We have come accustomed through the work of Michel Foucault and others since to thinking of the welfare state as a dimension of the biopolitics of liberal democracies.  No less a dimension of that biopolitical formation is the prison system with its regime of incarceration and reform. This paper seeks to examine the history and practices of incarceration as mechanism of the liberal state within a contested and colonial domain, namely, Ireland.  Commencing with work from the period of the formation of the modern British state that investigates Irish prison reforms, I will turn to look at the simultaneity of a discourse on prison architectures and on [the welfare of] prisoner’s bodies.  This long-standing concern of the state with the structures of incarceration and punishment, on the one hand, and with the welfare of the “reformable” subject, on the other, provides a somewhat telescoped context for understanding the prison protests of the 1970s and 1980s in Northern Ireland,  of the bureaucratic opposition between the “ordinary decent criminal” [ODC] and the recalcitrant political prisoner, of the nature of a protest that deploys both the reduced “bare life” of the body and the very architecture of the prison against the logic of “criminalization” of political prisoners.    The prison conflicts may be seen as a focus for a more fundamental conflict between the universalizing logics of the state, including the idea of its care for the welfare of its subjects, and alternative formations of community forged within the demands of modernity itself.