On the other, confinement could have no purpose other than correction (i.e. the suppression of that difference, or the accomplishment of the nothingness that was madness in death), which provides one explanation for the desires for death that are so often to be found on confinement registers, written in the guardians' hand, and which are not so much signs of barbarism, savagery, inhumanity or perversion as the precise expression of the meaning of confinement an operation whose aim was to return nothingness to nothingness.