "delinquent" for the offender, and also superimposed upon judicial practice a whole horizon of possible knowledge. Now this process that constitutes delinquency as an object of knowledge is one with the political operation that disassociates illegalities and isolates delinquency from them. The prison is the hinge of these two mechanisms; it enables them to reinforce one another perpetually, to objectify the delinquency behind the offense, to solidify delinquency in the movement of illegalities. So successful has the prison been that, after a century and a half of "failures," the prison still exists, producing the same results, and there is the greatest reluctance to dispose with it.

—Foucault, Discipline & Punish