As mentioned in Chapter 2, soon after its creation in May 1911, the Prison Administration began to organise a detailed prison survey. This survey commenced on 18 January 1912 by eliciting information regarding every aspect of prisons, including budgets, health care, employees, prison labour, and inmates. Categories of inquiry associated with prisoners included crimes committed, gender, date of incarceration, marital and familial status, recidivism, punishment, social class and occupation, ethno-religious/national identity, age, and literacy. The survey broke down each of these categories further into lists of specific items related to the prisoner's identity. For example, familial status differentiated its various categories according to gender. Under each gender, categories included – single, married with children, married without children, widowed with children, and widowed without children. Another example concerns the prisoner's social class and occupation. This group divided the population into twelve categories not differentiated by gender: state employees, teachers, physicians, merchants, money changers, land owners, artisans, farmers, workers, sailors, servants, and unemployed.

The level of information collected and tabulated by means of this survey fits the description of what Michel Foucault called a ‘tableaux vivants’. According to Foucault, this table is ‘the first of the great operations of discipline … which transforms the confused, useless or dangerous multitudes into ordered multiplicities’. The organising of seemingly disparate bits of information about inmates from more than a thousand prisons across a vast empire into a rational system made this questionnaire ‘both a technique of power and a procedure of knowledge’. The Prison Administration arranged the questionnaire to link the singular and the multiple together within one document. Foucault claimed that this combination simultaneously provided knowledge of the individual and the group.