Revisionist and counter revisionist analyses both offer important insights into the actual historical development of the English prison system between 1775 and 1939. The work of Michel Foucault and Michael Ignatieff during the 1970s challenged the earlier and somewhat optimistic general analysis of French and British penalty during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Their accounts constituted a major revision of this subject. In the early 1980s, a counter revisionist critique of their work argued that Foucault and Ignatieff had made substantial errors of fact and judgment. Garland made it clear that a discrepancy existed between the differentiating, selective, individualizing penal/welfare complex which he outlined as a set of ideas and the actual operationalization of those ideas. 54 references (Author abstract modified)