What is the real purpose of policing?
While previous criminal justice reformers asked how to make it more just or more humane, Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was more concerned that behind the apparent humanization of the prison system hid the guileful calculations of power.
His landmark book Discipline and Punish (1975) traced the evolution of punishment from the age of kings to the modern world. From public executions to prisons, probation officers, social workers, risk assessments, and surveillance. At first glance this transformation appears to be a story of moral progress. Medieval rulers tortured offenders in public squares, mutilated them, branded them, or put them to death in front of cheering crowds. Modern societies, by contrast, lock offenders away in relatively humane institutions and claim to rehabilitate them.
Foucault argued that this apparent humanization concealed a deeper shift in the way power operates. In earlier centuries power was visible and dramatic. The sovereign demonstrated his authority by inflicting pain upon the body of the offender. The criminal’s suffering was a public spectacle intended to inspire fear and obedience.
Modern societies, however, discovered a far more effective means of control. Instead of breaking bodies, they began shaping behavior. Power moved from the executioner’s scaffold into schools, factories, hospitals, military barracks, prisons, and police departments. Rather than relying on terror, these institutions used timetables, inspections, examinations, rankings, records, and constant observation to encourage people to regulate themselves. The goal was no longer simply obedience but normalization: the process by which institutions establish standards of what is considered normal, healthy, productive, responsible, or acceptable behavior, and then pressure people to conform to those standards.
For Foucault, what looks like progress is the most effective form of domination yet invented. To illustrate his point, he takes the idea of The Panopticon, a prison project proposed by Bentham. The idea was it would consist of cells arranged in a circle around a central observation tower where prisoners would be encouraged to behave by the fact they could never know whether they were being watched or not.
The genius of the system was that the perception of external surveillance would be internalized to self-surveillance giving rise to self-policing. Betham saw this idea as a humanitarian reform that would reduce the need for physical punishment and violence. To Foucault it was insidious. The Panopticon symbolized a subtle shift he already thought to be taking place in schools, factories, hospitals, armies, barracks, bureaucratic institutions and of course policing. Schoolchildren sit examinations and are ranked against one another. Employees are monitored, assessed, and evaluated. Patients are measured against medical norms. Citizens are recorded, documented, categorized, and tracked through countless administrative systems. Modern power operates not primarily through force but through observation, classification, and normalization. Increasingly, people curate their own behavior because they know they are visible to others and begin policing themselves.
Through subtle power, modern society itself was becoming a “carceral society”; over-surveiled. He called this “Panopticism.” In this 1984esque conception of civil society, power became continuous rather than occasional, automatic rather than personal, economical rather than force-intensive, and internalized rather than externally imposed.
Foucault’s provocative conclusion was that policing is not simply a response to crime, that’s just the overt cover. Rather, it’s part of a broader process of managing populations. The criminal justice system helps create the category of the criminal delinquent itself, a visible, manageable underclass that justifies keeping everyone else under gentle but constant control.
The proliferation of CCTV cameras, mass data collection, facial recognition systems, airport security procedures, routine identification checks, online monitoring, workplace surveillance software, and predictive policing technologies have given us good reason to take Foucauld seriously. Citizens really are being observed, tracked, and evaluated as a normal feature of everyday life. And this is becoming all the easier with the advent of AI. You don’t even need real people to watch or process the footage.
The BBC reported that the town of Croydon, South London was one of the first to implement Live Facial Recognition cameras to scan faces of pedestrians, allowing police to find those who are wanted, and in the first half of 2025 LFR had scanned 1.5 million faces in London. A resident told me the people had no will to resist because local people were genuinely fed up with local drug dealers and petty criminals that had destroyed thriving local high streets.
The “totalitarian tiptoe” is the concept that people rarely surrender liberty all at once. If radical breaches of liberty were implemented all at once, people would surely resist. But if they are brought in in a piecemeal manner, one by one, then people gradually acclimatize to them and further breaches of privacy that would have seemed intrusive a decade ago come to be accepted as not much of a change from normal at all.
First you just need to show your passport at the airport, then to buy alcohol even if you’re 40 years old, then you need a public ID card, then you need to show it to get groceries or check into a hospital, then they want to put your biometric data and vaccine status on it. Armed guards and routine searches at the airport acclimatize you to armed guards and prepare you to receive routine searches elsewhere. Understandable justifications are given to sell measures to the public such as reducing crime, tracking illegal migrants, cracking down on welfare abusers, looking out for fraud, or protecting kids from pedophilia. Over time, the cumulative effect can be a society in which surveillance, monitoring, and bureaucratic oversight become accepted as ordinary and unquestioned.
Foucault was not claiming that modern societies are identical to dictatorships or arguing that all forms of policing are illegitimate. He simply called for us to notice that power works best when it is covert rather than flagrant, appearing to be benign, rational and invisible, engendering conformity through self-monitoring rather than forcing people to obey by force. As Aldous Huxley commented, the totalitarianism of 1984 would be much more laborious to enforce, than the insidious, subtle, covert control of a Brave New World which appears benign, rational – if it appears at all – as it is designed to be invisible.
